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

by Christopher McDougall

  Yeah, Leadville was a tough place, Ken knew. Full of tough men, and even tougher women, and—

  And damn! Goddamn! That was it.

  If all Leadville had left to sell was grit, then step right up for your hot grits. Ken had heard about this guy in California, a long-haired mountain man named Gordy Ainsleigh, whose mare went lame right before the world’s premier horse endurance event, the Western States Trail Ride. Gordy decided to race anyway. He showed up at the starting line in sneakers and set out to run all one hundred miles through the Sierra Nevada on foot. He slurped water from creeks, got his vitals checked by veterinarians at the medical stops, and beat the twenty-four-hour cutoff for all horses with seventeen minutes to spare. Naturally, Gordy wasn’t the only lunatic in California, so the next year, another runner crashed the horse race … and another the year after that… until, by 1977, the horses were crowded out and Western States became the world’s first one-hundred-mile footrace.

  Ken had never even run a marathon himself, but if some California hippie could go one hundred miles, how hard could it be? Besides, a normal race wouldn’t cut it; if Leadville was going to survive, it needed an event with serious holy-shit power, something to set it apart from all the identical, ho-hum, done-one-done-’em-all 26.2- milers out there.

  So instead of a marathon, Ken created a monster.

  To get a sense of what he came up with, try running the Boston Marathon two times in a row with a sock stuffed in your mouth and then hike to the top of Pikes Peak.

  Done?

  Great. Now do it all again, this time with your eyes closed. That’s pretty much what the Leadville Trail 100 boils down to: nearly four full marathons, half of them in the dark, with twin twenty-six-hundred-foot climbs smack in the middle. Leadville’s starting line is twice as high as the altitude where planes pressurize their cabins, and from there you only go up.

  “The hospital does make a lot of money off us,” Ken Chlouber happily agrees today, twenty-five years after the inaugural race and his showdown with Doc Woodward. “It’s the only weekend when all the beds in the hotels and the emergency room are full at the same time.”

  Ken should know; he’s run every Leadville race, despite having been hospitalized with hypothermia during his first attempt. Leadville racers routinely fall off bluffs, break ankles, suffer over exposure, get weird heart arrhythmias and altitude sickness.

  Fingers crossed, Leadville has yet to polish anyone off, probably because it beats most runners into submission before they collapse. Dean Karnazes, the self-styled Ultramarathon Man, couldn’t finish it the first two times he tried; after watching him drop out twice, the Leadville folks gave him their own nickname: “Ofer” (“O fer one, O fer two …”). Less than half the field makes it to the finish every year.

  Not surprisingly, an event with more flameouts than finishers tends to attract a rare breed of athlete. For five years, Leadville’s reigning champion was Steve Peterson, a member of a Colorado higher-consciousness cult called Divine Madness, which seeks nirvana through sex parties, extreme trail running, and affordable housecleaning. One Leadville legend is Marshall Ulrich, an affable dog-food tycoon who perked up his times by having his toenails surgically removed. “They kept falling off anyway,” Marshall said.

  When Ken met Aron Ralston, the rock climber who sawed off his own hand with the chipped blade of a multitool after getting pinned by a boulder, Ken made an astonishing offer: if Aron ever wanted to run Leadville, he wouldn’t have to pay. Ken’s invitation stunned everyone who heard about it. The defending champ has to pay his way back into the race. Heroic grand master Ed Williams still has to pay. Ken has to pay. But Aron got a free ride—and why?

  “He’s the essence of Leadville,” Ken said. “We’ve got a motto here—you’re tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can. Guy like Aron, he shows the rest of us what we can do if we dig deep.”

  You might think poor Aron had already suffered enough, but little more than a year after his accident, he took Ken up on the offer. New prosthetic swinging by his side, Aron made it to the finish under the thirty-hour cutoff and went home with a silver belt buckle, thereby stating better than Ken ever could what it takes to toe the line at Leadville:

  You don’t have to be fast. But you’d better be fearless.

