Running with Sherman

by Christopher McDougall

  * * *

  —

  Three months after Barb met Lynzi, she cut her loose.

  For her last lesson, Barb taught Lynzi how to sling a packsaddle over Dakota’s back and cinch it just right (loose enough for comfort, secure enough to sit tight) and how to tie down the required pick, shovel, and mining pan. Then Barb sent her off to the first race of the 2014 season: an eight-mile tune-up event just west of Denver in Georgetown. The gun blasted, and suddenly Lynzi was swallowed by the stampede. She emerged ninety minutes later, finishing in the middle of the pack but with such a big smile and loping ease that she clearly had plenty left in the tank.

  Lynzi fights the men for the lead in her first burro race, and lands on the front page.

  “People began to notice,” Barb says. “They’re asking, ‘Who is this sweet young gal?’ ”

  They soon found out. Right before the Fairplay race, Barb made a strategic switch. She knew Lynzi had never run fifteen miles in her life, let alone strapped to a donkey, so Barb decided to pair her with Chugs instead of young, fast, and feisty Dakota. Dakota was speedy enough to give Lynzi the run of a lifetime, but Chugs had mellowed over the years from a half-wild thunderbolt into a wise, reliable warhorse. Barb couldn’t stomach the thought of something going haywire with Dakota while Lynzi was up on the mountains: alone, exhausted, maybe hurt. Barb had been there herself: once during a race Dakota had gotten wedged up to his chest in a snowdrift, and Barb had barely been able to dig him out. She hoped Chugs was canny enough to keep Lynzi out of trouble.

  Lynzi felt her stomach heaving as she and Chugs squeezed into the braying, stamping donkey herd. She tightened her fist around Chugs’s rope and tried to relax. Shortly before the final countdown, she caught the attention of America’s least-likely burro racers: Rick and Roger Pedretti, two middle-aged Wisconsin cattle farmers who haul their burros nearly 3,000 miles round-trip every year to compete in Fairplay. Fifteen years earlier, a Pedretti actually won the World Championship. Rob Pedretti had left the family farm to work in Colorado as a hunting guide. He didn’t know it, but he’d been waiting for burro racing all his life. His three great loves were animals, mountains, and running, and when he discovered some genius had actually combined them in a sport, he was ecstatic. It took him a while, but by 1999, Rob even got good enough to defeat defending champion Hal Walter and win the World Championship. Five years later, Rob returned home to Wisconsin, stomped “I LOVE YOU ALL” in giant letters in the snow, and shot himself in the heart.

  Every July since then, the Pedrettis have rented all the rooms in the ancient Hand Hotel for race weekend and made the World Championship their family reunion. The Pedrettis weren’t runners before—far from it—but they sure as hell are now. The brothers all take turns running with Rob’s burro, Smokey, always accompanied by a pack of Pedrettis of all ages with various burros borrowed from Rob’s old friends. The race has become such a rite of passage, even hopeful boyfriends know the best way to impress the family is to grab a rope on race day and pay their respects to Uncle Rob.

  So when Roger and Rick Pedretti spotted a scared teenager just before the starting gun in 2014, they knew exactly what Rob would have done. “Put Chugs between our burros and we’ll stick with you,” they told Lynzi. Or at least they’d try. When the three of them rounded the halfway turn and began heading for home, Lynzi looked so fresh that the Pedrettis suspected they were holding her back. “Don’t be polite,” Roger said. “If you can go, get going!” Lynzi was off like a shot, picking off racer after racer as she and Chugs weaved through the pack. She sprinted across the finish line, the number one woman and the fourth overall in her very first World Championship.

  “That gal is the real deal,” an impressed Curtis Imrie remarked. “Latest in a long line of women in this sport who are incredibly fit, very competitive, and have the knack for training animals. Why wouldn’t they beat all the men?” Curtis had a saying he liked to spring on new burro racers: “You have a great past ahead of you.” But with Lynzi, he saw a whole new future. “She has the opportunity to redefine this sport,” Curtis said. “Just the way Barb Dolan did.”

  Maybe she did. Or maybe Barb wasn’t done defining it yet herself.

