false 6289283 0307266303 9780307266309 1408 646 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255657150m/6289283.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6289283.Born_to_Run_A_Hidden_Tribe_Superathletes_and_the_Greatest_Race_the_World_Has_Never_Seen 133538 Christopher McDougall 1439 658 4 5 false Sun Oct 11 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Wed Sep 30 13:24:00 -0700 2009 Sun Oct 11 16:09:49 -0700 2009
Born to Run begins as an adventure story. While trying to figure out how to get his own foot to stop hurting, he saw an article about a tribe of Mexican Indians called the Tarahumara. These people were said to be able to run for days at a time through unforgiving terrain wearing nothing more on their feet than sandals made from thin strips of tire rubber. So McDougall set out to find these mysterious people, but doing so was not easy. The Copper Canyons where they live are extremely difficult to get to, and the trip is made even more hazardous by having to pass through drug farming country on the way.

In addition to being a sometimes nail-biting tale about the author's quest to find the Tarahumara, Born to Run also weaves in the fascinating history of the sport of ultra-running. Ultra-marathons are races consisting of any distance longer than a marathon. McDougall discusses how this crazy sport first came into being, highlighting along the way the stories of the participants who have slowly begun to make it famous.

McDougall narrates this history in real time, resulting in descriptions of several races that were so gripping I couldn't put the book down. One of these races was the Leadville Trail 100, a 100-mile race at 11,000 feet in which the Tarahumara faced off against an ultra-running prodigy named Ann Trason.

As McDougall weaves together the story of ultra-running's past with his own quest to find the Tarahumara and become a better runner, he also relays a fascinating tale about scientific discoveries into our evolutionary past suggesting that it was our ability to run long distances without getting winded, and thus get all that extra protein from the bounding antelope we were able to outlast, that gave us the evolutionary edge needed to grow our huge brains. These sections also point out that we did not evolve to run on cushions with arch support, and that expensive running shoes actually make runners more prone to injury than running in the bare feet nature so elegantly designed for us.

The book concludes with the tale of a joint venture between McDougall and a character named Caballo Blanco, a gringo who had befriended the Tarahumara and made the Copper Canyons his home. Though the Tarahumara had wowed people at Leadville, Caballo longed to see them race against America's ultra-running best on their own turf. So McDougall helped him get together a half-dozen racers and they made the dangerous trek down into the canyons. The resulting race and the sportsmanship described therein is very moving, and I finished this odd combination of memoir, sports history, adventure tale and evolutionary science with damp eyes.
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