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How was that possible? No woman ranked among the top fifty in the world in the mile (the female world record for the mile, 4:12, was achieved a century ago by men and rather routinely now by high school boys). A woman might sneak into the top twenty in a marathon (in 2003, Paula Radcliffe’s world-best 2:15:25 was just ten minutes off Paul Tergat’s 2:04:55 men’s record). But in ultras, women were taking home the hardware. Why, Vigil wondered, did the gap between male and female champions get smaller as the race got longer— shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Ultrarunning seemed to be an alternative universe where none of planet Earth’s rules applied: women were stronger than men; old men were stronger than youngsters; Stone Age guys in sandals were stronger than everybody. And the mileage! The sheer stress on their legs was off the charts. Running one hundred miles a week was supposed to be a straight shot to a stress injury, yet the ultrafreaks were doing one hundred miles in a day.
Last year, it took Victoriano seven hours and twelve minutes to get this far; Ann had done it in less than six. “No woman has ever led at this point in the race before,”
In all her years of running ultras and pacing them for her dad, it was the first time Kitty had ever heard one runner taunt another.
Once you jump ahead, you’re vulnerable; you surrender all element of surprise, and become a prisoner of your own pace. Even middle-school milers know that the smart tactic is to sit on the leader’s shoulder, go only as fast as you have to, then jam ’er into gear and blow past on the bell lap.
Classic example: Steve Prefontaine. Pre came out too quickly twice in the same race in the ’72 Olympics; both times, he was chased down. By the home stretch, Pre had nothing left and faded out of the medals to fourth. That historic defeat pounded home the lesson: nobody gives up the pursuit position if they don’t have to. Not unless you’re foolish, or reckless—or Garry Kasparov.
That kind of freewheeling self-invention is where big breakthroughs come from, as Vigil knew (and Columbus, the Beatles, and Bill Gates would happily agree).
Glee and determination are usually antagonistic emotions, yet the Tarahumara were brimming with both at once, as if running to the death made them feel more alive.
Vigil had been furiously taking mental notes (Look how they point their toes down, not up, like gymnasts doing the floor exercise. And their backs! They could carry water buckets on their heads without spilling a drop! How many years have I been telling my kids to straighten up and run from the gut like that?). But it was the smiles that really jolted him. That’s it! Vigil thought, ecstatic. I found it!
He could tell you exactly how much of a head start Kenyan teenagers had over Americans (eighteen thousand miles run in training). He’d discovered why those Russian sprinters were leaping off ladders (besides strengthening lateral muscles, the trauma teaches nerves to fire more rapidly, which decreases the odds of training injuries). He’d parsed the secret of the Peruvian peasant diet (high altitude has a curious effect on metabolism),
He’d figured out the body, so now it was on to the brain. Specifically: How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors’ backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably
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That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art,
Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles i...
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But the American approach—ugh. Rotten at its core. It was too artificial and grabby, Vigil believed, too much about getting stuff and getting it now: medals, Nike deals, a cute butt. It wasn’t art; it was business, a hard-nosed quid pro quo. No wonder so many people hated running; if you thought it was only a means to an end—an investment in becoming faster, skinnier, richer—then why stick with it if you weren’t getting enough quo for your quid?
The guys in the ’70s didn’t know enough to worry about “pronation” and “supination”; that fancy running-store jargon hadn’t even been invented yet.
“There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.
but Zatopek just laughed along. “I’m not talented enough to run and smile at the same time,”
“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.
“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
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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.
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.
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.
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.)
“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 be...
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After their triumph in 1994, the Tarahumara would never return to Leadville.
One man followed them. He was never seen in Leadville again either. It was the Tarahumara’s strange new friend, Shaggy—soon to be known as Caballo Blanco, lone wanderer of the High Sierras.
“The Rarámuri have no money, but nobody is poor,”
“Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked,”
He started to jog, more slowly this time, and I tried to copy everything he did. My arms floated until my hands were rib-high; my stride chopped down to pitty-pat steps; my back straightened so much I could almost hear the vertebrae creaking.
