Born to Run

by Christopher McDougall

  “You could literally halt epidemics in their tracks with this one remedy,” he said. He flashed two fingers up in a peace sign, then slowly rotated them downward till they were scissoring through space. The Running Man.

  “So simple,” he said. “Just move your legs. Because if you don’t think you were born to run, you’re not only denying history. You’re denying who you are.”

  CHAPTER 29

  The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

  —WILLIAM FAULKNER, Requiem for a Nun

  I WAS ALREADY awake and staring into the dark when Caballo came scratching at my door.

  “Oso?” he whispered.

  “C’mon in,” I whispered back. I blinked on my watch: 4:30.

  In half an hour, we were supposed to start out for our rendezvous with the Tarahumara. Months earlier, Caballo had told them to meet us in a little glen of shade trees on the trail up Batopilas mountain. The plan was to push up and over the peak, then down the back side and across the river to the village of Urique. I didn’t know what Caballo would do if the Tarahumara didn’t show up—or what I’d do if they did.

  Travelers on horseback give themselves three days for the thirty-five-mile journey from Batopilas to Urique; Caballo planned to do it in one. If I fell behind, would I be the one wandering lost in the canyons this time? And what if the Tarahumara didn’t show—would Caballo lead us into no-man’s-land to search for them? Did he even know where he was going?

  Those were the thoughts that kept me from sleeping. But Caballo, it turned out, had worries of his own. He came in and sat on the edge of my bed.

  “Do you think the kids are up for it?” he asked.

  Remarkably, they seemed fine after their near-death day in the canyons. They’d put away a good meal of tortillas and frijoles that evening, and I hadn’t heard any sounds of distress from the bathroom during the night.

  “How long till giardia hits?” I asked. Giardia parasites, I knew, had to incubate for a while in the intestines before erupting into diarrhea, fever, and stomach cramps.

  “A week or two.”

  “So if they don’t come down with something else by this morning, they might be okay till after the race.”

  “Hmm,” Caballo muttered. “Yeah.” He paused, obviously chewing over something else. “Look,” he went on. “I’m going to have to pop Barefoot Ted between the eyes.” The problem this time wasn’t Ted’s feet; it was his mouth. “If he gets in the face of the Rarámuri, they’re going to get real uncomfortable,” Caballo said. “They’re going to think he’s another Fisher and split.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to tell him he’s got to keep it shut tight. I don’t like telling people what to do, but he’s got to get the message.”

  I got up and helped him roust the others. The night before, a friend of Caballo’s had loaded our bags on a burro and set off for Urique, so all we had to carry was enough food and water to get us there. Bob Francis, the old backcountry guide, had volunteered to drive Luis’s father the long way around the mountain in his 4×4 pickup, sparing him the hike. Everyone else turned out quickly, and by 5 a.m., we were picking our way over the boulders toward the river. The canyon moon glittered on the water and bats were still darting overhead as Caballo led us to a faint footpath skirting the water line. We fitted into single file and shuffled into an easy jog.

  “The Party Kids are amazing,” Eric said, watching them glide along behind Caballo.

  “They’re more like the Comeback Kids,” I agreed. “But Caballo’s big worry is—” I pointed ahead to Barefoot Ted, whose outfit for the hike consisted of red shorts, his green FiveFinger toe shoes, and an anatomically correct skeleton amulet around his neck. Instead of a shirt, he wore a red raincoat with the hood knotted under his chin and the rest flapping loose over his shoulders like a cape. Jingling from his ankle was a string of bells, which he’d gotten because he’d read somewhere that Tarahumara elders wore them.

  “Good mojo,” Eric grinned. “We’ve got our own witch doctor.”

  By sunup, we’d left the river and turned up into the mountains. Caballo was pushing hard, even harder than he had the day before. We ate on the move, chomping down quick bites of tortilla and energy bars, sipping conservatively on our water in case it had to last all day. When it got light enough to see, I turned and looked back to get my bearings. The village had vanished like Brigadoon, swallowed whole by the forest. Even the trail behind us seemed to dissolve into the thick green foliage as soon as we passed. It felt like we were sinking into a bottomless green sea.

