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

by Christopher McDougall

  “So much for compassion,” I muttered to myself. “I give something away, and what do I get? Screwed.”

  As I sat, defeated, my heavy breathing from the hard climb slowed enough for me to become aware of another sound—a weird, warbling whistle that seemed to be getting closer. I pulled myself up for a look, and there, heading up this lost hill, was old Bob Francis.

  “Hey, amigo,” Bob called, fishing two cans of mango juice out of his shoulder bag and shaking them over his head. “Thought you could use a drink.”

  I was stunned. Old Bob had hiked five miles of hard trails in 95-degree heat to bring me juice? But then I remembered: a few days before, Bob had admired the knife I’d lent Barefoot Ted to make his sandals. It was a memento from expeditions in Africa, but Bob had been so kind to all of us that I had to give it to him. Maybe Bob’s miracle delivery was just a lucky coincidence, but as I gulped the juice and got ready to run to the finish, I couldn’t help feeling that the last piece of the Tarahumara puzzle had just snapped into place.

  Caballo and Tita were jammed into the crowd at the finish line, craning their necks for the first glimpse of the leaders. Caballo pulled an old, broken-strapped Timex out of his pocket and checked the time. Six hours. That was probably way too fast, but there was a chance that—

  “¡Vienen!” someone shouted. They’re coming!

  Caballo’s head jerked up. He squinted down the straight road, peering through the bobbing heads of dancers. False alarm. Just a cloud of dust and—no, there it was. Bouncing dark hair and a crimson blouse. Arnulfo still had the lead.

  Silvino was in second, but Scott was closing fast. With a mile to go, Scott ran Silvino down. But instead of blowing past, Scott slapped him on the back. “C’mon!” Scott shouted, waving for Silvino to come with him. Startled, Silvino reached deep and managed to match Scott stride for stride. Together, they bore down on Arnulfo.

  Screams and cheers drowned out the mariachi band as the three runners made their last push toward the finish. Silvino faltered, surged again, but couldn’t hold Scott’s pace. Scott drove on. He’d been in this spot before, and he’d always found something left. Arnulfo glanced back and saw the man who’d beaten the best in the world coming after him with everything he had. Arnulfo blazed through the heart of Urique, the screams building as he got closer and closer to the tape. When he snapped it, Tita was in tears.

  The crowd had already swallowed Arnulfo by the time Scott crossed the line in second. Caballo rushed over to congratulate him, but Scott pushed past him without a word. Scott wasn’t used to losing, especially not to some no-name guy in a pickup race in the middle of nowhere. This had never happened to him before—but he knew what to do about it.

  Scott walked up to Arnulfo and bowed.

  The crowd went crazy. Tita rushed over to hug Caballo and found him wiping his eyes. In the midst of this pandemonium, Silvino struggled across the finish line, followed by Herbolisto and Sebastiano.

  And Jenn? Her decision to win or die trying had finally caught up with her.

  By the time she arrived at Guadalupe, Jenn was ready to faint. She slumped down against a tree and dropped her dizzy head between her knees. A group of Tarahumara clustered around, trying to encourage Jenn back to her feet. She lifted head and mimed drinking.

  “¿Agua?” she asked. “¿Agua purificada?”

  Someone shoved a warm Coke into her hand.

  “Even better,” she said, and smiled wearily.

  She was still sipping the soda when a shout went up. Sebastiano and Herbolisto were running into the village. Jenn lost sight of them when the crowd thronged around to offer congratulations and pinole. Then Herbolisto was standing over her, stretching out his hand. With the other, he pointed toward the trail. Was she coming? Jenn shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. Herbolisto started to run, then stopped and walked back. He put out his hand again. Jenn smiled and waved him off. “Get going, already!” Herbolisto waved good-bye.

  Soon after he disappeared down the trail, the shouting began again. Someone relayed Jenn the information: the Wolf was coming.

  Bonehead! Jenn saved him a long sip of her Coke, and pulled herself to her feet while he downed it. For all the times they’d paced each other and all the sunset runs they’d done on Virginia Beach, they’d never actually finished a race side by side.

  “Ready?” Billy said.

  “You’re toast, dude.”