“Lesson two,” Caballo called. “Think Easy, Light, Smooth, and Fast. You start with easy, because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. Then work on light. Make it effortless, like you don’t give a shit how high the hill is or how far you’ve got to go. When you’ve practiced that so long that you forget you’re practicing, you work on making it smooooooth. You won’t have to worry about the last one—you get those three, and you’ll be fast.”
Like Karl Meltzer, who rocked “Strangelove” through his iPod while winning the Hardrock 100 three times in a row; and the “Dirt Diva,” Catra Corbett, a beautiful and kaleidoscopically-tattooed Goth chick who once, just for fun, ran all 211 miles of the John Muir trail across Yosemite National Park and then turned around and ran all the way back; and Tony “Naked Guy” Krupicka, who rarely wore more than skimpy shorts and spent a year sleeping in a friend’s closet while training to win the Leadville 100;
“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”
In 2005, he used his obsessive knowledge to blast the record at Leadville—he finished in a stunning 15:42, nearly two hours faster than the fastest Tarahumara ever had.
‘When you run on the earth and run with the earth, you can run forever.’ ”
His nutrition strategy for an Olympic marathon hopeful was this: “Eat as though you were a poor person.”
At the 2004 Athens Games, Deena outlasted the world-record holder, Paula Radcliffe, to win the bronze, the first Olympic medal for an American marathoner in twenty years.
Running seemed to be the only sensual pleasure in his life, and as such, he savored it less like a workout and more like a gourmet
Strictly by accident, Scott stumbled upon the most advanced weapon in the ultrarunner’s arsenal: instead of cringing from fatigue, you embrace it.
Lisa Smith-Batchen, the amazingly sunny and pixie-tailed ultrarunner from Idaho who trained through blizzards to win a six-day race in the Sahara, talks about exhaustion as if it’s a playful pet. “I love the Beast,” she says. “I actually look forward to the Beast showing up, because every time he does, I handle him better. I get him more under control.”
You can’t hate the Beast and expect to beat it; the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.
“Anybody who has seen him running fast on mountainous terrain in the last miles of a hundred-miler will be a changed person,” an awestruck trail runner declared on Letsrun.com,
Scott was a hero for a very different reason among back-of-the-packers too slow to see him in action. After winning a hundred-mile race, Scott would be desperate for a hot shower and cool sheets. But instead of leaving, he’d wrap himself in a sleeping bag and stand vigil by the finish line. When day broke the next morning, Scott would still be there, cheering hoarsely, letting that last, persistent runner know he wasn’t alone.
Lisa Smith-Batchen is the only American to ever win the six-day Marathon of the Sands across the Sahara, but even she had to be pulled from Badwater in 1999 and given an emergency IV to stop her dessicated kidneys from shutting down.
For ten minutes, Scott lay like a corpse. Then he got up and did it, shattering the Badwater record with a time of 24:36. King of the trails, king of the road. That 2005 doubleheader was one of the greatest performances in ultraracing history, and it couldn’t have come at a better moment: just when Scott was becoming the greatest star in ultrarunning, ultrarunning was getting sexy. There was Dean Karnazes, shucking his shirt for magazine covers and telling David Letterman how he ordered pizzas on his cell phone in the middle of a 250-mile run.
But like every champion, he was up against the Curse of Ali: he could beat everyone alive and still lose to guys who were dead (or at least, long retired).
He seemed to be the Bruce Wayne of barefoot running, the wealthy heir of a California amusement-park fortune who devoted himself to battling the worst crime ever committed against the human foot: the invention of the running shoe. Barefoot Ted believed we could abolish foot injuries by throwing away our Nikes, and he was willing to prove it on himself: he ran the Los Angeles and Santa Clarita marathons in his bare feet and finished fast enough to qualify for the elite Boston Marathon.