  “Not too much farther,” I could hear Caballo saying. He was pointing to something I couldn’t make out yet. “See that cluster of trees? That’s where they’ll be.”

  “The Arnulfo,” Luis said, wonder in his voice. “I’d rather meet him than Michael Jordan.”

  I got closer and saw the trees. I didn’t see any people.

  “The flu’s been going around,” Caballo said, slowing down and tilting back his head to squint at the hills above us for signs of life. “There’s a chance some of the runners will come later. If they’re sick. Or if they have to take care of their families.”

  Eric and I glanced at each other. Caballo had never mentioned anything about the flu before. I eased my hydration pack off my shoulders and got ready to sit down and rest. Better take a break now till we see what’s next, I thought, dropping the pack at my feet. When I looked back up, we were surrounded by half a dozen men in white skirts and pirate blouses. Between blinks, they’d materialized from the forest.

  We all stood, silent and stunned, waiting for a cue from Caballo.

  “Is he here?” Luis whispered.

  I scanned the ring of Tarahumara until I spotted that familiar whimsical smile on that handsome mahogany face. Wow; he really came. Just as unbelievably, his cousin Silvino was right beside him.

  “That’s him,” I whispered back. Arnulfo heard and glanced over. His lips twitched in a slight smile when he recognized me.

  Caballo was overcome with emotion. I thought it was just relief, until he reached out with both hands toward a Tarahumara runner with a mournful, Geronimo-like face. “Manuel,” Caballo said.

  Manuel Luna didn’t return the smile, but he sandwiched both Caballo’s hands with his own. I walked over. “I knew your son,” I said. “He was very good to me, a real caballero.”

  “He told me about you,” Manuel said. “He wanted to be here.”

  That emotional reunion between Caballo and Manuel broke the ice for everyone else. The rest of Caballo’s crew circulated among the Tarahumara, trading the special Tarahumara handshake Caballo had taught them, that light rasping of finger pads that is simultaneously less grasping and more intimate than a big ol’ powerpump.

  Caballo began introducing us. Not by name—in fact, I don’t think I ever heard him use our names again. He’d been studying us over the past three days, and just as he’d seen an oso in me and Barefoot Ted had spotted a monkey in himself, Caballo felt he’d identified spirit animals for everyone else.

  “El Coyote,” he said, laying a hand on Luis’s back. Billy became El Lobo Joven—the young wolf. Eric, quiet and ever watchful, was El Gavilán, the hawk. When he got to Jenn, I saw a flicker of amused interest briefly light up Manuel Luna’s eyes. “La Brujita Bonita,” Caballo called her. To the Tarahumara, steeped in tales of their two magnificent years at Leadville and the epic battle between Juan Herrera and Ann “the Bruja” Trason, calling a young runner “The Pretty Little Witch” had exactly the punch of nicknaming an NBA rookie “Heir Jordan.”

  “¿Hija?” Manuel asked. Was Jenn really Ann Trason’s daughter?

  “Por sangre, no. Por corazón, sí,” Caballo replied. Not the same blood, but the same heart.

  Finally, Caballo turned to Scott Jurek “El Venado,” he said, which even got a reaction out of too-cool Arnulfo. Now, what was the crazy gringo playing at? Why would Caballo call the tall, lean, and supremely confide
nt-looking guy “the Deer”? Was he giving the Tarahumara a foot tap under the table, a little hint how to play their cards on race day? Manuel remembered very well the way Caballo had urged the Tarahumara in Leadville to sit patiently on Ann Trason’s heels and “run her down like a deer.” But would Caballo favor the Tarahumara over his own compatriot? Or maybe it was a setup— maybe Caballo was trying to trick the Tarahumara into holding back while this American built an unbeatable lead….