  Together, they flew down the long hill and thundered across the swaying bridge. They came into Urique whooping and hollering, redeeming themselves magnificently; despite Jenn’s bloody legs and Billy’s narcoleptic approach to prerace prep, they’d beaten all but four of the Tarahumara as well as Luis and Eric, two highly experienced ultrarunners.

  Manuel Luna had dropped out halfway. Though he’d done his best to come through for Caballo, the ache of his son’s death left him too leaden to compete. But while he couldn’t get his heart into the racing, he was fully committed to one of the racers. Manuel prowled up and down the road, watching for Barefoot Ted. Soon, he was joined by Arnulfo … and Scott… and Jenn and Billy. Something odd began to happen: as the runners got slower, the cheers got wilder. Every time a racer struggled across the finish—Luis and Porfilio, Eric and Barefoot Ted—they immediately turned around and began calling home the runners still out there.

  From high on the hill, I could see the twinkle of the red and green lights strung above the road to Urique. The sun had set, leaving me running through that silvery-gray dusk of the deep canyons, a moonlike glow that lingers, unchanging, until you feel everything is frozen in time except you. And then, from out of those milky shadows, emerged the lone wanderer of the High Sierras.

  “Want some company?” Caballo said.

  “Love it.”

  Together, we clattered across the swaying bridge, the cool air off the river making me feel oddly weightless. When we hit the last stretch into town, trumpets began blasting. Side by side, stride for stride, Caballo and I ran into Urique.

  I don’t know if I actually crossed a finish line. All I saw was a pig-tailed blur as Jenn came flying out of the crowd, knocking me staggering. Eric caught me before I hit the ground and pushed a cold bottle of water against the back of my neck. Arnulfo and Scott, their eyes already bloodshot, pushed a beer into each of my hands.

  “You were amazing,” Scott said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Amazingly slow.” It had taken me over twelve hours, meaning that Scott and Arnulfo could have run the course all over again and still beaten me.

  “That’s what I’m saying,” Scott insisted. “I’ve been there, man. I’ve been there a lot. It takes more guts than going fast.”

  I limped over toward Caballo, who was sprawled under a tree as the party raged around him. Soon, he’d get to his feet and give a wonderful speech in his wacky Spanish. He’d bring forward Bob Francis, who’d walk back into town just in time to present Scott with a ceremonial Tarahumara belt and Arnulfo with a pocketknife of his own. Caballo would hand out prize money, and get choked up when the Party Kids, who could barely pay for the bus back to El Paso, immediately gave their cash to the Tarahumara runners who’d finished behind them. Caballo would roar with laughter as Herbolisto and Luis danced the Robot.

  But that would all come later. For now, Caballo was content to just sit alone under a tree, smiling and sipping a beer, watching his dream play out before his eyes.

  CHAPTER 32

  That head of his has been occupied with contemporary

  society’s insoluble problems for so long, and he is

  still battling on with his good-heartedness and boundless

  energy. His efforts have not been in vain, but he will

  probably not live to see them come to fruition.

  —THEO VAN GOGH, 1889

  “YOU’VE GOT TO HEAR THIS,” Barefoot Ted said, grabbing my arm.

  Damn. He caught me just as I was trying to slink away from the madness of the street party and limp off to the hotel to co
llapse. I’d already heard Barefoot Ted’s entire postrace commentary, including his observation that human urine is both nutrient-rich and an effective tooth whitener, and I couldn’t imagine anything he could possibly say that would be more compelling than a deep sleep in a soft bed. But it wasn’t Ted telling stories this time. It was Caballo.

  Barefoot Ted pulled me back into Mamá Tita’s garden, where Caballo was holding Scott and Billy and a few of the others spellbound. “You ever wake up in an emergency room,” Caballo was saying, “and wondered whether you wanted to wake up at all?” With that, he launched into the story I’d been waiting nearly two years to hear. It didn’t take me long to grasp why he’d chosen that moment. At dawn, we’d all be scattering and heading home. Caballo didn’t want us to forget what we shared, so for the first time, he was revealing who he was.

  ————

  He was born Michael Randall Hickman, son of a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant whose postings moved the family up and down the West Coast. As a skinny loner who constantly had to defend himself in new schools, young Mike’s first priority every time they moved was to find the nearest Police Athletic League and sign up for boxing lessons.

