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

by Christopher McDougall

  “What freaked me out about you—,” Caballo began, but suddenly stopped, bug-eyed with hunger, as Mamá plopped big bowls in front of us and futzed over them with chopped cilantro and jalapeños and squirts of lime. The snarling look he’d given me back at the hotel wasn’t because I was standing between him and freedom; it was because I was standing between him and food. Caballo had set out that morning for a short hike to a natural thermal pool in the woods, but once he spotted a faint trail through the trees he’d never seen before, hike and hot tub were history. He took off running, and was still going hours later. He hit a mountain, but instead of turning back, he bent himself into a three-thousand-foot ascent, the equivalent of climbing to the top of the Empire State Building twice. Eventually, he linked onto a path back into Creel, turning what should have been a relaxing soak into a grueling trail marathon. By the time I shanghaied him in the hotel, he hadn’t eaten since sunup and was nearly delirious with hunger.

  “I’m always getting lost and having to vertical-climb, water bottle between my teeth, buzzards circling over head,” he said. “It’s a beautiful thing.” One of the first and most important lessons he learned from the Tarahumara was the ability to break into a run anytime, the way a wolf would if it suddenly sniffed a hare. To Caballo, running has become as much of a first option in transportation as driving is to suburbanites; everywhere he goes, he goes at a lope, setting off as lightly equipped as a Neolithic hunter and with just as little concern about where—or how far away—he’ll end up.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to his ancient hiking shorts and Dumpster-ready pair of Teva sandals. “That’s all I wear, and I’m always wearing them.”

  He paused to shovel steaming mounds of spicy beans into his mouth, washing them down with long, thirsty pulls on a bottle of Tecate. Caballo polished off one bowl and was refilled by Mamá so quickly that he barely slowed his spoon, moving his hand from bowl to mouth to beer bottle with such ergonomic efficiency that dinner seemed less like the end of his long workout and more like its next phase. Listening to him from across the table was like listening to gas pumping into the tank of a car: scoop, chomp, chomp, gurgle, gurgle, scoop, chomp, chomp, gurgle …

  Every once in a while, he’d lift his head and deliver a brief torrent of storytelling, then dip back down to his bowl. “Yeah, I used to be a fighter, man, ranked fifth in the world.” Back to the spoonwork “What freaked me out was, you just came blaring at me out of nowhere. We’ve had kidnappings and murders down here. Drug nastiness. Guy I know was kidnapped, wife paid a big ransom, then they killed him anyway. Nasty stuff. Good thing I got nothing. I’m just a gringo Indio, man, running humbly with the Rarámuri.”

  “Sorry—,” I began, but his face was already back in the beans.

  I didn’t want to bug Caballo with questions just yet, even though listening to him was like watching an art-house film in fast forward; traumas, jokes, fantasies, flashbacks, grudges, guilt over grudges, tantalizing fragments of ancient wisdom—they all came calliope-ing past in a blur too quick and disjointed to catch. He’d tell a story, move on to the next, skip ahead to the third, go back and correct a detail in the first, gripe about the guy in the second, then apologize for griping because, man, he’d spent his life trying to control his anger, and that was another story altogether….

  His name was Micah True, he said, and he came from Colorado. Well, California, actually. And if I really wanted to understand the Rarámuri, I should have been there when this ninety-five-year-old man came hiking twenty-five miles over the mountain. Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn’t. No one ever told him he oughta be off dying somewhere in an old age home. You live up to your own expectations, man. Like when he named himself after his dog. That’s where the name “True” really came from, his old dog. He didn’t always measure up to good old True Dog, but that was another story, too….

  I waited, scraping at the label of my beer bottle with a fingernail, wondering if he’d ever simmer down enough for me to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Gradually, Caballo’s spoonwork slowed and came to a stop. He drained his second bottle of Tecate and sat back, satisfied.

  “Guadajuko!” he said with a toothy grin. “Good word to learn. That’s Rarámuri for ‘cool.’”

  I pushed a third Tecate across the table. He eyed it with that skeptical, sun-scorched squint. “I don’t know, man,” he said. “Not eating all day, I can’t hold it like the Rarámuri.”