  Because a few weeks later, spectators crowding the streets of Buena Vista heard a trailer door clang open and saw two legends emerge: Barb Dolan and Smokey, Rob Pedretti’s champion burro. At twelve miles, the Buena Vista course is comparatively short (Curtis calls it “the track meet”), so Barb figured it was safe to team Lynzi with Dakota. For herself, Smokey was perfect: a pursuit demon who’s obsessed with catching every burro in front of him. At the gun, Barb and Lynzi blasted off together, clattering across the bridge and leaning into the long climb up Whipple Trail.

  They hit the peak side by side and whipped around the turnaround, Lynzi sucking deep for wind as Barb gave her a master class in How Shit’s Done. Dead ahead was the front pack, led by a notoriously fast trail runner from California. The Californian was hooting and hollering like he was leading a cattle drive, knowing he was a lock for first and its $500 cash prize as long as the burro he’d rented kept pace. Barb glared at him, annoyed but minding her own business. Then she checked to see how Lynzi and Dakota were handling the commotion, and saw the future Curtis was talking about.

  Lynzi was running the way we do in our dreams, as light and smooth as if the earth were spinning beneath her feet. She was tight at Dakota’s hip, exactly where Barb had taught her, and encouraging him more by her presence than her voice. Every once in a while, Lynzi breathed a command. Dakota twitched his ears, listened, and obeyed. After watching Lynzi, Barb spun back to the Californian. “I don’t mean to be a bitch,” she said, “but shut up already. Keep it down, will ya?”

  Her message to Lynzi was a lot shorter: “Go!”

  Lynzi was gone. She dropped Barb on the long downhill, sticking hard on the heels of the lead pack as they thundered toward the finish line. Lynzi sprinted by past champions Bobby Lewis and George Zack, and was closing hard on Hal Walter and Justin Mock, the 2:29 marathoner, when she ran out of race course. Once again, the ninth-grader was first woman and fourth overall.

  “How’d she do?” Barb asked, panting in a few minutes later. She smiled when she heard the results. “Pretty awesome. That’s pretty awesome.” There would be other days to run down the loud Californian and the rest of the guys, Barb knew. Lynzi’s past was just beginning.

  22

  Skirt and a Smile

  Coach Eric doesn’t doink around. When I called him in a panic after Tanya’s accident, I had a hunch it wouldn’t take long for his big brain to come up with a battle plan. I still had no idea how we were going to get three donkeys from Pennsylvania to Colorado, but at least I had two more months to deal with that mess. Right now, our hot button problem was those three interlocked riddles:

  · How do you prepare in a valley for a race in the mountains?

  · How do you train alongside donkeys, yet stay one step ahead?

  · How could three very different athletes like Mika, Zeke, and me learn to run together as a team?

  Eric cracked the code in one night. “I’ve got a thirty-second solution for all your problems,” he told me the next morning. “And you know what it is too.”

  I did? I was lost…and then it all came rushing back. “Oh, no,” I groaned. “Not that again.”

  “Yup,” Eric said. “You can’t beat a classic.”

  The Thirty-Second Drill. It was the first thing Eric taught me when I met him ten years ago. At the time, we were in a city park in Denver and I was wrapping up my interview with him for Men’s Journal. “Well, everything you’ve said about running is good for some people,” I said, echoing the advice I’d been given over and over by the podiatrists and sports-medicine physicians who’d treated my various injuries. “But guys like me aren’t built for it.”

  Eric exhaled slowly
, a model of Zen forbearance. Here we go again. “Look, your running isn’t hurting you,” he explained. “It’s the way you run. Let’s try something.” Eric had me kick off my shoes, and together we set off on a barefoot jog around the park. “Now here comes the magic,” he said. “When we reach that tree, sprint to the next one.”

  “You mean, like—” I fumbled, oddly confused by those simple instructions until I realized that the last time anyone gave me that command, I was at high school basketball practice forty years ago. From then on, I’d probably cartwheeled more than I’d sprinted, and I can’t cartwheel. Who sprints anymore? Anyone who’s ever ripped a hamstring racing a nine-year-old niece knows there’s only one sensible way to run, and that’s to find your groove and stick to it. Sometimes we go a little faster, often a little slower, but mostly we cruise at whatever pace lets us finish three miles with a comfortable degree of discomfort. Nobody sprints. Talk about a recipe for disaster.

