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

by Christopher McDougall

  He’d read my article about Caballo and the Tarahumara and was intensely curious to hear more. “What the Tarahumara do is pure body art,” he said. “No one else on the planet has made such a virtue out of self-propulsion.” Eric had been fascinated with the Tarahumara since an athlete he’d trained for Leadville returned with amazing stories about fantastic Indians flying through the Druidic dusk in sandals and robes. Eric scoured libraries for books on the Tarahumara, but all he found were some anthropological texts from the ’50s and an amateur account by a husband-and-wife team who’d traveled through Mexico in their camper. It was a mystifying gap in sports literature; distance running is the world’s No. I participation sport, but almost nothing had been written about its No. I practitioners.

  “Everyone thinks they know how to run, but it’s really as nuanced as any other activity,” Eric told me. “Ask most people and they’ll say, ‘People just run the way they run.’ That’s ridiculous. Does everyone just swim the way they swim?” For every other sport, lessons are fundamental; you don’t go out and start slashing away with a golf club or sliding down a mountain on skis until someone takes you through the steps and teaches you proper form. If not, inefficiency is guaranteed and injury is inevitable.

  “Running is the same way,” Eric explained. “Learn it wrong, and you’ll never know how good it can feel.” He grilled me for details about the race I’d seen at the Tarahumara school. (“The little wooden ball,” he mused. “The way they learn to run by kicking it; that can’t be an accident.”) Then he offered me a deal; he’d get me ready for Caballo’s race, and in return, I’d vouch for him with Caballo.

  “If this race comes off, we have to be there,” Eric urged. “It’ll be the greatest ultra of all time.”

  “I just don’t think I’m built for running fifty miles,” I said.

  “Everyone is built for running,” he said.

  “Every time I up my miles, I break down.”

  “You won’t this time.”

  “Should I get the orthotics?”

  “Forget the orthotics.”

  I was dubious, but Eric’s absolute confidence was winning me over. “I should probably cut weight first to make it easier on my legs.”

  “Your diet will change all by itself. Wait and see.”

  “How about yoga? That’ll help, yeah?”

  “Forget yoga. Every runner I know who does yoga gets hurt.”

  This was sounding better all the time. “You really think I can do it?”

  “Here’s the truth,” Eric said. “You’ve got zero margin of error. But you can do it.” I’d have to forget everything I knew about running and start over from the beginning.

  “Get ready to go back in time,” Eric said. “You’re going tribal.”

  A few weeks later, a man with a right leg twisted below the knee limped toward me carrying a rope. He looped the rope around my waist and pulled it taut. “Go!” he shouted.

  I bent against the rope, churning my legs as I dragged him forward. He released the rope, and I shot off. “Good,” the man said. “Whenever you run, remember that feeling of straining against the rope. It’ll keep your feet under your body, your hips driving straight ahead, and your heels out of the picture.”

  Eric had recommended I begin my tribal makeover by heading down to Virginia to apprentice myself to Ken Mierke, an exercise physiologist and world champion triathlete whose muscular dystrophy forced him to squeeze every possible bit of economy out of his running style. “I’m living proof of God’s sense of humor,” Ken likes to say. “I was an obese kid with a drop foot whose dad lived for sports. So as an overweight Jerry’s Kid, I was way slower than everyone I ever played against. I learned to examine everything and find a better way.”

  In basketball Ken couldn’t drive the lane, so he practiced three-pointers and a deadly hook shot. He couldn’t chase a quarterback or shake a safety, but he studied body angles and lines of attack and became a formidable left tackle. He couldn’t outsprint a cross-court volley, so in tennis he developed a ferocious serve and service return. “If I couldn’t outrun you, I’d outthink you,” he says. “I’d find your weakness and make it my strength.”

  Because of the withered calf muscles in his right leg, when he began to compete in triathalons Ken could only run with a heavy shoe he’d built from a Rollerblade boot and a leaf spring. That put him at a substantial weight disadvantage to the amputee athletes in the physically challenged division, so ramping up his energy efficiency to compensate for his seven-pound shoes could make a huge difference.

