Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

by Christopher McDougall

  “I’ve worked with over a hundred of the best Kenyan runners, and one thing they have in common is marvelous elasticity in their feet,” Dr. Hartmann continued. “That comes from never running in shoes until you’re seventeen.” To this day, Dr. Hartmann believes that the best injury-prevention advice he’s ever heard came from a coach who advocated “running barefoot on dewy grass three times a week.”

  He’s not the only medical professional preaching the Barefoot Doctrine. According to Dr. Paul W Brand, chief of rehab at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Carville, Louisiana, and a professor of surgery at Louisiana State University Medical School, we could wipe out every common foot ailment within a generation by kicking off our shoes. As far back as 1976, Dr. Brand was pointing out that nearly every case in his waiting room—corns, bunions, hammertoes, flat feet, fallen arches—was nearly nonexistent in countries where most people go barefoot.

  “The barefoot walker receives a continuous stream of information about the ground and about his own relationship to it,” Dr. Brand has said, “while a shod foot sleeps inside an unchanging environment.”

  Drumbeats for the barefoot uprising were growing. But instead of doctors leading the charge for a muscular foot, it was turning into a class war pitting podiatrists against their own patients. Barefoot advocates like Drs. Brand and Hartmann were still rare, while traditional podiatric thinking still saw human feet as Nature’s Mistake, a work in progress that could always be improved by a little scalpel-sculpting and orthotic reshaping.

  That born-broken mentality found its perfect expression in The Runners’ Repair Manual. Written by Dr. Murray Weisenfeld, a leading sports podiatrist, it’s one of the top-selling foot-care books of all time, and begins with this dire pronouncement:

  “Man’s foot was not originally designed for walking, much less running long distances.”

  So what, according to the Manual, was our foot designed for? Well, at first swimming (“The modern foot evolved out of the fin of some primordial fish and these fins pointed backward”). After that, climbing (“The grasping foot permitted the creature to squat on branches without falling out”).

  And then …?

  And then, according to the podiatric account of evolution, we got stuck. While the rest of our bodies adapted beautifully to solid earth, somehow the only part of our body that actually touched the earth got left behind. We developed brains and hands deft enough to perform intravascular surgery, yet our feet never made it past the Paleolithic era. “Man’s foot is not yet completely adapted to the ground,” the Manual laments. “Only a portion of the population has been endowed with well ground-adapted feet.”

  So who are these lucky few with well-evolved feet? Come to think of it, nobody: “Nature has not yet published her plan for the perfect modern runner’s foot,” Dr. Weisenfeld writes. “Until the perfect foot comes along, my experience has shown me that we’ve all got an excellent chance at having some kind of injury.” Nature may not have published her blueprint, but that didn’t stop some podiatrists from trying to come up with one of their own. And it was exactly that kind of overconfidence—the belief that four years of podiatric training could trump two million years of natural selection—that led to a catastrophic rash of operations in the ’70s.

  “Not too many years ago, runner’s knee was treated by surgery,” Dr. Weisenfeld acknowledges. “That didn’t work too well, since you need that cushioning when you run.” Once the patients came out from under the knife, they discovered that their nagging ache had turned into a life-changing mutilation; without cartilage in their knees, they’d never be able to run without pain again. Despite the podiatric profession’s checkered history of attempting to one-up nature, The Runners’ Repair Manual never recommends strengthening feet; instead, the treatment of choice is always tape, orthotics, or surgery.

  It even took Dr. Irene Davis, whose credentials and open-mindedness are hard to beat, until 2007 to take barefooting seriously, and only then because one of her patients flat-out defied her. He was so frustrated by his chronic plantar fasciitis, he wanted to try blasting it away by running in thin-soled, slipperlike shoes. Dr. Davis told him he was nuts. He did it anyway.

  “To her surprise,” as BioMechanics magazine would later report, “the plantar fasciitis symptoms abated and the patient was able to run short distances in the shoes.”

