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

by Christopher McDougall

  Caballo forgave them as a friend, but not as a race director. He put out the word: the Urique Tarahumara were disqualified.

  I got a shock of my own when I hit the river. I’d been concentrating so much on watching my footing in the dark and reviewing my mental checklist (bend those knees … bird steps … leave no trace) that when I started to wade through the knee-deep water, it suddenly hit me: I’d just run two miles and it felt like nothing. Better than nothing—I felt light and loose, even more springy and energized than I had before the start.

  “Way to go, Oso!” Bob Francis was calling from the opposite bank. “Little bitty hill ahead. Nothing to worry about.”

  I scrambled out of the water and up the sand dune, growing more hopeful with every step. Sure, I still had forty-eight more miles, but the way it was going, I might be able to steal the first dozen or so before I had to make any real effort. I started climbing the dirt trail just as the sun was slanting over the top of the canyon. Instantly, everything lit up: the glittering river, the shimmering green forest, the coral snake coiled at my feet….

  I yelped and leaped off the trail, sliding down the steep slope and grabbing at scrub brush to stop my fall. I could see the snake above me, silent and curled, ready to strike. If I climbed back up, I risked a fatal bite; if I climbed down toward the river, I could plunge off the side of the cliff. The only way out was to maneuver sideways, working my way from one scrub-brush handhold to the next.

  The first clump held, then the next. When I’d made it ten feet away, I cautiously hauled myself back onto the trail. The snake was still blocking the trail, and for good reason—it was dead. Someone had already snapped its back with a stick I wiped the dirt out of my eyes and checked the damage: rock rash down both shins, thorns in my hands, heart pounding through my chest. I pulled the thorns with my teeth, then cleaned my gashes, more or less, with a squirt from my water bottle. Time to get going. I didn’t want anyone to come across me bleeding and panicky over a rotting snake.

  The sun got stronger the higher I climbed, but after the early-morning chill, it was more exhilarating than exhausting. I kept thinking about Eric’s advice—“If it feels like work, you’re working too hard”—so I decided to get outside my head and stop obsessing about my stride. I began drinking in the view of canyon around me, watching the sun turn the top of the foothill across the river to gold. Pretty soon, I realized, I’d be nearly as high as that peak.

  Moments later, Scott burst around a bend in the trail. He flashed me a grin and a thumbs-up, then vanished. Arnulfo and Silvino were right behind him, their blouses rippling like sails as they flew past. I must be close to the five-mile turnaround, I realized. I climbed around the next curve, and there it was: Guadalupe Coronado. It was little more than a whitewashed schoolhouse, a few small homes, and a tiny shop selling warm sodas and dusty packs of cookies, but even from a mile away, I could already hear cheers and drumbeats.

  A pack of runners was just pulling out of Guadalupe and setting off in pursuit of Scott and the Quimares. Leading them, all by herself, was the Brujita.

  The second Jenn saw her chance, she pounced. On the hike over from Batopilas, she’d noticed that the Tarahumara run downhill the same way they run up, with a controlled, steady flow. Jenn, on the other hand, loves to pound the descents. “It’s the only strength I’ve got,” she says, “so I milk it for all I’m worth.” So instead of exhausting herself by dueling with Herbolisto, she decided to let him set the pace for the climb. As soon as they reached the turnaround and started the long downhill, she broke out of the chase pack and began speeding off.

  This time, the Tarahumara let her go. She pulled so far ahead that by the time she hit the next uphill—a rocky single track climbing to the second branch of the Y at mile 15—Herbolisto and the pack couldn’t get close enough to swarm her. Jenn was feeling so confident that when she reached the turnaround, she stopped to take a breather and refill her bottle. Her luck with water so far had been fabulous; Caballo had asked Urique villagers to fan out through the canyons with jugs of purified water, and it seemed that every time Jenn took her last swallow, she came across another volunteer.