  Brawny kids would smirk and pound their gloves together as they watched the geek with the silky hippie hair gangle his way into the ring, but their grins died as soon as that long left arm began snapping jabs into their eyes. Mike Hickman was a sensitive kid who hated hurting people, but that didn’t stop him from getting really good at it. “The guys I liked best were the big, muscular ones, ’cause they’d keep coming after me,” he recalled. “But the first time I ever knocked out a guy, I cried. For a long time after that, I didn’t knock out anybody.”

  After high school, Mike went off to Humboldt State to study Eastern religions and Native American history. To pay tuition, he began fighting in backroom smokers, billing himself as the Gypsy Cowboy. Because he was fearless about walking into gyms that rarely saw a white face, much less a vegetarian white face spouting off about universal harmony and wheatgrass juice, the Cowboy soon had all the action he could handle. Small-time Mexican promoters loved to pull him aside and whisper deals in his ear.

  “Oye, compay,” they’d say. “Listen up, my friend. We’re going to start a chisme, a little whisper, that you’re a top amateur from back east. The gringos are gonna love it, man. Every gabacho in the house is going to bet their kids on you.”

  The Gypsy Cowboy shrugged. “Fine by me.”

  “Just dance around so you don’t get slaughtered till the fourth,” they’d warn him—or the third, or the seventh, whichever round the fix had been set for. The Cowboy could hold his own against gigantic black heavyweights by dodging and clinching up until it was time for him to hit the canvas, but against the speedy Latino middleweights, he had to fight for his life. “Man, sometimes they had to haul my bleeding butt out of there,” he’d say. But even after leaving school, he stuck with it. “I just wandered the country fighting. Taking dives, winning some, losing but really winning others, mostly putting on good shows and learning how to fight and not get hurt.”

  After a few years of scrapping along in the fight game’s underworld, the Cowboy took his winnings and flew to Maui. There, he turned his back on the resorts and headed east, toward the damp, dark side of the island and the hidden shrines of Hana. He was looking for a purpose for his life. Instead, he found Smitty, a hermit who lived in a hidden cave. Smitty led Mike to a cave of his own, then began guiding him to Maui’s hidden sacred sites.

  “Smitty is the guy who first got me into running,” Caballo told us. Sometimes, they’d set out in the middle of the night to run the twenty miles up the Kaupo Trail to the House of the Sun at the top of 10,000- foot Mount Haleakala. They’d sit quietly as the first rays of morning sparkled on the Pacific, then run back down again, fueled only by wild papayas they’d knocked from the trees. Gradually, the backroom brawler named Mike Hickman disappeared. In his place arose Micah True, a name inspired by “the courageous and fearless spirit” of the Old Testament prophet Micah and the loyalty of an old mutt called True Dog. “I don’t always live up to True Dog’s example,” Caballo would say. “But it’s something to shoot for.”

  During one of his vision-seeking runs through the rain forest, the newly reborn Micah True met a beautiful young woman from Seattle who was visiting on vacation. They couldn’t have been more different—Melinda was a psychology grad student and the daughter of a wealthy investment banker, while Micah was, quite literally, a caveman—but they fell in love. After a year in the wilderness, Micah decided it was time to return to the world.

  Wham! The Gypsy Cowboy knocked out his third opponent…

  … and his fourth …

  … and his fifth …

  With Melinda in his corner and those rain-forest runs powering his legs, Micah was virtually untouchable; he could dance and shuffle until the other fighter’s arms felt like cement. Once his fists drooped, Micah would dart in and hammer him to the canvas. “I was inspired by love, man,” Micah said. He and Melinda settled in Boulder, Colorado, where he could run the mountain trails and get bouts in Denver arenas.

  “He sure didn’t look like a fighter,” Don Tobin, then the Rocky Mountain lightweight kickboxing champion, later told me. “He had real long hair and was carrying this crusty old pair of gloves, like they were handed down from Rocky Graziano.” Don Tobin became the Cowboy’s friend and occasional sparring partner, and to this day, he marvels at the Cowboy’s work ethic. “He was doing unbelievable training on his own. For his thirtieth birthday, he went out and ran thirty miles. Thirty miles!” Few American marathoners were putting up those numbers.