  “This is how we often learn things, when patients don’t listen to us,” Dr. Davis graciously responded. “I think perhaps the widespread plantar fasciitis in this country is partly due to the fact that we really don’t allow the muscles in our feet to do what they are designed to do.” She was so impressed by her rebellious patient’s recovery that she even began adding barefoot walks to her own workouts.

  Nike doesn’t earn $17 billion a year by letting the Barefoot Teds of the world set the trends. Soon after the two Nike reps returned from Stanford with news that the barefoot uprising had even spread to elite college track, Nike set to work to see if it could make a buck from the problem it had created.

  Blaming the running injury epidemic on big, bad Nike seems too easy—but that’s okay, because it’s largely their fault. The company was founded by Phil Knight, a University of Oregon runner who could sell anything, and Bill Bowerman, the University of Oregon coach who thought he knew everything. Before these two men got together, the modern running shoe didn’t exist. Neither did most modern running injuries.

  For a guy who told so many people how to run, Bowerman didn’t do much of it himself. He only started to jog a little at age fifty, after spending time in New Zealand with Arthur Lydiard, the father of fitness running and the most influential distance-running coach of all time. Lydiard had begun the Auckland Joggers Club back in the late ’50s to help rehab heart-attack victims. It was wildly controversial at the time; physicians were certain that Lydiard was mobilizing a mass suicide. But once the formerly ill men realized how great they felt after a few weeks of running, they began inviting their wives, kids, and parents to come along for the two-hour trail rambles.

  By the time Bill Bowerman paid his first visit in 1962, Lydiard’s Sunday morning group run was the biggest party in Auckland. Bowerman tried to join them, but was in such lousy shape that he had to be helped along by a seventy-three-year-old man who’d survived three coronaries. “God, the only thing that kept me alive was the hope that I would die,” Bowerman said afterward.

  But he came home a convert, and soon penned a best-selling book whose one-word title introduced a new word and obsession to the American public: Jogging. Between writing and coaching, Bowerman was busy ruining his nervous system and his wife’s waffle iron by tinkering in the basement with molten rubber to invent a new kind of footwear. His experiments left Bowerman with a debilitating nerve condition, but also the most cushioned running shoe ever created. In a stroke of dark irony, Bowerman named it the Cortez—after the conquistador who plundered the New World for gold and unleashed a horrific smallpox epidemic.

  Bowerman’s deftest move was advocating a new style of running that was only possible in his new style of shoe. The Cortez allowed people to run in a way no human safely could before: by landing on their bony heels. Before the invention of a cushioned shoe, runners through the ages had identical form: Jesse Owens, Roger Bannister, Frank Shorter, and even Emil Zatopek all ran with backs straight, knees bent, feet scratching back under their hips. They had no choice: the only shock absorption came from the compression of their legs and their thick pad of midfoot fat. Fred Wilt verified as much in 1959 in his classic track text, How They Train, which detailed the techniques of more than eighty of the world’s top runners. “The forward foot moves toward the track in a downward, backward, ‘stroking’ motion (not punching or pounding) and the outer edge of the ball of the foot makes first contact with the track,” Wilt writes. “Running progression results from these forces pushing behind the center of gravity of the body. …”

  In fact, when the biomedical designer Van Phillips created a st
ate-of-the-art prosthetic for amputee runners in 1984, he didn’t even bother equipping it with a heel. As a runner who lost his left leg below the knee in a water-skiing accident, Phillips understood that the heel was needed only for standing, not motion. Phillips’s C-shaped “Cheetah foot” mimics the performance of an organic leg so effectively, it allowed the South African double amputee Oscar Pistorius to compete with the world’s greatest sprinters.

  But Bowerman had an idea: maybe you could grab a little extra distance if you stepped ahead of your center of gravity. Stick a chunk of rubber under the heel, he mused, and you could straighten your leg, land on your heel, and lengthen your stride. In Jogging, he compared the styles: with the time-tested “flat foot” strike, he acknowledged, “the wide surface area pillows the footstrike and is easy on the rest of the body.” Nevertheless, he still believed a “heel-to-toe” stride would be “the least tiring over long distances.” If you’ve got the shoe for it.

