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

by Christopher McDougall

  Zatopek was a bald, self-coached thirty-year-old apartment-dweller from a decrepit Eastern European backwater when he arrived for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. Since the Czech team was so thin, Zatopek had his choice of distance events, so he chose them all. He lined up for the 5,000 meters, and won with a new Olympic record. He then lined up for the 10,000 meters, and won his second gold with another new record. He’d never run a marathon before, but what the hell; with two golds already around his neck, he had nothing to lose, so why not finish the job and give it a bash?

  Zatopek’s inexperience quickly became obvious. It was a hot day, so England’s Jim Peters, then the world-record holder, decided to use the heat to make Zatopek suffer. By the ten-mile mark, Peters was already ten minutes under his own world-record pace and pulling away from the field. Zatopek wasn’t sure if anyone could really sustain such a blistering pace. “Excuse me,” he said, pulling alongside Peters. “This is my first marathon. Are we going too fast?”

  “No,” Peters replied. “Too slow.” If Zatopek was dumb enough to ask, he was dumb enough to deserve any answer he got.

  Zatopek was surprised. “You say too slow,” he asked again. “Are you sure the pace is too slow?”

  “Yes,” Peters said. Then he got a surprise of his own.

  “Okay. Thanks.” Zatopek took Peters at his word, and took off.

  When he burst out of the tunnel and into the stadium, he was met with a roar: not only from the fans, but from athletes of every nation who thronged the track to cheer him in. Zatopek snapped the tape with his third Olympic record, but when his teammates charged over to congratulate him, they were too late: the Jamaican sprinters had already hoisted him on their shoulders and were parading him around the infield. “Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry,” Mark Twain used to say. Zatopek found a way to run so that when he won, even other teams were delighted.

  You can’t pay someone to run with such infectious joy. You can’t bully them into it, either, which Zatopek would unfortunately have to prove. When the Red Army marched into Prague in 1968 to crush the pro-democracy movement, Zatopek was given a choice: he could get on board with the Soviets and serve as a sports ambassador, or he could spend the rest of his life cleaning toilets in a uranium mine. Zatopek chose the toilets. And just like that, one of the most beloved athletes in the world disappeared.

  At the same time, coincidentally, his rival for the title of world’s greatest distance runner was also taking a beating. Ron Clarke, a phenomenally talented Australian with Johnny Depp’s dark, dreamy beauty, was exactly the kind of guy that Zatopek, by all rights, should hate. While Zatopek had to teach himself to run in the snow at night after sentry duty, the Australian pretty boy was enjoying sunny morning jogs along the beaches of Mornington Peninsula and expert coaching. Everything Zatopek could wish for, Clarke had to spare: Freedom. Money. Elegance. Hair.

  Ron Clarke was a star—but still a loser in the eyes of his nation. Despite breaking nineteen records in every distance from the half-mile to six miles, “the bloke who choked” never managed to win the big ones. In the summer of ’68, he blew his final chance: in the 10,000- meter finals at the Mexico City Games, Clarke was knocked out by altitude sickness. Anticipating a barrage of abuse back home, Clarke delayed his return by stopping off in Prague to pay a courtesy call to the bloke who never lost. Toward the end of their visit, Clarke glimpsed Zatopek sneaking something into his suitcase.

  “I thought I was smuggling some message to the outside world for him, so I did not dare to open the parcel until the plane was well away,” Clarke would say. Zatopek sent him off with a strong embrace. “Because you deserved it,” he said, which Clarke found cute and very touching; the old master had far worse problems of his own to deal with, but was still playful enough to grant a victory-stand hug to the young punk who’d missed his chance to mount one.

  Only later would he discover that Zatopek wasn’t talking about the hug at all: in his suitcase, Clarke found Zatopek’s 1952 Olympic 10,000- meters gold medal. For Zatopek to give it to the man who’d replaced his name in the record books was extraordinarily noble; to give it away at precisely the moment in his life when he was losing everything else was an act of almost unimaginable compassion.

