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

by Christopher McDougall

That was an old Marshall Ulrich trick: it made it harder for the guy in the lead to glance back and see you sneak up from behind.

There was no way I’d get down before sunset, so this time, I’d be stumbling back in the dark. I dropped my head and started trudging. When I looked up again, Tarahumara kids were all around me. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. The kids were still there. I was so glad they weren’t a hallucination, I was almost weepy. Where they’d come from and why they’d chosen to tag along with me, I had no idea. Together, we made our way higher and higher up the hill.

What would Caballo do? I wondered. He was always getting himself into hopeless predicaments out here in the canyons, and he always found a way to run his way out. He’d start with easy, I told myself. Because if that’s all you get, that’s not so bad. Then he’d work on light. He’d make it effortless, like he didn’t care how high the hill is or how far he had got to go—

“So much for compassion,” I muttered to myself. “I give something away, and what do I get? Screwed.”

Something odd began to happen: as the runners got slower, the cheers got wilder. Every time a racer struggled across the finish—Luis and Porfilio, Eric and Barefoot Ted—they immediately turned around and began calling home the runners still out there.

“I’ve been there, man. I’ve been there a lot. It takes more guts than going fast.”

But that would all come later. For now, Caballo was content to just sit alone under a tree, smiling and sipping a beer, watching his dream play out before his eyes.

That head of his has been occupied with contemporary society’s insoluble problems for so long, and he is still battling on with his good-heartedness and boundless energy. His efforts have not been in vain, but he will probably not live to see them come to fruition.

Mike Hickman was a sensitive kid who hated hurting people, but that didn’t stop him from getting really good at it.

Mike went off to Humboldt State to study Eastern religions and Native American history. To pay tuition, he began fighting in backroom smokers, billing himself as the Gypsy Cowboy.

“I was inspired by love,

He’d just smashed a man’s face on national TV, and why? To be great in someone else’s eyes? To be a performer whose achievements were only measured by someone else’s affection? He wasn’t stupid; he could connect the dots between the nervous boy with the Great Santini dad and the lonely, love-hungry drifter he’d become. Was he a great fighter, in other words, or just a needy one?

Poor and free was the way he’d chosen to live, but was it the way he wanted to die?

Only lucky rebels go out in a blaze of glory,