  CHAPTER 10

  PERFECT! Leadville was exactly the kind of wild, Rock’em-Sock’em thrill show Rick Fisher was looking for. As usual, he was out to make a big splash, and a carnival like Leadville was just the ticket. You telling him that ESPN wouldn’t jump at the chance for footage of good-looking guys in skirts smashing records on a mythical man-eater? Hell yeah!

  So in August 1992, Fisher came roaring back to Patrocinio’s village in his big old Chevy Suburban. He’d gotten travel papers from the Mexican Tourism Board, and a promised payoff in corn for the racers. Meanwhile, Patrocinio had cajoled five of his fellow villagers to trust this strange, intense chabochi whose name got stuck in their mouths. Spanish has no “sh” sound, so Fisher soon got a taste of sly Tarahumara humor when he heard his new team calling him Pescador—the Fisherman. Sure, it was easier to pronounce; but it also nailed his Ahabness, the constant hunger to hook a big one that radiated off him like heat waves off a car hood.

  Whatever. As far as Fisher was concerned, they could call him Dr. Dumbass, as long as they got serious once the race started. The Pescador squeezed his team into the Chevy and hit the gas for Colorado.

  Just before 4 a.m. on race day, the crowd at the Leadville starting line tried not to stare as five men in skirts struggled with the unfamiliar laces of the black canvas basketball sneakers the Pescador had gotten for them. The Tarahumara shared a last few drags on a black tobacco cigarette, then moved shyly to the very back of the pack as the other two hundred ninety ultrarunners chanted Three … two …

  Boooom! Leadville’s mayor blasted his big old blunderbuss of a shotgun, and the Tarahumara raced off to show their stuff.

  For a while. Before they even made it halfway, every one of the Tarahumara runners had dropped out. Damn, Fisher moaned into every ear he could grab. I never should have stuffed them into those sneaks, and no one told them they were allowed to eat at the aid stations. Totally my bad. They’d never seen flashlights before, so they were pointing them straight up like torches….

  Yeah, yeah, check’s in the mail. Same old Tarahumara letdown; same old Tarahumara excuses. Few but the most obsessive track historians know it, but Mexico tried using a pair of Tarahumara runners in the Olympic marathon in both the 1928 Amsterdam games and the 1968 Mexico City games. Both times, the Tarahumara finished out of the medals. The excuse those times was that 26.2 miles was too short; the dinky little marathon was over before the Tarahumara got a chance to shift into high gear.

  Maybe. But if these guys were really such superhuman speedsters, how come they never beat anybody? Nobody cares if you’re a great three-point shooter in your backyard; what matters is whether you stick them on game day. And for a century, the Tarahumara had never competed in the outside world without stinking up the joint.

  Fisher puzzled over it during the long drive back to Mexico, and then the lightbulb flashed. Of course! Same reason you can’t grab five kids off a Chicago schoolyard and expect to beat the Bulls: just because you’re a Tarahumara runner doesn’t mean you’re a great Tarahumara runner. Patrocinio had tried to make life easier for Fisher by enlisting runners who lived near the new paved road, figuring they’d be more comfortable around outsiders and easier to gather for the trip. But as the Mexican Olympic Committee should have realized years ago, the easiest Tarahumara to recruit may not be the ones worth recruiting.

  “Let’s try again,” Patrocinio urged. Fisher’s sponsors had donated a pile of corn to Patrocinio’s village, and he hated to lose the windfall. This time, he’d open the team to runners from outside his own village. He’d head back into the canyons—and back in time. Team Tarahumara was going old-school.

  Yep, “o
ld” pretty much nailed it.

  Ken was none too impressed with the new band of Tarahumara who showed up at the next Leadville. The team captain looked like a Keebler elf who’d taken early retirement in Miami Beach: he was a short fifty-five-year-old grandfather in a blue robe with flashy pink flowers, topped off by a happy-go-lucky grin, a pink scarf, and a wool cap yanked down over his ears. Another guy had to be in his forties, and the two scared kids behind him looked young enough to be his sons. The whole operation was even worse equipped than last year’s; no sooner had Team Tarahumara arrived than they disappeared into the town dump, emerging with strips of tire rubber that they began fashioning into sandals. No chafing black Chuckies this time around.