  Bowerman’s marketing was brilliant. “The same man created a market for a product and then created the product itself,” as one Oregon financial columnist observed. “It’s genius, the kind of stuff they study in business schools.” Bowerman’s partner, the runner-turned-entrepreneur Phil Knight, set up a manufacturing deal in Japan and was soon selling shoes faster than they could come off the assembly line. “With the Cortez’s cushioning, we were in a monopoly position probably into the Olympic year, 1972,” Knight would gloat. By the time other companies geared up to copy the new shoe, the Swoosh was a world power.

  Delighted with the reaction to his amateur designs, Bowerman let his creativity take off. He contemplated a waterproof shoe made of fish skin, but let that one die on the drawing board. He did come out with the LD-1000 Trainer, a shoe with a sole so wide it was like running on pie plates. Bowerman figured it would kill pronation in its tracks, overlooking the fact that unless the runner’s foot was perfectly straight, the flared heel would wrench his leg. “Instead of stabilizing, it accelerated pronation and hurt both feet and ankles,” former Oregon runner Kenny Moore reported in his biography of Bowerman. The shoe that was supposed to give you a perfect stride, in other words, only worked if you already had one. When Bowerman realized he was causing injuries instead of preventing them, he had to backtrack and narrow the heel in later versions.

  Back in New Zealand, meanwhile, an appalled Arthur Lydiard was watching the flashy exports flooding out of Oregon and wondering what in the world his friend was up to. Compared with Bowerman, Lydiard was by far the superior track mind; he’d coached many more Olympic champions and world-record holders, and he’d created a training program that remains the gold standard. Lydiard liked Bill Bowerman and respected him as a coach, but good God! What was this junk he was selling?

  Lydiard knew all this pronation stuff was just marketing gibberish. “If you told the average person of any age to take off his or her shoes and run down the hallway you would almost always discover the foot action contains no hint of pronation or supination,” Lydiard complained. “Those sideways flexings of the ankles begin only when people lace themselves into these running shoes because the construction of many of the shoes immediately alters the natural movement of the feet.

  “We ran in canvas shoes,” Lydiard went on. “We didn’t get plantar fascia, we didn’t pronate or supinate, we might have lost a bit of skin from the rough canvas when we were running marathons, but, generally speaking, we didn’t have foot problems. Paying several hundred dollars for the latest in high-tech running shoes is no guarantee you’ll avoid any of these injuries and can even guarantee that you will suffer from them in one form or another.”

  Eventually, even Bowerman was stricken by doubt. As Nike steamrolled along, churning out a bewildering variety of shoes and changing models every year for no reason besides having something else to sell, Bowerman felt his original mission of making an honest shoe had been eroded by a new ideology, which he summed up in two words: “Make money.” Nike, he griped in a letter to a colleague, was “distributing a lot of crap.” Even to one of Nike’s founding partners, it seemed, the words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.”

  Bowerman had died by the time the barefoot uprising was taking hold in 2002, so Nike went back to Bowerman’s old mentor to see if this shoeless stuff really had merit. “Of course!” Arthur Lydiard reportedly snorted. “You support an area, it gets weaker. Use it extensively, it gets stronger…. Run barefoot and you don’t have all those troubles.

  “Shoes that let your foot function like you’re barefoot—they’re the shoes for me,” Lydiard concluded.

  Nike followed up that blast with its own hard data. Jeff Pisciotta, the senior researcher at Nike Sports Research Lab, assembled twenty runners on a grassy field and filmed them running barefoot. When he zoomed in, he was startled by what he found: instead of each foot clomping down as it would in a shoe, it behaved like an animal with a mind of its own—stretching, grasping, seeking the ground with splayed toes, gliding in for a landing like a lake-bound swan.