  She was still gurgling her full bottle when Herbolisto, Sebastiano, and the rest of the chase pack finally caught her. They spun around without stopping, and Jenn let them go. Once she was rewatered, she began pounding down the hill. Within two miles, she’d once again reeled them in and left them behind. She began mentally scanning the course ahead to calculate how long she could keep pulling away. Let’s see … upcoming was two miles of descent, then four flat miles back into the village, then—

  Wham! Jenn landed facedown on the rocks, bouncing and sliding on her chest before coming to a stunned stop. She lay there, blinded with pain. Her kneecap felt broken and an arm was smeared with blood. Before she could gather herself to try getting to her feet, Herbolisto and the chase pack came storming down the trail. One by one, they hurdled Jenn and disappeared, never looking back.

  They’re thinking, That’s what you get for not knowing how to run on the rocks, Jenn thought. Well, they’ve got a point. Gingerly, she pulled herself to her feet to assess the damage. Her shins looked like pizza, but her kneecap was only bruised and the blood she thought was pouring from her hand turned out to be chocolaty goo from an exploded PowerGel packet she’d stashed in her handheld. Jenn walked a few cautious steps, then jogged, and felt better than she expected. She felt so good, in fact, that by the time she reached the bottom of the hill, she’d caught and passed every one of the Tarahumara who’d jumped over her.

  “¡BRUJITA!” The crowd in Urique went crazy when Jenn came racing back through the village, bloody but smiling as she hit the twenty-mile mark. She paused at the aid station to dig a fresh goo out of her drop bag, while a deliriously happy Mamá Tita dabbed at Jenn’s gory shins with her apron and kept shouting “¡Cuarto! ¡Estás en cuarto lugar!”

  “I’m a what? A room?” Jenn was halfway out of town again before her rickety Spanish let her figure out what Mama Tita was talking about: she was in fourth place. Only Scott, Arnulfo, and Silvino were still ahead of her, and she was nibbling steadily at their lead. Caballo had picked her spirit name perfectly: twelve years after Leadville, the Bruja was back with a vengeance.

  But only if she could handle the heat. The temperature was nearing 100 degrees just as Jenn was entering the furnace—the jagged up-and-down climb to the Los Alisos settlement. The trail hugged a sheer rock wall that plunged and soared and plunged again, gaining and losing some three thousand feet. Any of the hills in the Los Alisos stretch would rank among the hardest Jenn had ever seen, and there were at least half a dozen of them, strung one behind the other. The heat shimmering off the rocks felt as if it was blistering her skin, but she had to stick tight to the canyon wall to avoid slipping off the edge and into the gorge below.

  Jenn had just reached the top of one of the hills when she suddenly had to leap against the wall: Arnulfo and Silvino were blazing toward her, running shoulder to shoulder. The Deer hunters had taken everyone by surprise; we’d expected the Tarahumara to haunt Scott’s heels all day and then try to blast past him at the finish, but instead, the Deer hunters had pulled a fast one and jumped out first.

  Jenn pressed her back against the hot rock to let them pass. Before she had time to wonder where Scott was, she was leaping back against the wall again. “Scott is running up this goddamn thing with the most intensity I’ve ever seen in a human being,” Jenn said later. “He’s booking, going, ‘Huh-Huh-Huh-Huh.’ I’m wondering if he’s even going to acknowledge me, he’s so in the zone. Then he looks up and starts screaming, ‘Yaaaah, Brujita, whooooo!’”

  Scott stopped to brief Jenn on the trail ahead and let her know where to expect water drops. Then he quizzed her about Arnulfo and Silvino: How far ahead were they? How did they look? Jenn figured they were maybe three minutes out and pushing hard.

  “Good,” Scott nodded. He swatted her on the back and shot off.

&nbs
p; Jenn watched him go, and noticed he was running on the very edge of the trail and sticking tight to the turns. That was an old Marshall Ulrich trick: it made it harder for the guy in the lead to glance back and see you sneak up from behind. Scott hadn’t been surprised by Arnulfo’s big move after all. The Deer was hunting the hunters.

  “Just beat the course,” I told myself. “No one else. Just the course.”