  Seconds before the race was about to begin, the Tarahumara vanished. Same eye of the tiger as last year, Ken thought dismissively; just as before, the timid Tarahumara had hidden themselves at the very rear of the pack. At the blast of the shotgun, they trotted off in last place. And in last place they remained, ignored and inconsequential…

  … until mile 40, when Victoriano Churro (the Keebler look-alike with a taste for pastels) and Cerrildo Chacarito (the forty-something goat farmer) began quietly, almost nonchalantly, pitter-pattering their way along the edges of the trail, picking off a few runners at a time as they began the three-mile mountain climb to Hope Pass. Manuel Luna caught up and locked in beside them, the three elders leading the younger Tarahumara like a wolf pack on the hunt.

  Heeya! Ken whooped and hollered like a bullrider when he saw the Tarahumara heading back toward him after the fifty-mile turnaround. Something strange was going on; Ken could tell by the weird look on their faces. He’d seen every single Leadville runner for the past decade, and not one of them had ever looked so freakishly … normal. Ten straight hours of mountain running will either knock you on your ass or plant its flag on your face, no exceptions. Even the best ultrarunners by this point are heads down and digging deep, focusing hard on the near-impossible task of getting each foot to follow the other. But that old guy? Victoriano? Totally cool. Like he just woke up from a nap, scratched his belly, and decided to show the kids how the big boys play this game.

  By mile 60, the Tarahumara were, flying. Leadville has aid stations every fifteen miles or so where helpers can resupply their runners with food, dry socks, and flashlight batteries, but the Tarahumara were moving so fast, Rick and Kitty couldn’t drive around the mountain fast enough to keep up with them.

  “They seemed to move with the ground,” said one awestruck spectator. “Kind of like a cloud, or a fog moving across the mountains.”

  This time, the Tarahumara weren’t two lonely tribesmen adrift in a sea of Olympians. They weren’t five confused villagers in awful canvas sneakers who hadn’t run since the road was bulldozed into their village. This time, they were locked into a formation they’d practiced since childhood, with wily old vets up front and eager young bucks pushing from behind. They were sure-footed and sure of themselves. They were the Running People.

  Meanwhile, a rather different endurance contest was taking place a few blocks from the finish line. Every year, Leadville’s Sixth Street partyers cowboy up and spend the weekend trying to outlast the runners. They start pounding at the blast of the starting gun, and keep downing ’em until the race officially ends, thirty hours later. Between Jäger and Jell-O shots, they also perform a critical advisory function: their job is to alert the timers at the finish line by going apeshit the second they spot a runner emerging from the dark. This time, the boozers nearly blew it; at two in the morning, old Victoriano and Cerrildo came whisking by so quickly and quietly—“a fog moving across the mountains”—they almost went unnoticed.

  Victoriano hit the tape first, with Cerrildo right behind in second. Manuel Luna, whose new sandals had fallen apart at mile 83 and left his unprotected feet raw and bleeding, still surged back over the rocky trail around Turquoise Lake to finish fifth. The first non-Tarahumara finisher was nearly a full hour behind Victoriano—a distance of roughly six miles.

  The Tarahumara hadn’t just gone from last to first; they’d done serious damage to the record book in the process. Victoriano was the oldest winner in race history, eighteen-year-old Felipe Torres was the youngest finisher, and Team Tarahumara was the only squad to ever grab three of the top five spots—even though its two top finishers had a combined age of nearly one hundred.

  “It was amazing,” a hard-to-amaze participant named Harry Dupree would tell The New York Times. After running Leadville twelve times himself, Dupree thought his days of being surprised by anything in the race were over. Then he watched Victoriano and Cerrildo whiz past.

  “Here were these little guys wearing sandals who never actually trained for the race. And they blew away some of the best long-distance runners in the world.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “I TOLD YOU!” Rick Fisher crowed.