  But he picked it up and took a sip. Thirsty work, rambling up sky-scraping mesas. He took a long, chugging pull, then relaxed way back in his chair, tipping the front legs up and lacing his fingers across his lean belly. Something had just clicked inside him; I could tell before he even said another word. Maybe he needed those last twelve ounces of beer to loosen up, or maybe he’d just had to blow out some pent-up steam before relaxing into his story.

  Because when Caballo started to talk this time, he kept me spellbound. He talked deep into the night, telling an amazing story that spanned the ten years since his disappearance from the outside world and was full of bizarre characters, amazing adventures, and furious fights. And, in the end, a plan. An audacious plan.

  A plan, I gradually realized, that involved me.

  CHAPTER 8

  TO APPRECIATE Caballo’s vision, you have to go back to the early ’90s, when a wilderness photographer from Arizona named Rick Fisher was asking himself the obvious question: if the Tarahumara were the world’s toughest runners, why weren’t they ripping up the world’s toughest races? Maybe it was time they met the Fisherman.

  Total score all around, the way Fisher saw it. Some spit-chaw towns bag a ton of TV for their oddball races, the Fisherman turns into the Crocodile Hunter of Lost Tribes, and the Tarahumara get primo PR and become media sweethearts. Okay, so the Tarahumara are the most publicity-shy people on the planet and have spent centuries fleeing any kind of relations with the public, but…

  Well, Fisher would have to deal with that speed bump later; he already had far stickier problems to handle. Like, he didn’t know jack about running and barely spoke a lick of Spanish, let alone Rarámuri. He had no idea where to find Tarahumara runners, and no clue how he’d persuade them to follow him out of the safety of their caves and up into the lair of the Bearded Devils. And those were only the minor details: assuming he did assemble an all-Tarahumara track team, how the hell was he going to get them out of the canyons without cars and into America without passports?

  Luckily, Fisher had some special talents going for him. Top of the list was his amazing internal GPS; Fisher was like one of those house cats who reappear at home in Wichita after getting lost on a family vacation in Alaska. His ability to sniff his way through the most bewildering canyons may be unrivaled on the planet, and it appears to be mostly raw instinct. Fisher had never seen anything deeper than a ditch before leaving the midwest for the University of Arizona, but once there, he immediately began plunging into places better left unplunged. He was still a student when he began exploring Arizona’s mazelike Mogollon canyon range, venturing in just after the head of Phoenix’s Sierra Club was killed there in a not-uncommon flash flood. Fisher, with zero experience and Boy Scout-grade gear, not only survived, but came back with breathtaking photos of an underground wonderland.

  Even Jon Krakauer, the adventure überexpert and author of Into Thin Air, was impressed. “Rick Fisher can fairly lay claim to being the world’s leading authority on the Mogollon canyons and the myriad secrets they contain,” Krakauer concluded early in Fisher’s career, after Fisher had led him to “an utterly spellbinding slice of earth, like no place I’d even seen”—a Willy Wonka world of lime-green pools and pink crystal towers and subterranean waterfalls.

  Which brings up Rick Fisher’s other skill set: when it comes to grabbing a spotlight and persuading people to do things they’d rather not, Fisher could put a televangelist to shame (well, as much as that’s possible). Take this classic Fish tale that Krakauer te
lls about a rafting trip Fisher made into the Copper Canyons in the mid-1980s. Fisher really didn’t know where he was going, even though he was attempting, by Krakauer’s estimation, “the canyoneering equivalent of a major mountaineering expedition in the Himalaya.” Yet he still managed to convince two pals—a guy and his girlfriend—to come along. Everything was going grand … until Fisher accidentally beached the raft next to a marijuana field. Suddenly, a drug sentinel popped up with a cocked assault rifle.

  No problem. Fisher just whipped out a packet of news articles about himself he carries everywhere he goes (yup, even on very wet rafts through non-English-speaking Mexican badlands). See! You don’t want to mess with me. I’m, uh, whatchacallit—importante! ¡Muy importante!

  The bewildered sentinel let them paddle on, only to have Fisher come to shore at another drug encampment. This time, it got really ugly. Fisher’s little band was surrounded by a band of thugs who— being womanless in the wilderness—were drunk and dangerously lusty. One of the thugs grabbed the American woman. When her boyfriend tried to pull her back, a rifle barrel was slammed into his chest.