  Before I tackled the climb to Los Alisos, I stopped to get myself under control. I ducked my head in the river and held it there, hoping the water would cool me off and the oxygen debt would snap me back to reality. I’d just hit the halfway point, and it had only taken me about four hours. Four hours, for a hard trail marathon in desert heat! I was so far ahead of schedule, I’d started getting competitive: How hard can it be to pick off Barefoot Ted? He’s got to be hurting on those stones. And Porfilio looked like he was struggling….

  Luckily, the head-dunking worked. The reason I was feeling so much stronger today than I had on the long haul over from Batopilas, I realized, was because I was running like the Kalahari Bushmen. I wasn’t trying to overtake the antelope; I was just keeping it in sight. What had killed me during the Batopilas hike was keeping pace with Caballo & Co. So far today, I’d only competed against the racecourse, not the racers.

  Before I got too ambitious, it was time to try another Bushman tactic and give myself a systems check. When I did, I noticed I was in rougher shape than I’d thought. I was thirsty, hungry, and down to just half a bottle of water. I hadn’t taken a leak in over an hour, which wasn’t a good sign considering all the water I’d been drinking. If I didn’t rehydrate soon and get some calories down my neck, I’d be in serious trouble in the roller coaster of hills ahead. As I started sloshing the fifty yards across the river, I filled the bladder of my empty hydration pack with river water and dropped in a few iodine pills. I’d give that a half hour to purify, while I washed down a ProBar—a chewy raw-food blend of rolled oats, raisins, dates, and brown rice syrup—with the last of my clean water.

  Good thing I did. “Brace yourself,” Eric called as we passed each other on the far side of the river. “It’s a lot rougher up there than you remember.” The hills were so tough, Eric admitted, that he’d been on the verge of dropping out himself. A bad-news burst like that could come across as a punch in the gut, but Eric believes the worst thing you can give a runner midrace is false hope. What causes you to tense up is the unexpected; but as long as you know what you’re in for, you can relax and chip away at the job.

  Eric hadn’t exaggerated. For over an hour, I climbed up and down the foothills, convinced I was lost and on the way to disappearing into the wilderness. There was only one trail and I was on it—but where the hell was the little grapefruit orchard at Los Alisos? It was only supposed to be four miles from the river, but I’d felt as if I’d covered ten and I still couldn’t see it. Finally, when my thighs were burning and twitching so badly I thought I was going to collapse, I spotted a cluster of grapefruit trees on a hill ahead. I made it to the top, and dropped down next to a group of the Urique Tarahumara. They’d heard they were disqualified and decided to cool off in the shade before walking back to the village.

  “No hay problema,” one of them said. It’s not a problem. “I was too tired to keep going anyway.” He handed me an old tin cup. I scooped into the communal pinole pot, giardia be damned. It was cool and deliciously grainy, like a popcorn Slushee. I gulped down a cupful, then another, as I looked back at the trail I’d just covered. Far below, the river was faint as fading sidewalk chalk. I couldn’t believe I’d run here from there. Or that I was about to do it again.

  ————

  “It’s unbelievable!” Caballo gasped.

  He was slick with sweat and bug-eyed with excitement. As he struggled to catch his breath, he sluiced sweat off his dripping chest and flung it past me, the shower of droplets sparkling in the blazing Mexican sun. “We’ve got a world-class event going on!” Caballo panted. “Out here in the middle of nowhere!”

  By the forty-two-mile mark, Silvino and Arnulfo were still ahead of Scott, while Jenn was creeping up behind all three. On her second pass through Urique, Jenn had dropped into a chair to drink a Coke, but Mamá Tita grabbed her under the arms and hauled her to her feet.

  “¡Puedes, cariño, puedes!” Tita cried. You can do it, sweetie!

  “I’m not dropping out,” Jenn tried to protest. “I just need a drink.”

  But Tita’s hands were in Jenn’s back, pushing her back into the street. Just in time, too; Herbolisto and Sebastiano had taken advantage of the flat road into town to move back within a quarter mile of Jenn, while Billy Bonehead had broken free of Luis to move within a quarter mile of them.

  “This is anybody’s day!” Caballo said. He was trailing the leaders by about a half hour, and it was driving him batty. Not because he was losing; because he was in danger of missing the finish. The suspense was so unbearable, Caballo finally decided to drop out of his own race and cut back to Urique to see if he could get there in time for the final showdown.

