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

by Christopher McDougall

To live with ghosts requires solitude.

Caballo Blanco—the White Horse.

impenetrable Barrancas del Cobre—the Copper Canyons—to live among the Tarahumara, a near-mythical tribe of Stone Age superathletes. 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.

the Tarahumara live in the side of cliffs higher than a hawk’s nest in a land few have ever seen. The Barrancas are a lost world in the most remote wilderness in North America, a sort of a shorebound Bermuda Triangle known for swallowing the misfits and desperadoes who stray inside.

somehow the White Horse had made his way to the depths of the Barrancas. And there, it’s said, he was adopted by the Tarahumara as a friend and kindred spirit; a ghost among ghosts.

A guy like that, a wanderer who’d go anywhere but fit in nowhere, must live inside his own head and rarely hear his own voice.

Tao Te Ching—“The best runner leaves no tracks”—wasn’t

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Next time you line up for a Turkey Trot, look at the runners on your right and left: statistically, only one of you will be back for the Jingle Bell Jog.

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“Each footfall hits one of their legs with a force equal to more than twice their body weight.

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.

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.

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

Tinkering with a new gait can suddenly load the heel and Achilles with unaccustomed stress and bring on a fresh batch of injuries.

“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 only ones who knew the answers—the only ones who lived the answers—weren’t talking.

a Tarahumara champion once ran 435 miles, the equivalent of setting out for a jog in New York City and not stopping till you were closing in on Detroit.

The Tarahumara are so mysterious, in fact, they even go by an alias. Their real name is Rarámuri—the Running People. They were dubbed “Tarahumara” by conquistadores who didn’t understand the tribal tongue.

When it comes to marathoning, the Tarahumara prefer more of a Mardi Gras approach. In terms of diet, lifestyle, and belly fire, they’re a track coach’s nightmare. They drink like New Year’s Eve is a weekly event, tossing back enough corn beer in a year to spend every third day of their adult lives either buzzed or recovering. Unlike Lance, the Tarahumara don’t replenish their bodies with electrolyte-rich sports drinks. They don’t rebuild between workouts with protein bars; in fact, they barely eat any protein at all, living on little more than ground corn spiced up by their favorite delicacy, barbecued mouse. Come race day, the Tarahumara don’t train or taper. They don’t stretch or warm up. They just stroll to the starting line, laughing and bantering … then go like hell for the next forty-eight hours.

Arnulfo Quimare was the greatest living Tarahumara runner,

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The Tarahumara can’t be seen unless they want to be.’ ”

the singers challenged the drug lords’ sense of their own importance, and so were marked for death.

We emerged from the woods to find an ocean of empty space ahead—a crack in the earth so vast that the far side could be in a different time zone. Down below, it looked like a world-ending explosion frozen in stone, as if an angry god had been in the midst of destroying the planet, then changed his mind in mid-apocalypse. I was staring at twenty thousand square miles of wilderness, randomly slashed into twisting gorges deeper and wider than the Grand Canyon.

Tarahumara etiquette. Before approaching a Tarahumara cave, you have to take a seat on the ground a few dozen yards away and wait. You then look off in the opposite direction for a while, as if you’d just happened to be wandering by with nothing better to do. If someone appears and invites you into the cave, great. If not, you get up and go. You do not go walking right up to the entrance, the way Salvador and I had. The Tarahumara like to be visible only if they decide to be; laying eyes on them without invitation was like barging in on someone naked in the bathroom.

He never asked who we were or why we were there; it seemed like he wanted to figure it out for himself.

When it comes to the rest of the planet, the Tarahumara are living contradictions: they shun outsiders, but are fascinated by the outside world.

A Tarahumara man once turned up in Siberia; he’d somehow strayed onto a tramp steamer and vagabonded his way across the Russian steppes before being picked up and shipped back to Mexico. In 1983, a Tarahumara woman in her swirling native skirts was discovered wandering the streets of a town in Kansas; she spent the next twelve years in an insane asylum before a social worker finally realized she was speaking a lost language, not gibberish.

Tarahumara men couldn’t even muster the nerve to get romantic with their own wives if they didn’t drown their bashfulness in home brew.

To the Tarahumara, asking direct questions is a show of force, a demand for a possession inside their head. They certainly wouldn’t abruptly open up and spill their secrets to a stranger; strangers were the reason the Tarahumara were hidden down here in the first place.

Jesuit missionaries showed up with Bibles in their hands and influenza in their lungs, promising eternal life but spreading instant death.

In the Tarahumara tongue, humans come in only two forms: there are Rarámuri, who run from trouble, and chabochis, who cause it.

Even in death, the Tarahumara are fanatics about elusiveness.

Once the dead soul has erased all signs of its earthbound existence, it can venture on to the afterlife.

Even in death, the elders reminded the boys, they’re still the Running People.

“You’re alive because your father can run down a deer. He’s alive because his grandfather could outrun an Apache war pony.

Pursuing them into the maze meant running the risk of never finding a way back out again.

What was hell for pursuers, they realized, couldn’t be a whole lot nicer for the pursued. Whatever happened to the fugitives in there—starvation, jaguar attack, dementia, a life sentence of voluntary solitary confinement—was probably more ghastly than anything the Mexican court system would have meted out. So, often as not, the federales would rein in their horses and allow any bandit who reached the canyons to try his luck in the prison of his own making.

pinole, the Tarahumara corn gruel.

korima, the cornerstone of Tarahumara culture. Korima sounds like karma and functions the same way, except in the here and now. It’s your obligation to share whatever you can spare, instantly and with no expectations: once the gift leaves your hand, it was never yours to begin with. 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.

“Many of the best runners were from Yerbabuena,” Ángel said. “They had a very good trail which would let them cover a lot of distance in a day, much farther than you could get to from here.” Unfortunately, the trail was so good that the Mexican government eventually decided to slick it with asphalt and turn it into a road. Trucks began showing up in Yerbabuena, and in them, foods the Tarahumara had rarely eaten—soda, chocolate, rice, sugar, butter, flour. The people of Yerbabuena developed a taste for starch and treats, but they needed money to buy them, so instead of working their own fields, they began hitching rides to Guachochi, where they worked as dishwashers and day laborers, or selling junk crafts at the train station in Divisadero.

“They stand out to-day as an interesting relic of a time long gone by; as a representative of one of the most important stages in the development of the human race; as one of those wonderful primitive tribes that were the founders and makers of the history of mankind.”

rarájipari, the Tarahumara running game.

rarájipari was the heart and soul of Tarahumara culture, Ángel explained; everything that made the Tarahumara unique was on display during the heat of a rarájipari.

“We say the rarájipari is the game of life,” Ángel said. “You never know how hard it will be. You never know when it will end. You can’t control it. You can only adjust.”

Tarahumara virtues—strength, patience, cooperation, dedication, and persistence.

no one really seemed to care who won; there was no arguing, no showboating, and, most noticeably, no coaching. Ángel and the schoolteacher were watching happily and with intense interest, but not yelling advice. They weren’t even cheering. The kids accelerated when they felt frisky, downshifted when they didn’t, and caught an occasional breather under a shady tree when they overdid it and started sucking wind.

“Iskiate.”

iskiate is otherwise known as chia fresca—“chilly chia.” 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 on chia during their epic runs from Arizona to the Pacific Ocean. The Mexican state of Chiapas is actually named after the seed; it used to rank right up there with corn and beans as a cash crop. Despite its liquid-gold status, chia is ridiculously easy to grow;