  Ken got a stack of videos of Kenyan runners and ran through them frame by frame. After hours of viewing, he was struck by a revelation: the greatest marathoners in the world run like kindergartners. “Watch kids at a playground running around. Their feet land right under them, and they push back,” Ken said. “Kenyans do the same thing. The way they ran barefoot growing up is astonishingly similar to how they run now—and astonishingly different from how Americans run.” Grabbing a pad and pen, Ken went back through the tapes and jotted down all the components of a Kenyan stride. Then he went looking for guinea pigs.

  Fortunately, Ken had already begun doing physiological testing on triathletes as part of his kinesiology studies at Virginia Polytechnic, so that gave him access to a lot of athletes to experiment on. Runners would have been resistant to having someone tinker with their stride, but Ironmen are up for anything. “Triathletes are very forward thinking,” Ken explains. “It’s a young sport, so it’s not mired in tradition. Back in 1988, triathletes started to use aero bars on their bikes and cyclists mocked them mercilessly—until Greg Lemond used one and won the Tour de France by eight seconds.”

  Ken’s first test subject was Alan Melvin, a world-class Masters triathlete in his sixties. First, Ken set a baseline by having Melvin run four hundred meters full out. Then he clipped a small electric metronome to his T-shirt.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Set it for one hundred eighty beats a minute, then run to the beat.”

  “Why?”

  “Kenyans have superquick foot turnover,” Ken said. “Quick, light leg contractions are more economical than big, forceful ones.”

  “I don’t get it,” Alan said. “Don’t I want a longer stride, not a shorter one?”

  “Let me ask you this,” Ken replied. “You ever see one of those barefoot guys in a 10K race?”

  “Yeah. It’s like they’re running on hot coals.”

  “You ever beat one of those barefoot guys?”

  Alan reflected. “Good point.”

  After practicing for five months, Alan came back for another round of testing. He ran four one-mile repeats, and every lap of the track was faster than his previous four hundred-meter best. “This was someone who’d been running for forty years and was already Top Ten in his age group,” Ken pointed out. “This wasn’t the improvement of a beginner. In fact, as a sixty-two-year-old athlete, he should have been declining.”

  Ken was working on himself, as well. He’d been such a weak runner that in his best triathlon to date, he’d come off the bike with a ten-minute lead and still lost. Within a year of creating his new technique in 1997, Ken became unbeatable, winning the world disabled championship the next two years in a row. Once word got out that Ken had figured out a way to run that was not only fast but gentle on the legs, other triathletes began hiring him as their coach. Ken went on to train eleven national champions and built up a roster of more than one hundred athletes.

  Convinced that he’d rediscovered an ancient art, Ken named his style Evolution Running. Coincidentally, two other barefoot-style running methods were popping up around the same time. “Chi Running,” based on the balance and minimalism of tai chi, began taking off in San Francisco, while Dr. Nicholas Romanov, a Russian exercise physiologist based in Florida, was teaching his POSE Method. The surge in minimalism did not arise through copying or cross-pollination; instead, it seemed to be testament to the urgent need for a respons
e to the running-injury epidemic, and the pure mechanical logic of, as Barefoot Ted would call it, “the bricolage of barefooting”—the elegance of a less-is-more cure.

  But a simple system isn’t necessarily simple to learn, as I found out when Ken Mierke filmed me in action. My mind was registering easy, light, and smooth, but the video showed I was still bobbing up and down while bending forward like I was leaning into a hurricane. My ease with Caballo’s style, Ken explained, had been my mistake.

  “When I teach this technique and ask someone how it feels, if they say ‘Great!,’ I go ‘Damn!’ That means they didn’t change a thing. The change should be awkward. You should go through a period where you’re no longer good at doing it wrong and not yet good at doing it right. You’re not only adapting your skills, but your tissues; you’re activating muscles that have been dormant most of your life.”

  Eric had a foolproof system for teaching the same style.