  I watched him run off, desperate to follow. I was so tired, I couldn’t find my way to the skinny cable bridge over the river and somehow ended up under it, forcing me to splash through the river for the fourth time. My soaked feet felt too heavy to lift as I shuffled through the sand on the far side. I’d been out here all day, and now I was at the bottom of that same endless Alpine climb I’d almost fallen off this morning when I’d gotten spooked by the dead snake. There was no way I’d get down before sunset, so this time, I’d be stumbling back in the dark.

  I dropped my head and started trudging. When I looked up again, Tarahumara kids were all around me. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. The kids were still there. I was so glad they weren’t a hallucination, I was almost weepy. Where they’d come from and why they’d chosen to tag along with me, I had no idea. Together, we made our way higher and higher up the hill.

  After we’d gone about half a mile, they darted up a nearly invisible side trail and waved for me to follow.

  “I can’t,” I told them regretfully.

  They shrugged, and ran off into the brush. “¡Gracias!” I rasped, missing them already. I kept pushing up the hill, shambling along at a trot that couldn’t have been faster than a walk. When I hit a short plateau, the kids were sitting there, waiting. So that’s how the Urique Tarahumara were able to break open such big leads. The kids hopped up and ran alongside me until, once again, they vanished into the brush. A half mile later, they popped out again. This was turning into a nightmare: I kept running and running, but nothing changed. The hill stretched on forever, and everywhere I looked, Children of the Corn appeared.

  What would Caballo do? I wondered. He was always getting himself into hopeless predicaments out here in the canyons, and he always found a way to run his way out. He’d start with easy, I told myself. Because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. Then he’d work on light. He’d make it effortless, like he didn’t care how high the hill is or how far he had got to go—

  “OSO!” Heading toward me was Barefoot Ted, and he looked frantic.

  “Some boys gave me some water and it felt so cold, I figured I’d use it to cool down,” Barefoot Ted said. “So I’m squirting myself all over, spraying it around …”

  I had trouble following Barefoot Ted’s story, because his voice was fading in and out like a badly tuned radio. My blood sugars were so low, I realized, I was on the verge of bonking.

  “… and then I’m going, ‘Crap, oh crap, I’m out of water—’”

  From what I could make out from Barefoot Ted’s yammering, it was maybe a mile to the turnaround. I listened impatiently, desperate to push on to the aid station so I could chow down an energy bar and take a break before tackling the final five miles.

  “… So I tell myself if I’ve got to pee, I’d better pee into one of these bottles in case I’m down to the last, you know, the last of the last. So I pee into this b
ottle and it’s like, orange. It’s not looking good. And it’s hot. I think people were watching me pee in my bottle and thinking, ‘Wow, these gringos are really tough.’”

  “Wait,” I said, starting to understand. “You’re not drinking piss?”

  “It was the worst! The worst-tasting urine I’ve ever tasted in my entire life. You could bottle this stuff and sell it to bring people back from the dead. I know you can drink urine, but not if it’s been heated and shaken in your kidneys for forty miles. It was a failed experiment. I wouldn’t drink that urine if it was the last liquid on planet Earth.”

  “Here,” I said, offering the last of my water. I had no idea why he hadn’t just gone back to the aid station and refilled if he was so worried, but I was too exhausted to ask any more questions. Barefoot Ted dumped his whiz, refilled his bottle, and padded off. Odd as he was, there was no denying his resourcefulness and determination; he was less than five miles from finishing a 50- mile race in his rubber toe slippers, and he’d been willing to drink bodily waste to get there.

  Only after I arrived at the Guadalupe turnaround did it finally penetrate my woozy mind why Barefoot was dry in the first place: all the water was gone. All the people, too. Everyone in the village had trooped into Urique for the postrace party, closing up the little shop and leaving no one behind to point out the wells. I slumped down on a rock. My head was reeling, and my mouth was too cottony to let me chew food. Even if I managed to choke down a few bites, I was way too dehydrated to make the hour-long run to the finish. The only way to get back to Urique was on foot, but I was too wasted to walk.