  “His enthusiasm, his friendliness, his love of life, shone through every movement,” an overcome Ron Clarke said later. “There is not, and never was, a greater man than Emil Zatopek.”

  So here’s what Coach Vigil was trying to figure out: was Zatopek a great man who happened to run, or a great man because he ran? Vigil couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running. The engineering was certainly the same: both depended on loosening your grip on your own desires, putting aside what you wanted and appreciating what you got, being patient and forgiving and undemanding. Sex and speed—haven’t they been symbiotic for most of our existence, as intertwined as the strands of our DNA? We wouldn’t be alive without love; we wouldn’t have survived without running; maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.

  Look, Vigil was a scientist, not a swami. He hated straying into this Buddha-under-the-lotus-tree stuff, but he wasn’t going to ignore it, either. He’d made his bones by finding connections where everyone else saw coincidence, and the more he examined the compassion link, the more intriguing it became. Was it just by chance that the pantheon of dedicated runners also included Abraham Lincoln (“He could beat all the other boys in a footrace”) and Nelson Mandela (a college cross-country standout who, even in prison, continued to run seven miles a day in place in his cell)? Maybe Ron Clarke wasn’t being poetic in his description of Zatopek—maybe his expert eye was clinically precise: His love of life shone through every movement.

  Yes! Love of life! Exactly! That’s what got Vigil’s heart thumping when he saw Juan and Martimano scramble happy-go-luckily up that dirt hill. He’d found his Natural Born Runner. He’d found an entire tribe of Natural Born Runners, and from what he’d seen so far, they were just as joyful and magnificent as he’d hoped.

  Vigil, an old man alone in the woods, suddenly felt a burst of immortality. He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn’t just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we’re meant to be. Vigil had read his Lumholtz, and at that moment the great explorer’s words revealed their hidden treasure; so that’s what Lumholtz meant when he called the Tarahumara “the founders and makers of the history of mankind.” Perhaps all our troubles—all the violence, obesity, illness, depression, and greed we can’t overcome—began when we stopped living as Running People. Deny your nature, and it will erupt in some other, uglier way.

  Vigil’s mission was clear. He had to trace the route back from what we’ve become to what the Tarahumara have always been, and figure out where we got lost. Every action flick depicts the destruction of civilization as some kind of crash-boom-bang, a nuclear war or hurtling comet or a self-aware-cyborg uprising, but the true cataclysm may already be creeping up right under our eyes: because of rampant obesity, one in three children born in the United States is at risk of diabetes—meaning, we could be the first generation of Americans to outlive our own children. Maybe the ancient Hindus were better crystal-ball-gazers than Hollywood when they predicted the world would end not with a bang but with a big old yawn. Shiva the Destroyer would snuff us out by doing … nothing. Lazing out. Withdrawing his hot-blooded force from our bodies. Letting us become slugs.

  Coach Vigil wasn’t a maniac, though. He wasn’t proposing we all run off to the canyons with the Tarahumara to live in caves and gnaw mice. But there had to be transferable skills, right? Basic Tarahu principles that could survive and take root in American soil?

  Because my God, imagine the payoff. What if you could run for decades and never get injured … and log hundreds of weekly miles and enjoy every
one of them … and see your heart rate drop and your stress and anger fade while your energy soared? Imagine crime, cholesterol, and greed melting away as a nation of Running People finally rediscovered its stride. More than his Olympic runners, more than his triumphs and records, this could be Joe Vigil’s legacy.

  He didn’t have all the answers yet—but watching the Tarahumara whisk past in their wizard capes, he knew where he would find them.

  CHAPTER 16

  FUNNY, because Shaggy was looking at the same thing and all he saw was a middle-aged guy with a demonic knee.

  Shaggy’s ear caught the problem first. For hours, he’d been listening to the faint whish … whish … whish of Juan’s and Martimano’s sandals, a sound like a drummer beating rhythm with the brushes. Their soles didn’t hit the ground so much as caress it, scratching back lightly as each foot kicked toward their butts and circled around for the next stride. Hour after hour: whish … whish … whish …

  But as they came down Mount Elbert on the single-track trail toward mile 70, Shaggy detected a little hitch in the beat. Martimano seemed to be babying one foot, placing it carefully rather than whipping it right around. Juan noticed, too; he kept glancing back at Martimano uncertainly.

