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

by Christopher McDougall

  Dr. Davis put me on a treadmill, first in my bare feet and then in three different types of running shoes. She had me walk, trot, and haul ass. She had me run back and forth over a force plate to measure the impact shock from my footfalls. Then I sat in horror as she played back the video.

  In my mind’s eye, I’m light and quick as a Navajo on the hunt. That guy on the screen, however, was Frankenstein’s monster trying to tango. I was bobbing around so much, my head was disappearing from the top of the frame. My arms were slashing back and forth like an ump calling a player safe at the plate, while my size 13s clumped down so heavily it sounded like the video had a bongo backbeat.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, Dr. Davis then hit slow-mo so we could all settle back and really appreciate the way my right foot twisted out, my left knee dipped in, and my back bucked and spasmed so badly that it looked as if someone ought to jam a wallet between my teeth and call for help. How the hell was I even moving forward with all that up-down, side-to-side, fish-on-a-hook flopping going on?

  “Okay,” I said. “So what’s the right way to run?”

  “That’s the eternal question,” Dr. Davis replied.

  As for the eternal answer … well, that was tricky. I might straighten out my stride and get a little more shock absorption if I landed on my fleshy midfoot instead of my bony heel, buuuuut… I might just be swapping one set of problems for another. Tinkering with a new gait can suddenly load the heel and Achilles with unaccustomed stress and bring on a fresh batch of injuries.

  “Running is tough on the legs,” Dr. Davis said. She was so gentle and apologetic, I could tell what else she was thinking: “Especially your legs, big fella.”

  I was right back where I’d started. After months of seeing specialists and searching physiology studies online, all I’d managed was to get my question flipped around and fired back at me:

  How come my foot hurts?

  Because running is bad for you.

  Why is running bad for me?

  Because it makes your foot hurt.

  But why? Antelope don’t get shin splints. Wolves don’t ice-pack their knees. I doubt that 80 percent of all wild mustangs are annually disabled with impact injuries. It reminded me of a proverb attributed to Roger Bannister, who, while simultaneously studying medicine, working as a clinical researcher, and minting pithy parables, became the first man to break the four-minute mile: “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up,” Bannister said. “It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle— when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

  So why should every other mammal on the planet be able to depend on its legs except us? Come to think of it, how could a guy like Bannister charge out of the lab every day, pound around a hard cinder track in thin leather slippers, and not only get faster, but never get hurt? How come some of us can be out there running all lionlike and Bannisterish every morning when the sun comes up, while the rest of us need a fistful of ibuprofen before we can put our feet on the floor?

  These were very good questions. But as I was about to discover, the only ones who knew the answers—the only ones who lived the answers—weren’t talking.

  Especially not to someone like me.

  ————

  In the winter of 2003, I was on assignment in Mexico when I began flipping through a Spanish-language travel magazine. Suddenly, a photo of Jesus running down a rock slide caught my eye.

  Closer inspection revealed that while maybe not Jesus, it was definitely a man in a robe and sandals sprinting down a mountain of rubble. I started translating the caption, but couldn’t figure out why it was in the present tense; it seemed to be some kind of wishful Atlantean legend about an extinct empire of enlightened super-beings. Only gradually did I figure out that I was right about everything except the “extinct” and “wishful” parts.

  I was in Mexico to track down a missing pop star and her secret brainwashing cult for The New York Times Magazine, but the article I was writing suddenly seemed a snore compared with the one I was reading. Freakish fugitive pop stars come and go, but the Tarahumara seemed to live forever. Left alone in their mysterious canyon hideaway, this small tribe of recluses had solved nearly every problem known to man. Name your category—mind, body, or soul—and the Tarahumara were zeroing in on perfection. It was as if they’d secretly turned their caves into incubators for Nobel Prize winners, all toiling toward the end of hatred, heart disease, shin splints, and greenhouse gases.