  “It’s beautiful to watch,” a still spellbound Pisciotta later told me. “That made us start thinking that when you put a shoe on, it starts to take over some of the control.” He immediately deployed his team to gather film of every existing barefoot culture they could find. “We found pockets of people all over the globe who are still running barefoot, and what you find is that during propulsion and landing, they have far more range of motion in the foot and engage more of the toe. Their feet flex, spread, splay, and grip the surface, meaning you have less pronation and more distribution of pressure.”

  Faced with the almost inescapable conclusion that it had been selling lemons, Nike shifted into make-lemonade mode. Jeff Pisciotta became head of a top-secret and seemingly impossible project: finding a way to make a buck off a naked foot.

  It took two years of work before Pisciotta was ready to unveil his masterpiece. It was presented to the world in TV ads that showed so many barefoot athletes—Kenyan marathoners padding along a dirt trail, swimmers curling their toes around a starting block, gymnasts and Brazilian capoeira dancers and rock climbers and wrestlers and karate masters and beach soccer players—that after a while, it was hard to remember who does wear shoes, or why.

  Flashing over the images were motivational messages: “Your feet are your foundation. Wake them up! Make them strong! Connect with the ground…. Natural technology allows natural motion…. Power to your feet.” Across the sole of a bare foot is scrawled “Performance Starts Here.” Then comes the grand finale: as “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” crescendos in the background, we cut back to those Kenyans, whose bare feet are now sporting some kind of thin little shoe. It’s the new Nike Free, a swooshed slipper even thinner than the old Cortez.

  And its slogan?

  “Run Barefoot.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Baby, this town rips the bones from your back;

  It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap …

  —BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “Born to Run”

  CABALLO BLANCO’S face was pink with pride, so I tried to think of something nice to say.

  We’d just arrived in Batopilas, an ancient mining town tucked eight thousand feet below the lip of the canyon. It was founded four hundred years ago when Spanish explorers discovered silver ore in the stony river, and it hasn’t changed much since then. It’s still a tiny strip of houses hugging the riverbank, a place where burros are as common as cars and the first telephone was installed when the rest of the world was programming iPods.

  Getting down there took a cast-iron stomach and supreme faith in your fellow man, the man in question being the one driving the bus. The only way into Batopilas is a dirt road that corkscrews along the sheer face of a cliff, dropping seven thousand feet in less than ten miles. As the bus strained around hairpin turns, we hung on tight and looked far below at the wrecks of cars whose drivers had miscalculated by a few
inches. Two years later, Caballo would make his own contribution to the steel cemetery when the pickup truck he was driving caught the lip of the cliff and tumbled over. Caballo managed to dive out just in time and watched as the truck exploded far below. Later, chunks of the scorched carcass were scavenged as good-luck charms.

  After the bus pulled over on the edge of town, we climbed down stiffly, our faces as war-painted with dust and sweat salt as Caballo’s had been the first the time I met him. “There she is!” Caballo hollered. “That’s my place.”

  We looked around, but the only thing in sight was the ancient ruin of an old mission across the river. Its roof was gone and its red-stone walls were collapsing into the ruddy canyon they’d been carved from, looking like a sand castle dissolving back into sand. It was perfect; Caballo had found the ideal home for a living ghost. I could only imagine how freaky it must be to pass here at night and see his monstrous shadow dancing around behind his campfire as he wandered the ruins like Quasimodo.

  “Wow, that’s really something, uh … else,” I said.

  “No, man,” he said. “Over here.” He pointed behind us, toward a faint goat trail disappearing into the cactus. Caballo began to climb, and we fell in behind him, grabbing at brush for balance as we slipped and scrabbled up the stony path.

  “Damn, Caballo,” Luis said. “This is the only driveway in the world that needs trail markers and an aid station at mile two.”

  After a hundred yards or so, we came through a thicket of wild lime trees and found a small, clay-walled hut. Caballo had built it by hauling up rocks from the river, making the round-trip over that treacherous path hundreds of times with river-slick stones in his hands. As a home, it suited Caballo even better than the ruined mission; here in his handmade fortress of solitude, he could see everything in the river valley and remain unseen.