  That did it for Fisher. No fanning out his scrapbook this time; instead, he went berserk. “You’re muy malos hombres!” he screamed in an absolute spitting fury, calling the thugs “naughty, naughty men” in his junior-high Spanish. “¡Muy, muy malos!” He kept screeching and raving until, as Krakauer tells it, the thugs finally silenced the shrill lunatic by shoving him aside and walking away. Fisher had just brazened his way out of a death sentence—and, naturally, he made sure that the journalist Krakauer heard about it.

  Fisher loved the sound of his own horn, no doubt about it, and that spurred him to keep finding reasons to toot it. While most wild-men in the ’80s were pushing skyward, racing Reinhold Messner to scale the fourteen highest peaks in the Himalayas, Rick Fisher was burrowing down to more exotic kingdoms right beneath their feet. Using notes from Captain Frederick Bailey, a British secret agent who’d stumbled across a hidden valley in Tibet in the 1930s while reconnoitering with rebel groups in Asia, Fisher helped locate the fabled Kintup Falls, a thundering cascade that conceals the entrance to the deepest canyon on the planet. From there, Fisher moled his way into lost worlds on five continents, sliding through war zones and murderous militias to pioneer descents in Bosnia, Ethiopia, China, Namibia, Bolivia, and China.

  Secret agents, whizzing bullets, prehistoric kingdoms … even Ernest Hemingway would have shut up and surrendered the floor if Fisher walked into the bar. But no matter where he roamed, Fisher kept circling back home to his greatest passion: the bewitching girl next door, the Copper Canyons.

  During one expedition into the Barrancas, Fisher and his fiancée, Kitty Williams, became friends with Patrocinio López, a young Tarahumara man who’d wandered into the modern world when a new logging road pushed into his homeland. Patrocinio was Holly-wood handsome and musically gifted on the two-string Tarahumara chabareke, and so agreeable to working with the Bearded Devils that the Chihuahua Tourism Department adopted him as the face for the Copper Canyon Express, a luxury vintage train that makes whistle-stops along the rim of the Barrancas and allows tourists in air-conditioned railcars to be served by bow-tied waiters while peering at the savage country below. Patrocinio’s job was to pose for posters with a violin he’d carved by hand (a handicraft legacy from the Spanish slave days), as if to suggest that the life of the Tarahumara down yonder was all hunky guys and fiddle music.

  Rick and Kitty asked Patrocinio if he could take them to a raráji-pari, the ancient Tarahumara ball race. Maybe, Patrocinio replied, before demonstrating that he’d adopted the modern world as much as it had adopted him: If you’re willing to pay. He made Rick and Kitty an offer—he’d roust some runners, if they’d pony up food for his entire village.

  Deal?

  Deal.

  Rick and Kitty delivered the chow, and Patrocinio delivered one hell of a race. When Rick and Kitty arrived at the village, they didn’t find some rinky-dink fun run awaiting them; instead, thirty-four Tarahumara men were stripping down to breechcloths and sandals, getting prerace rubdowns from medicine men, and slamming back last-minute cups of iskiate. At the bark of the village elder, they were off, charging down the dirt trail in a sixty-mile, no mercy, dawn-to-dusk, semi-controlled stampede, flowing past Rick and Kitty with the speed and near-telepathic precision of migrating sparrows.

  Yow! Now THAT’S running! Kitty, a seasoned ultrarunner herself, was enthralled. She’d grown up watching her father, Ed Williams, turn himself into an unstoppable mountain racer despite living along the lowland banks of the Mississippi. Testament to Ed’s toughness was the fact that of all races in the world, his favorite was one of the scariest: the notorious Leadville Trail 100, a hundred-mile ultra-marathon held in Colorado, which he’d finished twelve times and was still running at age seventy.

  A beautiful marriage was forming in Rick’s mind: Patrocinio could get him runners, and future dad-in-law Ed could get him inside juice with a prestigious race. All he had left to do was hit up some charities for corn donations to tempt the Tarahumara, and maybe get a shoe company to put them in something sturdier than those sandals, and …

  Fisher schemed on, clueless that he was fine-tuning a fiasco.

  CHAPTER 9

  Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.