  In Tarahumara Land, there was no crime, war, or theft. There was no corruption, obesity, drug addiction, greed, wife-beating, child abuse, heart disease, high blood pressure, or carbon emissions. They didn’t get diabetes, or depressed, or even old: fifty-year-olds could outrun teenagers, and eighty-year-old great-grandads could hike marathon distances up mountainsides. Their cancer rates were barely detectable. The Tarahumara geniuses had even branched into economics, creating a one-of-a-kind financial system based on booze and random acts of kindness: instead of money, they traded favors and big tubs of corn beer.

  You’d expect an economic engine fueled by alcohol and freebies to spiral into a drunken grab-fest, everyone double-fisting for themselves like bankrupt gamblers at a casino buffet, but in Tarahumara Land, it works. Perhaps it’s because the Tarahumara are industrious and inhumanly honest; one researcher went as far as to speculate that after so many generations of truthfulness, the Tarahumara brain was actually chemically incapable of forming lies.

  And if being the kindest, happiest people on the planet wasn’t enough, the Tarahumara were also the toughest: the only thing that rivaled their superhuman serenity, it seemed, was their superhuman tolerance for pain and lechuguilla, a horrible homemade tequila brewed from rattlesnake corpses and cactus sap. According to one of the few outsiders who’d ever witnessed a full-on Tarahumara rave, the partiers got so blitzed that wives began ripping each others’ tops off in a bare-breasted wrestling match, while a cackling old man circled around trying to spear their butts with a corncob. The husbands, meanwhile, gazed on in glassy-eyed paralysis. Cancún at spring break had nothing on the Barrancas under a harvest moon.

  The Tarahumara would party like this all night, then roust themselves the next morning to face off in a running race that could last not two miles, not two hours, but two full days. According to the Mexican historian Francisco Almada, a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping till you were closing in on Detroit. Other Tarahumara runners reportedly went three hundred miles at a pop. That’s nearly twelve full marathons, back to back to back, while the sun rose and set and rose again.

  And the Tarahumara weren’t cruising along smooth, paved roads, either, but scrambling up and down steep canyon trails formed only by their own feet. Lance Armstrong is one of the greatest endurance athletes of all time, and he could barely shuffle through his first marathon despite sucking down an energy gel nearly every mile. (Lance’s text message to his ex-wife after the New York City Marathon: “Oh. My. God. Ouch. Terrible.”) Yet these guys were knocking them out a dozen at a time?

  In 1971, an American physiologist trekked into the Copper Canyons and was so blown away by Tarahumara athleticism that he had to reach back twenty-eight hundred years for a suitable scale to rank it on. “Probably not since the days of the ancient Spartans has a people achieved such a high state of physical conditioning,” Dr. Dale Groom concluded when he published his findings in the American Heart Journal. Unlike the Spartans, however, the Tarahumara are benign as bodhisattvas; they don’t use their superstrength to kick ass, but to live in peace. “As a culture, they’re one of the great unsolved mysteries,” says Dr. Daniel Noveck, a University of Chicago anthropologist who specializes in the Tarahumara.

  The Tarahumara are so mysterious, in fact, they even go by
an alias. Their real name is Rarámuri—the Running People. They were dubbed “Tarahumara” by conquistadores who didn’t understand the tribal tongue. The bastardized name stuck because the Rarámuri remained true to form, running away rather than hanging around to argue the point. Answering aggression with their heels has always been the Rarámuri way. Ever since Cortés’s armored invaders came jangling into their homeland and then through subsequent invasions by Pancho Villa’s roughriders and Mexican drug barons, the Tarahumara have responded to attacks by running farther and faster than anyone could follow, retreating ever deeper into the Barrancas.

  God, they must be unbelievably disciplined, I thought. Total focus and dedication. The Shaolin monks of running.

  Well, not quite. When it comes to marathoning, the Tarahumara prefer more of a Mardi Gras approach. In terms of diet, lifestyle, and belly fire, they’re a track coach’s nightmare. They drink like New Year’s Eve is a weekly event, tossing back enough corn beer in a year to spend every third day of their adult lives either buzzed or recovering. Unlike Lance, the Tarahumara don’t replenish their bodies with electrolyte-rich sports drinks. They don’t rebuild between workouts with protein bars; in fact, they barely eat any protein at all, living on little more than ground corn spiced up by their favorite delicacy, barbecued mouse. Come race day, the Tarahumara don’t train or taper. They don’t stretch or warm up. They just stroll to the starting line, laughing and bantering … then go like hell for the next forty-eight hours.