  “Imagine your kid is running into the street and you have to sprint after her in bare feet,” Eric told me when I picked up my training with him after my time with Ken. “You’ll automatically lock into perfect form—you’ll be up on your forefeet, with your back erect, head steady, arms high, elbows driving, and feet touching down quickly on the forefoot and kicking back toward your butt.”

  Then, to embed that light, whispery foot strike into my muscle memory, Eric began programming workouts for me with lots of hill repeats. “You can’t run uphill powerfully with poor biomechanics,” Eric explained. “Just doesn’t work. If you try landing on your heel with a straight leg, you’ll tip over backward.”

  Eric also had me get a heart-rate monitor so I could correct the second-most common mistake of the running class—pace. Most of us are just as clueless about speed as we are about form. “Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow,” Ken Mierke says. “So they’re just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants. You’ve got enough fat stored to run to California, so the more you train your body to burn fat instead of sugar, the longer your limited sugar tank is going to last.”

  The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold—your hard-breathing point—during your endurance runs. Respecting that speed limit was a lot easier before the birth of cushioned shoes and paved roads; try blasting up a scree-covered trail in open-toed sandals sometime and you’ll quickly lose the temptation to open the throttle. When your feet aren’t artificially protected, you’re forced to vary your pace and watch your speed: the instant you get recklessly fast and sloppy, the pain shooting up your shins will slow you down.

  I was tempted to go the Full Caballo and chuck my running shoes for a pair of sandals, but Eric warned me that I was cruising for a stress fracture if I tried to suddenly go naked after keeping my feet immobilized for forty years. Since the No. I priority was getting me ready for fifty backcountry miles, I didn’t have time to slowly build up foot strength before starting my serious training. I’d need to start off with some protection, so I experimented with a few low-slung models before settling on a classic I found on eBay: a pair of old-stock Nike Pegasus* from 2000, something of a throwback to the flat-footed feel of the old Cortez.

  By week two, Eric was sending me off for two hours at a stretch, his only advice being to focus on form and keep the pace relaxed enough to occasionally breathe with my mouth shut. (Fifty years earlier, Arthur Lydiard offered an equal but opposite tip for managing heart rate and pace: “Only go as fast as you can while holding a conversation.”) By week four, Eric was layering in speedwork: “The faster you can run comfortably,” he taught me, “the less energy you’ll need. Speed means less time on your feet.” Barely eight weeks into his program, I was already running more miles per week—at a much faster pace—than I ever had in my life.

  That’s when I decided to cheat. Eric had promised that my eating would self-regulate once my mileage began climbing, but I was too doubtful to wait and see. I have a cyclist friend who dumps his water bottles before riding uphill; if twelve ounces slowed him down, it wasn’t hard to calculate what thirty pounds of spare tire were doing to me. But if I was going to tinker with my diet a few months before a 50- mile race, I had to be careful to do it Tarahumara-style: I had to get strong while getting lean.

  I tracked down Tony Ramirez, a horticulturist in the Mexican border town of Laredo who’s been traveling into Tarahumara country for thirty years and now grows Tarahumara heritage corn and grinds his own pinole. “I’m a big fan of pinole. I love it,” Tony told me. “It’s an incomplete protein, but combined with beans, it’s more nutritious than a T-bone steak. They usually mix with it with water and drink it, but I like it dry. It tastes like shredded popcorn.

  “Do you know about phenols?” Tony added. “They’re natural plant chemicals that combat disease. They basically boost your immune system.” When Cornell University researchers did a comparison analysis of wheat, oats, corn, and rice to see which had the highest quantity of phenols, corn was the hands-down winner. And because it’s a low-fat, whole-grain food, pinole can slash your risk of diabetes and a host of digestive-system cancers—in fact, of all cancers. According to Dr. Robert Weinberg, a professor of cancer research at MIT and discoverer of the first tumor-suppressor gene, one in every seven cancer deaths is caused by excess body fat. The math is stark: cut the fat, and cut your cancer risk.

