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July 7 - September 12, 2021
We wouldn’t be alive without love; we wouldn’t have survived without running; maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.
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.
the true cataclysm may already be creeping up right under our eyes: because of rampant obesity, one in three children born in the United States is at risk of diabetes—meaning, we could be the first generation of Americans to outlive our own children.
Back home in the Barrancas, the shamans protect the iskiate and pinole from witchcraft, and combat any spells in the runner’s hips and knees and butts by massaging them with smooth stones and mashed medicinal herbs.
They’re not gods, he realized. They’re just guys. And like every guy, the thing they loved most could bring them the most misery and confusion.
“Sometimes,” she said, “it takes a woman to bring out the best in a man.”
Tarahumara didn’t know what was being said, but they got the message. Faced with anger and hostility, the world’s greatest underground athletes reacted as they always had; they headed back home to their canyons, fading like a dream and taking their secrets with them. 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.
And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were some kind of solution.
The choice was clear; I could be a pest and piss him off, or I could back off and hear some great stories.
“The Rarámuri have no money, but nobody is poor,”
“Suffering is humbling.
Caballo has spent so many years navigating the trails, he’s even nicknamed the stones beneath his feet: some are ayudantes, the helpers which let you spring forward with power; others are “tricksters,” which look like ayudantes but roll treacherously at takeoff; and some are chingoncitos, little bastards just dying to lay you out.
“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.”
Karl Meltzer,
Catra Corbett,
Tony “Naked Guy” Krupicka,
Fabulous Flying Skaggs Brothers, Eric and Kyle,
It wasn’t just the racing they loved; it was the thrill of exploring the brave new world of their own bodies.
Scott Jurek
“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.”
Matt Carpenter,
Victoriano and Juan had run like hunters, the way they’d been taught: just fast enough to capture their quarry and no faster.
what if he set up a race the Tarahumara way? It would be like an old-time guitar picker’s battle—a week of sparring, trading secrets, studying each other’s style and techniques. On the last day, all the runners would face off in a 50-mile clash of champions. It was a great idea—and a total joke, of course. No elite runner would take the risk; it wasn’t just career suicide, it was suicide suicide. Just to get to the starting line, they’d have to slip past bandits, hike through the badlands, keep an eagle eye on every sip of water and every bite of food. If they got hurt, they were dead; not
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Scott Jurek.”
Dean Karnazes
Pam Reed
the greatest American ultrarunner of them all was virtually invisible. He seemed to be a pure racing animal, which explained two of his other peculiar habits: at the start of every race, he’d let out a bloodcurdling shriek, and after he won, he’d roll in the dirt like a hyperactive hound. Then he’d get up, brush himself off, and vanish back to Seattle until it was time for his war cry to echo through the dark again.
‘When you run on the earth and run with the earth, you can run forever.’ ”
Arnulfo Quimare.”
I still had an after-image on my retina of the teenage Human Torch surging over that dirt trail as fast as a flame along a fuse.
I watched him go. There was something terribly sad, yet terribly uplifting, about watching this prophet of the ancient art of distance running turning his back on everything except his dream, and heading back down to “the best place in the world to run.” Alone.
in ultrarunning, all roads lead to Don Allison in Weymouth, Massachusetts.
Deena Kastor (then Drossin)
His nutrition strategy for an Olympic marathon hopeful was this: “Eat as though you were a poor person.”
train like the Tarahumara. That meant living lean and building her soul as much as her strength.
Coach Vigil believed you had to become a strong person before you could become a strong runner.
No matter how psyched you might have been about the race, consequently, you’d have to think twice about putting your life in the hands of a mysterious loner with a fake name whose closest friends lived in caves and ate mice and still considered him the iffy one.
To check e-mail, Caballo had to run more than thirty miles over a mountain and wade through a river to the tiny town of Urique, where he’d cajoled a schoolteacher into letting him use the school’s creaking PC and its single dial-up line.
EPHRAIM ROMESBERG
So all that misery was leading somewhere after all,
it had quietly bloomed into an ability to push harder and harder as things looked worse and worse.
instead of cringing from fatigue, you embrace it. You refuse to let it go. You get to know it so well, you’re not afraid of it anymore.
Lisa Smith-Batchen,
“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.”
the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.
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.
Death Valley is the perfect flesh-grilling device, the Foreman Grill in Mother Nature’s cupboard. It’s a big, shimmering sea of salt ringed by mountains that bottle up the heat and force it right back down on your skull. The average air temperature hovers around 125 degrees, but once the sun rises and begins broiling the desert floor, the ground beneath Scott’s feet would hit a nice, toasty 200 degrees—exactly the temperature you need to slow roast a prime rib. Plus, the air is so dry that by the time you feel thirsty, you could be as good as dead; sweat is sucked so quickly from your body,
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“This is the landscape of catastrophe,” one Death Valley chronicler wrote.
Dr. Ben Jones
“Badwater Ben”