  It was all mysterious and complicated and thoroughly entertaining to the Tarahumara, whose love of race strategy rivaled their taste for corn beer. Quietly, they began to banter among themselves, until Barefoot Ted barged in. Whether accidentally or prophylactically, Caballo had bypassed Ted in the introductions, so Ted presented himself.

  “Yo soy El Mono!” he announced. “The Monkey!” Hang on, Barefoot Ted thought; do they even have monkeys in Mexico? Maybe the Tarahumara don’t know what a mono is. Just in case, he began hooting and scratching like a chimp, his ankle bells jingling and the sleeves of his red raincoat flapping in his face, somehow thinking that impersonating a thing they’d never heard of would let them know what that thing was.

  The Tarahumara stared. None of them, incidentally, wore bells.

  “Okay,” Caballo said, eager to drop the curtain on this show. “¿Vámonos?”

  We reshouldered our packs. We’d been on the climb for nearly five straight hours, but we had to keep racing the sun if we were going to have a chance of fording the river before dark. Caballo took point, while the rest of us shuffled into single file among the Tarahumara. I tried to put myself last so I wouldn’t slow down the parade, but Silvino wouldn’t hear of it. He wouldn’t move till I moved first.

  “¿Por qué?” I asked. Why?

  Habit, Silvino said; as one of the top ball-racers in the canyons, he was used to keeping tabs on his teammates from the rear and letting them pull the pace until it was time for him to slingshot off for the final miles. I was tickled to think of myself as part of an All-Star Mixed Tarahumara-American Ultrarunning Team, until I translated what Silvino had said for Eric.

  “Maybe,” Eric said. “Or maybe the race already started.” He nodded farther ahead. Arnulfo was walking right behind Scott, watching him intently.

  CHAPTER 30

  Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude—they were what

  developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize

  that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning,

  had to be stored up before a race.

  —HERB ELLIOTT, Olympic champion and

  world-record holder in the mile who trained in bare feet,

  wrote poetry, and retired undefeated

  OYE, OSO, a shopkeeper called, waving me inside.

  Two days after we’d arrived in Urique, we were known everywhere by the spirit-animal nicknames Caballo had given us. “Everywhere,” of course, meant about five hundred yards in every direction; Urique is a tiny, Lost World village sitting alone at the bottom of the canyon like a pebble at the bottom of a well. By the time we’d finished breakfast on our first morning, we’d already been folded into the local social life. An army squad encamped on the outskirts would salute Jenn as they passed through on patrol, calling, “¡Hola, Brujita!” Kids greeted Barefoot Ted with shouts of “Buenos días, Señor Mono.” Good morning, Mr. Monkey.

  “Hey, Bear,” the shopkeeper continued. “Do you know that Arnulfo has never been beaten? Do you know he’s won the one-hundred-kilometer race three times in a row?”

  No Kentucky Derby, presidential election, or celebrity murder trial has ever been handicapped as passionately and personally as Caballo’s race was by the people of Urique. As a mining village whose best days were over more than a century ago, Urique had two things left to be proud of: its brutally tough landscape and its Tarahumara neighbors. Now, for the first time, a pack of exotic foreign runners had traveled all this way to test themselves against both, and it had exploded into much more than a race: for the people of Urique, it was the one chance in their lifetime to show the outside world just what they were made of.

  And even Caballo was surprised to find that his race had surpassed his hopes and was growing into the Ultimate Fighting Competition of underground ultras. Over the past two days, Tarahumara runners had continued trickling in by ones and twos from all directions. When we awoke the morning after our hike from Batopilas, we saw a band of local Tarahumara traipsing down from the hills above the village. Caballo hadn’t even been sure the Urique Tarahumara still ran anymore; he’d been afraid that, as in the tragic case of the Tarahumara of Yerbabuena, government upgrades to the dirt road had converted the Urique Tarahumara from runners into hitchhikers. They certainly looked like a people in transition; the Urique Tarahumara still carried wooden palia sticks (their version of the ball race was more like high-speed field hockey), but instead of traditional white skirts and sandals, they wore running shorts and sneakers from the Catholic mission.

