Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen

by Christopher McDougall

The Tarahumara (pronounced Spanish-style by swallowing the “h”: Tara-oo-mara) may be the healthiest and most serene people on earth, and the greatest runners of all time.

When it comes to ultradistances, nothing can beat a Tarahumara runner—not a racehorse, not a cheetah, not an Olympic marathoner.

but he also co-wrote The Running Athlete, the definitive radiographic analysis of every conceivable running injury.

A report by the American Association of Orthopedic Surgeons concluded that

distance running is “an outrageous threat to the integrity of the knee.”

“Know what I’d recommend?” Dr. Torg concluded. “Buy a bike.”

There’s something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we’re scared, we run when we’re ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.

And when things look worst, we run the most. Three times, America has seen distance-running skyrocket, and it’s always in the midst of a national crisis.

In terms of stress relief and sensual pleasure, running is what you have in your life before you have sex.

I didn’t love running, but I wanted to.

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up,” Bannister said. “It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle— when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

The Tarahumara geniuses had even branched into economics, creating a one-of-a-kind financial system based on booze and random acts of kindness: instead of money, they traded favors and big tubs of corn beer.

Perhaps it’s because the Tarahumara are industrious and inhumanly honest; one researcher went as far as to speculate that after so many generations of truthfulness, the Tarahumara brain was actually chemically incapable of forming lies.

the only thing that rivaled their superhuman serenity, it seemed, was their superhuman tolerance for pain and lechuguilla, a horrible homemade tequila brewed from rattlesnake corpses and cactus sap.

“Probably not since the days of the ancient Spartans has a people achieved such a high state of physical conditioning,” Dr. Dale Groom concluded when he published his findings in the American Heart Journal.

Their real name is Rarámuri—the Running

the guys working the hardest were having the most fun. …

Was it a coincidence that the world’s most enlightened people were also the world’s most amazing runners? Seekers

The heart of the Andes or the crests of the Himalayas contain no more sublime scenery than the wild, unknown fastnesses of the Sierra Madres of Mexico”—before

tell, was their fame, good looks, and talent; the singers challenged the drug lords’ sense of their own importance, and so were marked for death.

Every time he moved, the muscles in his legs shifted and re-formed like molten metal.

The last time the Tarahumara had been open to the

outside world, the outside world had put them in chains and mounted their severed heads on nine-foot poles.

Spanish silver hunters had staked their claim to Tarahumara land—and Tarahumara labor—by decapi...

It also led to a meat cleaver of a vocabulary when it comes to describing people. In the Tarahumara tongue, humans come in only two forms: there are Rarámuri, who run from trouble, and chabochis, who cause it. It’s a harsh view of the world, but with six bodies a week tumbling into their canyons, it’s hard to say they’re wrong.

The result: Black Jack and Old Blood and Guts could whip the Germans in two world wars, but surrendered to the Copper Canyons.

No matter what kind of fancy hiking duds you’ve got on, you’re guaranteed to feel underdressed among the Tarahumara.

The Tarahumara have no monetary system, so korima is how they do business: their economy is based on trading favors and the occasional cauldron of corn beer.

Marcelino’s running was so amazing, it was hard to take it all in at once. His feet were jitterbugging like crazy between the rocks, but everything above his legs was tranquil, almost immobile. Seeing him from the waist up, you’d think he was gliding along on skates. With his chin high and his black hair streaming off his forehead,

his legs scissoring in a surprisingly short, mincing stride that somehow still looked smooth, not choppy.

Months later, I’d learn that iskiate is otherwise known as chia fresca— “chillychia.” It’s brewed up by dissolving chia seeds in water with a little sugar and a squirt of lime. In terms of nutritional content, a tablespoon of chia is like a smoothie made from salmon,

spinach, and human growth hormone. As tiny as those seeds are, they’re superpacked with omega-3s, omega-6s, protein, calcium, iron, zinc, fiber, and antioxidants. If you had to pick just one desert-island food, you couldn’t do much better than chia, at least if you were interested in building muscle, lowering cholesterol, and reducing your risk of heart disease;

after a few months on the chia diet, you could probably swim home.Chia was once so treasured, the Aztecs used to deliver it to their king in homage. Aztec runners used to chomp chia seeds as they went into battle, and the Hopis fueled themselves...

Despite its liquid-gold status, chia is ridiculously easy to grow; if you own a Chia Pet, in fact, you’re only a few steps away from your own batch of devil drink.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The first nonTarahumara 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.

Ann had run track in high school, but got sick to death of “hamstering” around and around an artificial oval,

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.

What could be more sensual than paying exquisite attention to your own body? Sensual counted as romantic, right?

With Olympic running? As a sport, most track coaches ranked ultras somewhere between competitive eating and recreational S&M.