  “Fast as you can,” Eric insisted. “Let ’er rip for about thirty seconds. Then settle back to a jog.”

  Twenty seconds in, I flamed out. I had to stop and walk it off, wheezing like a guy being drowned in a bathtub. I hadn’t sprinted in so long, I’d forgotten how. It was equal parts embarrassing and depressing, but Eric didn’t give me time to mope. As soon as I recovered, we went at it again. And again. And by the fourth or fifth repetition, I noticed a weird sensation, like your hand tingling back to life after you’ve banged your elbow: instead of getting tired, my legs felt looser, stronger, fresher, than when we’d started. The faster I ran, the better I felt. I was straightening my back, driving with my knees, deep-breathing from the gut, and whipping my legs around from the hip.

  “Good, right?” Eric asked. “Feeling bouncy?” Running fast can auto-correct your biomechanics, he explained, while slow leads to sloppy. That’s a big reason I was always hurt; my plodding pace had me balancing too long on each leg, leaving all those tissues and tendons exposed to serious torque as my body weight swayed around. Instead, I should be pop-pop-popping my feet, getting them off the ground as quickly as I could.

  “It doesn’t mean you’ve got to sprint all the time,” Eric said. “But the technique is the same. You’ve got to learn to go fast before you go slow.” The Thirty-Second Drill was kind of genius: it was a workout, biomechanical feedback device, and fitness tracker all in one. And it couldn’t be simpler: first, you warm up with an easy two-mile run. Then you sprint for thirty seconds, and jog lightly to recover. Repeat, alternating sprints and jogs, until you’ve had enough. Don’t worry, you’ll know when; as soon as your legs lose their bounce and you’re struggling to recover between reps, that’s the time to call it a day.

  For the next nine months, Eric used cadence drills and speedwork to prepare me for the fifty-mile Copper Canyon ultramarathon, and it was a game-changer. But once that summer was over, so were my big training challenges. I stopped following a workout schedule, and gradually I regressed back to my slow and comfortable groove. For the next ten years, my speedometer barely quivered. Sprint? C’mon. Nobody sprints.

  * * *

  —

  Eric’s new battle plan, despite the sinister shadow of the Thirty-Second Drill, looked pretty good.

  It was a Four/Two/One system: four days with the donkeys, two days without, one day of rest. Every time we ran with the donkeys, Eric wanted us heading one way: up. All hills, all the time. That way, we’d be building our wind and our leg strength while teaching the donkeys to ignore our gasping. Rather than pretend we weren’t dying, we had to normalize it. Flower needed to get used to the idea that most times, the guy behind her would be blowing steam like the Little Engine That Shouldn’t Get Its Hopes Too High. In Colorado, we’d be at 12,000 feet and fighting for air even when walking, so the donkeys had to learn that wasn’t a signal to stop.

  Non-donkey days were all about overdrive. Months ago, Eric had given me a workout schedule based on lots of short, fast repetitions, but once Zeke joined the team and we’d gotten serious about donkey training, I’d let that slip. Dumb mistake; we’d lost a good opportunity to stay one step ahead of the Gang of Three. But Eric believed we could make it up by adding a burst of speed whenever we ran on our own. The more we pushed the pace, the more we’d lower our resting heart rates and improve our performance at high altitude. It wouldn’t completely acclimate us for the Rockies, but it would approximate the sensation and act as a good boot camp to prepare us for the stress of oxygen debt.

  That sly dog Eric also knew something else about hills: They’re Mother Nature’s best remedy for big egos, second only to donkeys. Hills are the universal equalizer; that’s why even in races, shrewd ultrarunners will hike any terrain that makes them lift their heads. Sure, a runner will beat a hiker to the peak, but not by much—and not for long. Three or four climbs into a 50K, a runner’s legs will be trashed, while the hill hiker still has enough energy on tap to break away on the downhills and flats. Hills are more a test of shrewdness than stamina; you’ve got to have the experience to realize that your best climbing speed isn’t much faster than anyone else’s and the humility to accept it.