  —KEN CHLOUBER,

  Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100

  THE BIG, fat flaw in Rick Fisher’s plan was the fact that the Leadville race happens to be held in Leadville.

  Hunkered in a valley two miles up in the Colorado Rockies, Leadville is the highest city in North America and, many days, the coldest (the fire company couldn’t ring its bell come winter, afraid it would shatter). One look at those peaks had the first settlers shaking in their coonskins. “For there, before their unbelieving eyes, loomed the most powerful and forbidding geological phenomenom they had ever seen,” recounts Leadville historian Christian Buys. “They might as well have been on another planet. It was that remote and threatening to all but the most adventuresome.”

  Of course, things have improved since then: the fire company now uses a horn. Otherwise, well… “Leadville is a home for miners, muckers, and mean motherfuckers,” says Ken Chlouber, who was an out-of-work, bronco-busting, Harley-riding, hard-rock miner when he created the Leadville Trail 100, in 1982. “Folks who live at ten thousand feet are cut from a different kind of leather.”

  Dog-toy-tough or not, when Leadville’s top physician heard what Ken had in mind, he was outraged. “You cannot let people run a hundred miles at this altitude,” railed Dr. Robert Woodward. He was so pissed off he had a finger in Ken’s face, which didn’t bode well for his finger. If you’ve seen Ken, with those steel-toed boots on his size 13 stompers and that mug as craggy as the rock he blasted for a living, you figure out pretty quick you don’t put a hand near his face unless you’re dead drunk or dead serious.

  Doc Woodward wasn’t drunk. “You’re going to kill anyone foolish enough to follow you!”

  “Tough shit!” Ken shot back. “Maybe killing a few folks will get us back on the map.”

  Shortly before Ken’s showdown with Doc Woodward on that cold autumn day in 1982, the Climax Molybdenum mine had suddenly shut down, taking with it nearly every paycheck in Leadville. “Moly” is a mineral used to strengthen steel for battleships and tanks, so once the Cold War fizzled, so did the moly market. Almost overnight, Leadville stopped being a bustling little burg with an old-timey ice-cream parlor on its old-timey main street and was transformed into the most desperate, jobless city in North America. Eight out of every ten workers in Leadville punched the clock at Climax, and the few who didn’t depended on the ones who did. Once boasting the highest per capita income in Colorado, it soon found itself the county seat of one of the poorest counties in the state.

  It couldn’t get worse. And then it did.

  Ken’s neighbors were drinking hard, punching their wives,
sinking into depression, or fleeing town. A sort of mass psychosis was overwhelming the city, an early stage of civic death: first, people lose the means to stick it out; then, after the knife fights, arrests, and foreclosure warnings, they lose the desire.

  “People were packing up and leaving by the hundreds,” recalls Dr. John Perna, who ran Leadville’s emergency room. His ER was as busy as a MASH unit and confronting an ugly new trend of injuries; instead of job-site ankle sprains and smashed fingers, Dr. Perna was amputating toes from drunk miners who’d passed out in the snow, and calling the police for wives who arrived in the middle of the night with broken cheekbones and scared children.

  “We were slipping into lethal doldrums,” Dr. Perna told me. “Ultimately, we faced the disappearance of the city.” So many miners had already left, the last citizens of Leadville couldn’t fill the bleachers at a minor-league ballpark.

  Leadville’s only hope was tourism, which was no hope at all. What kind of idiot would vacation in a place with nine months of freezing weather, no slopes worth skiing, and air so thin that breathing counted as a cardio workout? Leadville’s backcountry was so brutal that the army’s elite 10th Mountain Division used to train there for Alpine combat.

  Making things worse, Leadville’s reputation was as scary as its geography. For decades, it was the wildest city in the Wild West, “an absolute death trap,” as one chronicler put it, “that seemed to take pride in its own depravity.” Doc Holliday, the dentist turned gun-slinging gambler, used to hang out in the Leadville saloons with his quick-drawin’ O.K. Corral buddy Wyatt Earp. Jesse James used to slink through as well, attracted by the stages loaded with gold and excellent hideouts just a lick away in the mountains. Even as late as the 1940s, the 10th Mountain Division commandos were forbidden to set foot in downtown Leadville; they might be fierce enough for the Nazis, but not for the cutthroat gamblers and prostitutes who ruled State Street.