  How come they’re not crippled? I wondered. It’s as if a clerical error entered the stats in the wrong columns: shouldn’t we—the ones with state-of-the-art running shoes and custom-made orthotics—have the zero casualty rate, and the Tarahumara—who run way more, on way rockier terrain, in shoes that barely qualify as shoes—be constantly banged up?

  Their legs are just tougher, since they’ve been running all their lives, I thought, before catching my own goof. But that means they should be hurt more, not less: if running is bad for your legs, then running lots should be a lot worse.

  I shoved the article aside, feeling equal parts intrigued and annoyed. Everything about the Tarahumara seemed backward, taunting, as irritatingly ungraspable as a Zen master’s riddles. The toughest guys were the gentlest; battered legs were the bounciest; the healthiest people had the crappiest diet; the illiterate race was the wisest; the guys working the hardest were having the most fun….

  And what did running have to do with all this? Was it a coincidence that the world’s most enlightened people were also the world’s most amazing runners? Seekers used to climb the Himalayas for that kind of wisdom—and all this time, I realized, it was just a hop across the Texas border.

  CHAPTER 3

  FIGURING OUT WHERE over the border, however, was going to be tricky.

  Runner’s World magazine assigned me to trek into the Barrancas in search of the Tarahumara. But before I could start looking for the ghosts, I’d need to find a ghost hunter. Salvador Holguín, I was told, was the only man for the job.

  By day, Salvador is a thirty-three-year-old municipal administrator in Guachochi, a frontier town on the edge of the Copper Canyons. By night, he’s a barroom mariachi singer, and he looks it; with his beer gut and black-eyed, rose-in-the-teeth good looks, he’s the exact image of a guy who splits his life between desk chairs and bar stools. Salvador’s brother, however, is the Indiana Jones of the Mexican school system; every year, he loads a burro with pencils and workbooks and bushwhacks into the Barrancas to resupply the canyon-bottom schools. Because Salvador is game for just about anything, he has occasionally blown off work to accompany his brother on these expeditions.

  “Hombre, no problem,” he told me once I’d tracked him down. “We can go see Arnulfo Quimare. …”

  If he’d stopped right there, I’d have been ecstatic. While searching for a guide, I’d learned that Arnulfo Quimare was the greatest living Tarahumara runner, and he came from a clan of cousins, brothers, in-laws, and nephews who were nearly as good. The prospect of heading right to the hidden huts of the Quimare dynasty was better than I could have hoped for. The only problem was, Salvador was still talking.

  “… I’m pretty sure I know the way” he continued. “I’ve never actually been there. “Pues, lo que sea.” Well, whatever. “We’ll find it. Eventually.”

  Ordinarily, that would sound a little ominous, but compared with everyone else I’d talked with, Salvador was wildly optimistic. Since fleeing into no-man’s-land four hundred years ago, the Tarahumara have spent their time perfecting the art of invisibility. Many Tarahumara still live in cliffside caves reachable only by long climbing poles; once inside, they pull up the poles and vanish into the rock. Others live in huts so ingeniously camouflaged, the great Norwegian explorer Carl Lumholtz was once startled to discover he’d trekked right past an entire Tarahumara village without detecting a hint of homes or humans.

  Lumholtz was a true backwoods badass who’d spent years living among headhunters in Borneo before heading into Tarahumara Land in the late 1890s. But you can sense even his fortitude grinding thin after he’d dragged himself through deserts and up death-defying cliffs, only to arrive at last in the heart of Tarahumara country to find…

  No one.

  “To look at these mountains is a soul-inspiring sensation; but to travel over them is exhaustive to muscle and patience,” Lumholtz wrote in Unknown Mexico: A Record of Five Years’ Exploration Among the Tribes of the Western Sierra Madre. “Nobody except those who have travelled in the Mexican mountains can understand and appreciate the difficulties and anxieties attending such a journey.”