  By the time his unbeaten streak reached 12-0, the Cowboy’s reputation was formidable enough to land him on the cover of Denver’s weekly newspaper, Westword. Under the headline FIST CITY was a full-page photo of Micah, bare-chested and sweaty, fists cocked and hair swinging, his eyes in the same glower I saw twenty years later when I surprised him in Creel. “I’ll fight anybody for the right amount of money,” the Cowboy was quoted as saying.

  Anybody, eh? That article fell into the hands of an ESPN kick-boxing promoter, who quickly tracked down the Cowboy and made an offer. Even though Micah was a boxer, not a kickboxer, she was willing to put him in the ring for a nationally televised bout against Larry Shepherd, America’s fourth-ranked light heavyweight. Micah loved the publicity and the big payday, but smelled a rat. Just a few months before, he had been a homeless hippie meditating on a mountaintop; now, they were pitting him against a martial artist who could break cinder blocks with his head. “It was all a big joke to them, man,” Micah says. “I was this long-haired hippie they wanted to shove into the ring for laughs.”

  What happened next summarizes Caballo’s entire life story: the easiest choices he ever had to make were the ones between prudence and pride. When the bell clanged on ESPN’s Superfight Night, the Gypsy Cowboy abandoned his usual canny strategy of dodging and dancing. Instead, he sprinted self-righteously across the ring and battered Shepherd with a furious barrage of lefts and rights. “He didn’t know what I was doing, so he covered up in the corner to figure it out,” Micah would recall. Micah cocked his right arm for a hay-maker, but got a better idea. “I kicked him in the face so hard, I broke my toe,” Micah says. “And his nose.”

  Dingdingding.

  Micah’s arm was jerked into the air, while a doctor began probing Shepherd’s eyes to make sure his retinas were still attached. Another KO for the Gypsy Cowboy. He couldn’t wait to get back home to celebrate with Melinda. But Melinda, he discovered, had a knockout of her own to deliver. And long before that conversation was over— long before she’d finished telling him about the affair and her plans to leave him for another man and move back to Seattle—Micah’s brain was buzzing with questions. Not for her; for him.

  He’d just smashed a man’s face on national TV, and why? To be great in someone else’s eyes? To be a performer whose achievements were only measured by
someone else’s affection? He wasn’t stupid; he could connect the dots between the nervous boy with the Great Santini dad and the lonely, love-hungry drifter he’d become. Was he a great fighter, in other words, or just a needy one?

  Soon after, Karate magazine called. The year-end rankings were about to come out, the reporter said, and the Gypsy Cowboy’s upset had made him the fifth-ranked light-heavyweight kickboxer in America. The Cowboy’s career was about to skyrocket; once Karate hit the stands and the offers started pouring in, he’d have plenty of big-money opportunities to find out whether he truly loved fighting, or was fighting to be loved.

  “Excuse me,” Micah told the reporter. “But I just decided to retire.”

  Making the Gypsy Cowboy disappear was even simpler than dispensing with Mike Hickman. Everything Micah couldn’t carry on his back was discarded. The phone was disconnected, the apartment abandoned. Home became a ’69 Chevy pickup. By night, he slept in a sleeping bag in the back. By day, he hired himself out to mow lawns and move furniture. Every hour in between, he ran. If he couldn’t have Melinda, he’d settle for exhaustion. “I’d get up at four-thirty in the morning, run twenty miles, and it would be a beautiful thing,” Micah said. “Then I’d work all day and want to feel that way again. So I’d go home, drink a beer, eat some beans, and run some more.”

  He had no idea if he was fast or slow, talented or terrible, until one summer weekend in 1986 when he drove up to Laramie, Wyoming, to take a stab at the Rocky Mountain Double Marathon. He surprised even himself by winning in six hours and twelve minutes, knocking off back-to-back trail marathons in a scratch over three hours each. Racing ultras, he discovered, was even tougher than prizefighting. In the ring, the other fighter determines how hard you’re hit, but on the trail, your punishment is in your own hands. For a guy looking to beat himself into numbness, extreme running could be an awfully attractive sport.