  “¿Qué pasa?” Shaggy asked. “What’s up?”

  Martimano didn’t answer right away, most likely because he was mentally scanning the previous twelve hours to see if he could pinpoint the cause of his pain: was it running those thirteen miles wearing trail shoes for the first time in his life? Or pivoting around those jagged switchbacks in the dark? Or slip-sliding over slick stones in a raging river? Or was it…

  “La bruja,” Martimano said; must’ve been the witch. The whole episode back at the firehouse suddenly made sense. Ann’s glare, the mumbo jumbo she spat at him, the shocked look on people’s faces, Kitty’s refusal to repeat it in Spanish, Shaggy’s comment—it was obvious. Ann had cursed him. “I passed her,” Martimano said later, “but then she cast a spell on my knee.”

  Martimano had been afraid something like this would happen ever since the Pescador had refused to bring along their shaman. Back home in the Barrancas, the shamans protect the iskiate and pinole from witchcraft, and combat any spells in the runner’s hips and knees and butts by massaging them with smooth stones and mashed medicinal herbs. But the Tarahumara had no shaman by their side in Leadville, and look what happened: for the first time in forty-two years, Martimano’s knee was giving out.

  When Shaggy realized what was going on, he felt a sudden pang of affection. They’re not gods, he realized. They’re just guys. And like every guy, the thing they loved most could bring them the most misery and confusion. Running a hundred miles wasn’t painless for the Tarahumara, either; they had to face their doubts, and silence the little devil on their shoulder who kept whispering excellent reasons in their ear for quitting.

  Shaggy looked over at Juan, who was torn between taking off or sticking with his mentor. “Go ahead,” Shaggy told Juan and his pacer. “I’ve got your boy. Go run that bruja down like a deer!”

  Juan nodded, and soon disappeared around a bend in the trail.

  Shaggy gave Martimano a wink. “It’s tú y yo, amigo.”

  “Guadajuko,” Martimano said. Cool by me.

  The scent of the finish line was tickling Ann’s nose. By the time Juan made it to the Halfmoon aid station at mile 72, Ann had nearly doubled her lead; she was twenty-two minutes ahead with just twenty-eight miles to go.

  Just to pull even, Juan would have to steal back close to one minute every mile, and he was about to enter the worst possible place to start trying: a seven-mile stretch of asphalt. Ann, with her road-racing expertise and air-injected Nikes, could uncoil her long legs and let fly. Juan, who’d never touched blacktop until that day, would have to handle the strange surface in homemade sandals.

  “His feet are really going to suffer,” Juan’s pacer called out to a TV crew by the roadside. As soon as Juan came off the dirt and hit the hardtop, he bent his knees and shortened his stride, getting all the shock absorption he needed from the up-and-down compression of his legs. He adjusted so well, in fact, that his amazed pacer began falling back, unable to keep up.

  Juan chased Ann on his own. He covered the seven miles to the Fish Hatchery in almost exactly the time it had taken him that morning, then cut left and onto the muddy trail leading to the dreaded Powerline Climb. Many Leadville runners fear Powerline nearly as much as Hope Pass. “I’ve seen people sitting by the side of the trail, crying,” one Leadville vet recalled. But Juan leaned into it like he’d been waiting for it all day, running up near-vertical pitches that force most runners to push their knees down with their hands.

  Ahead, Ann was approaching the peak, but her eyes were nearly closed with exhaustion, as if she couldn’t bear to even look at the last bit of slope. Switchback by switchback, Juan steadily reeled her in— until abruptly, he pulled up short and started hopping on one foot. Disaster had struck; the thong on one of his sandals had snapped, and he had nothing to replace it with. As Ann was cresting the mountain, Juan was taking a seat on a rock and examining what was left of the strap. He rethreaded the sandal, and found there was just enough thong left to hold the sole on his foot. He knotted the shortened strap carefully and gave it a couple of test steps. Good to go.