  And that’s assuming you make it as far as the mountains in the first place. “On first encounter, the region of the Tarahumara appears inaccessible,” the French playwright Antonin Artaud grumbled after he sweated and inched his way into the Copper Canyons in search of shamanic wisdom in the 1930s. “At best, there are a few poorly marked trails that every twenty yards seem to disappear under the ground.” When Artaud and his guides finally did discover a path, they had to gulp hard before taking it: subscribing to the principle that the best trick for throwing off pursuers was to travel places where only a lunatic would follow, the Tarahumara snake their trails over suicidally steep terrain.

  “A false step,” an adventurer named Frederick Schwatka jotted in his notebook during a Copper Canyon expedition in 1888, “would send the climber two hundred to three hundred feet to the bottom of the canyon, perhaps a mangled corpse.”

  Schwatka was no prissy Parisian poet, either; he was a U.S. Army lieutenant who’d survived the frontier wars and later lived among the Sioux as an amateur anthropologist, so the man knew from mangled corpses. He’d also traveled the baddest of badlands in his time, including a hellacious two-year expedition to the Arctic Circle. But when he got to the Copper Canyons, he had to recalibrate his scoring table. Scanning the ocean of wilderness around him, Schwatka felt a quick pulse of admiration—“The heart of the Andes or the crests of the Himalayas contain no more sublime scenery than the wild, unknown fastnesses of the Sierra Madres of Mexico”—before being jerked back to morbid bewilderment: “How they can rear children on these cliffs without a loss of one hundred percent annually is to me one of the most mysterious things connected with these strange people.”

  Even today, when the Internet has shrunk the world into a global village and Google satellites let you spy on a stranger’s backyard on the other side of the country, the traditional Tarahumara remain as ghostly as they were four hundred years ago. In the mid-1990s, an expeditionary group was pushing into the deep Barrancas when they were suddenly rattled by the feeling of invisible eyes:

  “Our small party had been hiking for hours through Mexico’s Barranca del Cobre—the Copper Canyon—without seeing a trace of any other human being,” wrote one member of the expedition. “Now, in the heart of a canyon even deeper than the Grand Canyon, we heard the echoes of Tarahumara drums. Their simple beats were faint at first, but s
oon gathered strength. Echoing off stony ridges, it was impossible to tell their number or location. We looked to our guide for direction. ‘¿Quién sabe?’ she said. ‘Who knows? The Tarahumara can’t be seen unless they want to be.’”

  The moon was still high when we set off in Salvador’s trusty four-wheel-drive pickup. By the time the sun came up, we’d left pavement far behind and were jouncing along a dirt track that was more like a creek bed than a road, grinding along in low, low gear as we pitched and rolled like a tramp steamer on stormy seas.

  I tried keeping track of our location with a compass and map, but I sometimes couldn’t tell if Salvador was making a deliberate turn or taking evasive action around a fallen boulder. Soon, it didn’t matter—wherever we were, it wasn’t part of the known world; we were still snaking along a narrow gash through the trees, but the map showed nothing but untouched forest.

  “Mucha mota por aquí,” Salvador said, swirling a finger at the hills around us. Lots of marijuana around here.

  Because the Barrancas are impossible to police, they’ve become a base for two rival drug cartels, Los Zetas and the New Bloods. Both were manned by ex-Army Special Forces and were absolutely ruthless; the Zetas were notorious for plunging uncooperative cops into burning barrels of diesel fuel and feeding captured rivals to the gang’s mascot—a Bengal tiger. After the victims stopped screaming, their scorched and tiger-gnawed heads were carefully harvested as marketing tools; the cartels liked to mark their territory by, in one case, impaling the heads of two police officers outside a government building with a sign in Spanish reading LEARN SOME RESPECT. Later that same month, five heads were rolled onto the dance floor of a crowded nightclub. Even way out here on the fringes of the Barrancas, some six bodies were turning up a week.