  So the Tarahumara Miracle, when it comes to cancer, isn’t such a mystery after all. “Change your lifestyle, and you can reduce your risk of cancer by sixty to seventy percent,” Dr. Weinberg has said. Colon, prostate, and breast cancer were almost unknown in Japan, he points out, until the Japanese began eating like Americans; within a few decades, their mortality rate from those three diseases skyrocketed. When the American Cancer Society compared lean and heavy people in 2003, the results were even grimmer than expected: heavier men and women were far more likely to die from at least ten different kinds of cancer.

  The first step toward going cancer-free the Tarahumara way, consequently, is simple enough: Eat less. The second step is just as simple on paper, though tougher in practice: Eat better. Along with getting more exercise, says Dr. Weinberg, we need to build our diets around fruit and vegetables instead of red meat and processed carbs. The most compelling evidence comes from watching cancer cells fight for their own survival: when cancerous tumors are removed by surgery, they are 300 percent more likely to grow back in patients with a “traditional Western diet” than they are in patients who eat lots of fruit and veggies, according to a 2007 report by The Journal of the American Medical Association. Why? Because stray cells left behind after surgery seem to be stimulated by animal proteins. Remove those foods from your diet, and those tumors may never appear in the first place. Eat like a poor person, as Coach Joe Vigil likes to say, and you’ll only see your doctor on the golf course.

  “Anything the Tarahumara eat, you can get very easily,” Tony told me. “It’s mostly pinto beans, squash, chili peppers, wild greens, pinole, and lots of chia. And pinole isn’t as hard to get as you think.” Nativeseeds.org sells it online, along with heritage seeds in case you want to grow your own corn and whiz up some homemade pinole in a coffee grinder. Protein is no problem; according to a 1979 study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the traditional Tarahumara diet exceeds the United Nations’ recommended daily intake by more than 50 percent. As for bone-strengthening calcium, that gets worked into tortillas and pinole with the limestone the Tarahumara women use to soften the corn.

  “How about beer?” I asked. “Any benefit to drinking like the Tarahumara?”

  “Yes and no,” Tony said. “Tarahumara tesgüino is very lightly fermented, so it’s low in alcohol and high in nutrients.” That makes Tarahumara beer a rich food source—like a whole-grain smoothie— while ours is just sugar water. I could try home-brewing my own corn near-beer, but Tony had a better idea. “Grow some wild geranium,” he suggested. “Or
buy the extract online.” Geranium niveum is the Tarahumara wonder drug; according to the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, it’s as effective as red wine at neutralizing disease-causing free radicals. As one writer put it, wild geranium is “anti-everything—anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antibacterial, antioxidant.”

  I stocked up on pinole and chia, and even ordered some Tarahumara corn seeds to plant out back: cocopah and mayo yellow chapalote and pinole maiz. But realistically, I knew it was only a matter of time before I got sick of seeds and dried corn and started double-fisting burgers again. Luckily, I spoke to Dr. Ruth Heidrich first.

  “Have you ever had salad for breakfast?” she asked me. Dr. Ruth is a six-time Ironman triathlete and, according to Living Fit magazine, one of the ten Fittest Women in America. She only became an athlete and a Ph.D. in health education, she told me, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, twenty-four years ago. Exercise has been shown to cut the risk of breast cancer reoccurrence by up to 50 percent, so even with the sutures still in her chest from her mastectomy, Dr. Ruth began training for her first triathlon. She also started researching the diets of noncancerous cultures and became convinced that she needed to immediately transition from the standard American diet—or SAD, as she calls it—and eat more like the Tarahumara.

  “I had a medical gun at my head,” Dr. Ruth told me. “I was so scared, I’d have bargained with the devil. So by comparison, giving up meat wasn’t that big a deal.” She had a simple rule: if it came from plants, she ate it; if it came from animals, she didn’t. Dr. Ruth had much more to lose than I did if she got it wrong, but almost immediately, she felt her strength increasing.

  Her endurance increased so dramatically that within one year, she’d progressed from 10ks to marathons to the Ironman. “Even my cholesterol dropped from two hundred thirty to one hundred sixty in twenty-one days,” she adds. Under her Tarahumara-style eating plan, lunch and dinner were built around fruit, beans, yams, whole grains, and vegetables, and breakfast was often salad.