  Ann, meanwhile, had made it to the homestretch. All she had left was the ten miles of rolling dirt trail around Turquoise Lake before the screams of the Sixth Street party animals hauled her uphill to the finish line. It was just past eight in the evening and the woods around her were sinking into darkness—and that’s when something burst out of the trees behind her. It came on her so fast, Ann couldn’t even react; she froze in place in the middle of the trail, too startled to move, as Juan darted to her left with one stride and back onto the trail with the next, his white cape swirling around him as he whisked past Ann and disappeared down the trail.

  He didn’t even look tired! It’s like he was just… having fun! Ann was so crushed, she decided to quit. She was less than an hour from the finish line, but the Tarahumara joyfulness that so excited Joe Vigil had totally disheartened her. Here she was, absolutely killing herself to hold the lead, and this guy looked like he could have snatched it any time he pleased. It was humiliating; she now realized that as soon as she’d sprung her Queen’s Gambit, Juan had marked her for the kill. Her husband eventually got her moving again, and just in time; Martimano and the rest of the Tarahumara pack were coming up fast.

  Juan crossed the finish line in 17:30, setting a new Leadville course record by twenty-five minutes. (He also established another first by shyly ducking under the tape instead of breasting it, never having seen one before.) Ann finished nearly a half hour later, in 18:06. Right behind her, Martimano and his bewitched knee finished third, with Manuel Luna and the rest of the Tarahumara charging home in fourth, fifth, seventh, tenth, and eleventh.

  “Wow, what a race!” Scott Tinley raved for the TV audience as he pushed a microphone into Ann Trason’s face. She blinked into the camera lights, looking like she was about to faint, but managed to rally one last burst of fight.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “it takes a woman to bring out the best in a man.”

  Hey, and right back atcha, the Tarahumara could have replied; thanks to Ann’s heroic attempt to single-handedly defeat an entire team of distance-running savants, she had smashed her own Leadville best by more than two hours, setting a new women’s record that has never been broken.

  But the Tarahumara weren’t free to say anything at the moment, even if they’d been so inclined. They’d stepped off the racecourse and into a shit storm.

  This should have been their moment. Finally, after centuries of horror and fear, after being hunted for their scalps, enslaved for their strength, and bullied for their land, the Tarahumara were respected. They had proven themselves, indisputably, the greatest ultrarunners on earth. The world would see they had fantastic skills worth studying, a way of life worth pr
eserving, a homeland worth protecting.

  Joe Vigil was already selling his house and quitting his job; that’s how excited he was. Now that Leadville had built a bridge between American and Tarahumara culture, he was ready to carry out a plan he’d been contemplating for a long time. At sixty-five years old, he was ready to retire from Adams State anyway. He and his wife, Caroline, would move to Arizona’s Mexican border, where he’d set up a base camp for Tarahumara studies. It might take another few years, but in the meantime, he’d come back to Leadville every summer and tighten his relationship with the Tarahumara racers. He’d start learning their language … get them on a treadmill with heart-rate and maximal-oxygen-consumption monitors … maybe even arrange workshops with his Olympians! Because that was the cool part—Ann had been right there with them, which meant whatever the Tarahumara were doing, the rest of us could learn!

  It was beautiful. For about a minute.

  If you think you’re using one goddamn picture of my Tarahumara, Rick Fisher declared when Tony Post and the other Rockport executives hurried over with their congratulations, you’d better come up with some money.

  Tony Post was appalled. “He really went off. He came across like he was totally enraged, like the kind of guy who’d hunt you down and kill you. Not literally,” Post hastened to add. “He just seemed like this hothead who would argue forever and never admit he was wrong.”

  “He was a pain in the ass,” Ken Chlouber added. “He wasn’t a pain in the ass until we had big-time sponsors and TV crews, and then he held Rockport hostage to use film of the Indians. He tried to make life miserable for me as the race president, he was totally self-serving, and he didn’t take care of them at all.”