  He was right about something else, too: suddenly, everybody wanted a piece of the Running People. Fisher promised that Team Tarahumara would be back next year, and that was the magic wand that transformed Leadville from a little-known gruelathon into a major media event. ESPN grabbed broadcast rights; Wide World of Sports aired a Who-Are-These-Super-Jocks special; Molson beer signed on as a Leadville sponsor. Rockport Shoes even became official backers of the only running team in the world that hated running shoes.

  Reporters from The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Le Monde, Runner’s World, you name it, kept calling Ken with the same question:

  “Can anyone beat these guys?”

  “Yep,” Ken replied. “Annie can.”

  Ann Trason. The thirty-three-year-old community-college science teacher from California. If you said you could spot her in a crowd, you were either her husband or a liar. Ann was sort of short, sort of slender, sort of schlumpy, sort of invisible behind her mousy-brown bangs—sort of what you’d expect, basically, in a community-college science teacher. Until someone fired a gun.

  Watching Ann bolt at the start of a race was like watching a mild-mannered reporter yank off his glasses and sling on a crimson cape. Her chin came up, her hands curled into fists, her hair flowed around her face like a jet stream, the bangs blowing back to reveal glinting brown cougar eyes. In street clothes, Ann is a pinch over five feet; in running shorts, she reconfigures to Brazilian model proportions, all lean legs and ballerina-straight back and sun-browned belly hard enough to break a bat.

  Ann had run track in high school, but got sick to death of “ham-stering” around and around an artificial oval, as she put it, so she gave it up in college to become a biochemist (which pretty much makes the case for how tedious track was, if periodic tables were more spellbinding). For years, she ran only to keep from going nuts: when her brain got fried from studying, or after she’d graduated and started a demanding research job in San Francisco, Ann would blow out the stress with a quick patter around Golden Gate Park.

  “I love to run just to feel the wind in my hair,” she’d say. She could care less about races; she was just hooked on the joy of bustin’ out of prison. It wasn’t long before she began defusing job stress in advance by jogging the nine miles to the lab each morning. And once she realized that her legs were fresh again by punch-out time, she began running back home again as well. Oh, and what the heck; as long as she was racking up eighteen miles a day during the workweek, it was no big deal to unwind on a lazy Saturday with twenty at a pop …

  … or twenty-five …

  … or thirty …

  One Saturday, Ann got up early and ran twenty miles. She relaxed over breakfast, then headed back out for twenty more. She had some plumbing chores around the house, so after finishing run No. 2, she hauled out her toolbox and got to work. By the end of the day, she was pretty pleased with herself; she’d run forty miles and taken care of a messy job on her own. So as a reward, she treated herself to another fifteen miles.

  Fifty-five miles in one day. Her friends had to wonder, and worry. Did Ann have an eating disor
der? An exercise obsession? Was she fleeing some subconscious Freudian demon by literally running away? “My friends would tell me I’m not addicted to crack, I’m addicted to endorphins,” Trason would say, and her comeback didn’t much put their minds at ease: she liked to tell them that running huge miles in the mountains was “very romantic.”

  Gotcha. Grueling, grimy, muddy, bloody, lonely trail-running equals moonlight and champagne.

  But yeah, Ann insisted, running was romantic; and no, of course her friends didn’t get it because they’d never broken through. For them, running was a miserable two miles motivated solely by size 6 jeans: get on the scale, get depressed, get your headphones on, and get it over with. But you can’t muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it, like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.

  Relax enough, and your body becomes so familiar with the cradle-rocking rhythm that you almost forget you’re moving. And once you break through to that soft, half-levitating flow, that’s when the moonlight and champagne show up: “You have to be in tune with your body, and know when you can push it and when to back off,” Ann would explain. You have to listen closely to the sound of your own breathing; be aware of how much sweat is beading on your back; make sure to treat yourself to cool water and a salty snack and ask yourself, honestly and often, exactly how you feel. What could be more sensual than paying exquisite attention to your own body? Sensual counted as romantic, right?