  Eric knew that if Mika, Zeke, and I ran a lot of hills together, we’d find that all six of us—men and women, young and old, animal and human—had roughly the same sweet spot. We wouldn’t have to worry about pacing together as a team: the hills would take care of that for us.

  * * *

  —

  Mika and Zeke liked Eric’s game plan. The donkeys freaking loved it.

  The day after Eric laid it out for me, we roped the Gang of Three and set off for our first hill workout. I wasn’t looking forward to Phase 1 of persuading Flower she’s supposed to keep climbing when I’m lagging behind, but as we were heading down the gravel road, I got an idea. I veered right, steering Flower toward the creek. She stopped short at the bank, letting Mika and Matilda catch up. “Let’s take them across here,” I suggested. “I want to try something on the other side.”

  Matilda had never been in this part of the creek before, but it didn’t matter. She plunged straight down the bank, splashing through like a kid kicking puddles. Sherman was quick to follow, which meant this time it was Zeke who found himself dodging a 700-pound meteorite when Flower realized she was being left behind and leaped frantically to follow. The three donkeys scrambled to shore, poking their heads through a thin veil of weeds as they approached this trail they hadn’t seen before. Flower swiveled her head like a radar scanner, ears set on maximum alert, as she sniffed for danger. Her nostrils issued a command:

  Go nuts.

  Flower upshifted from zero to holy-shit in about six steps. The rope whistled through my hands, stopping only when I bolted after her in time to grip the knot at the end. All three donkeys took off like a pack of wildebeests, galloping so crazily that I gave up any hope of dodging branches and just crashed along in the middle of the herd. Sherman and Matilda were galloping hot on Flower’s tail, but I was so close to wiping out that I couldn’t risk a glance back to see how Zeke and Mika were doing.

  “Everyone good?” I hollered.

  “YAH-WHOOOOO!” Zeke howled from somewhere nearby.

  “Yoowooooah!” Mika hollered in the distance. Flower thundered on, zigzagging like a slalom skier along the snaking trail, forcing me to leap wildly over a gully I barely spotted in time. Only when Flower finally slowed down on a muddy uphill did I have a sec to wonder why, in twenty years, I’d never heard Mika wolf-howl before. Come to think of it, how could Mika be that far behind when Matilda’s snout was right beside me? I looked back and saw Mika’s rope but no Mika.

  Crap. That wasn’t a howl; it must have been a scream of pain. I dropped Flower’s rope and sprinted back down the hill, only to find Mika hiking toward me. “Wait, I’ll come to you,” I called. “Is it your ankle?”

  “No, I’m fine,” she said. “I was saying, ‘You go!’ ”

 
Matilda had sprinted out so fast that Mika decided—smartly—to drop the rope rather than risk getting yanked off her feet. Matilda is only half Flower’s size, but she can really turn on the burners. When she makes up her mind, you don’t want to be in her way. “Oh my god, she was so excited,” Mika said. “Sherman and Matilda were jumping and kicking like they were on the playground.”

  That was my plan, although about 50 percent less bananas. When we set off that morning, I knew the sticky part of Eric’s strategy would be pushing the donkeys forward while we were lagging ass behind. Unfortunately, Flower was the key: she was pace leader, so for the operation to succeed, the big skittish baby needed a lightbulb to flash between those furry ears and show her that this was all an awesome game of Keep-Away and the hills were her time to shine. We had to make the climbs irresistible and fun, the way Nancy Sweigart*1 did when she’d goose Bubba the Goat so he’d chase her around the yard. Or like that time we showed Sherman the dirt trail to the horse farm and he suddenly took off like a thoroughbred…

  Dirt. That was it. That was the thumb-in-the-goat’s-butt we were looking for.

  Somehow I’d missed the connection between the way the donkeys ran and where they were running. I’d been so busy bitching to Eric about how aggravating Flower was on the asphalt road leading to the maze, I’d forgotten to mention how giddy she was once we got inside. The secret ingredient we were looking for—the flash of inspiration that would override Flower’s caution and transform her into a hill-running demon—was literally at our feet. I kept thinking we had to jack up our mileage by sticking to smooth, paved roads. But that morning, it finally clicked that when it came to hills, we were better off lost in the woods.