  That same afternoon, Caballo was overjoyed to see a fifty-one-year-old named Herbolisto come jogging in from Chinivo, accompanied by Nacho, a forty-one-year-old champion from one of Herbolisto’s neighboring settlements. As Caballo had feared, Herbolisto had been laid up with the flu. But he was one of Caballo’s oldest Tarahumara friends and hated the idea of missing the race, so as soon as he felt a little better, he grabbed a pinole bag and set off on the sixty-mile trip on his own, stopping off on the way to invite Nacho along for the fun.

  By the eve of Race Day, our numbers had tripled from eight to twenty-five. Up and down Urique’s main street, debate over who was now the true top seed was running hot: Was it Caballo Blanco, the wily old veteran who’d poached the secrets of both American and Tarahumara runners? Or the Urique Tarahumara, experts on the local trails who had hometown pride and support on their side? Some money was riding on Billy Bonehead, the Young Wolf, whose surf-god physique drew admiring stares whenever he went for a swim in the Urique River. But the heaviest street action was divided between the two stars: Arnulfo, king of the Copper Canyons, and El Venado, his mysterious foreign challenger.

  “Sí, señor,” I replied to the shopkeeper. “Arnulfo won a one-hundred-kilometer race in the canyons three times. But the Deer has won a one-hundred-mile race in the mountains seven times.”

  “But it’s very hot down here,” the shopkeeper retorted. “The Tarahumara, they eat heat.”

  “True. But the Deer won a one-hundred-thirty-five-mile race across a desert called Death Valley in the middle of summer. No one has ever run it faster.”

  “No one beats the Tarahumara,” the shopkeeper insisted.

  “So I’ve heard. So who are you betting on?”

  He shrugged. “The Deer.”

  The Urique villagers had grown up in awe of the Tarahumara, but this tall gringo with the flashy orange shoes was unlike anyone they’d ever seen. It was eerie watching Scott run side by side with Arnulfo; even though Scott had never seen the Tarahumara before and Arnulfo had never seen the outside world, somehow these two men separated by two thousand years of culture had developed the same running style. They’d approached their art from opposite ends of history, and met precisely in the middle.

  I first saw it up on Batopilas mountain, after we’d finally gotten to the top and the trail flattened as it circled the peak. Arnulfo took advantage of the plateau to open it up. Scott locked in beside him. As the trail curled into the setting sun, the two of them vanished into the glare. For a few moments, I couldn’t tell them apart—they were two fiery silhouettes moving with identical rhythm and grace.

  “Got it!” Luis said, dropping back to show me the image in his digital camera. He’d sprinted ahead and wheeled around just in time to capture everything I’d come to understand about running over the past two years. It wasn’t Arnulfo’s and Scott’s matching form so much as their matching smiles; they were both grinning with sheer muscular pleasure, like dolphins rocketing through the waves. “This one is going to
make me cry when I get back home,” Luis said. “It’s like getting Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle in the same shot.” If Arnulfo had an advantage, it wouldn’t be style or spirit.

  But I had another reason to put my money on Scott. During the last, hardest miles of the hike to Urique, he kept hanging back with me and I’d wondered why. He’d come all this way to see the best runners in the world, so why was he wasting his time with one of the worst? Didn’t he resent me for holding everyone up? Seven hours of descending that mountain eventually gave me my answer:

  What Coach Joe Vigil sensed about character, what Dr. Bramble conjectured with his anthropological models, Scott had been his entire life. The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other. Scott learned that before he had a choice, back when he was trailing Dusty and the boys through the Minnesota woods. He was no good and had no reason to believe he ever would be, but the joy he got from running was the joy of adding his power to the pack. Other runners try to disassociate from fatigue by blasting iPods or imagining the roar of the crowd in Olympic Stadium, but Scott had a simpler method: it’s easy to get outside yourself when you’re thinking about someone else.*