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Up to eight out of every ten runners are hurt every year.
“Each footfall hits one of their legs with a force equal to more than twice their body weight.
“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.”
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.
Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone. —KEN CHLOUBER, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100
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.
One Leadville legend is Marshall Ulrich, an affable dog-food tycoon who perked up his times by having his toenails surgically removed. “They kept falling off anyway,” Marshall said.
Take this equation: how come nearly all the women finish Leadville and fewer than half the men do? Every year, more than 90 percent of the female runners come home with a buckle, while 50 percent of the men come up with an excuse. Not even Ken Chlouber can explain the sky-high female finishing rate, but he can damn well exploit it: “All my pacers are women,” Chlouber says. “They get the job done.”
Kasparov had deliberately sacrificed his most powerful piece in exchange for an even more powerful psychological advantage. He was deadliest when swashbuckling, when he was chased into a corner and had to slash, scramble, and improvise his way out. Anatoly Karpov, his by-the-book opponent, was too conservative to pressure Kasparov early in the game, so Kasparov put the pressure on himself with a Queen’s Gambit—and won.
And those are the runners who are really keeping it together. Hallucinations are no strangers to the rest; one ultrarunner kept screaming and leaping into the woods whenever he saw a flashlight, convinced it was an oncoming train. One runner enjoyed the company of a smokin’ young hottie in a silver bikini who Rollerbladed by his side for miles across Death Valley until, to his regret, she dissolved into heat shimmers.
Vigil’s notion of character wasn’t toughness. It was compassion. Kindness. Love. That’s right: love.
And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle—behold, the Running Man.
And like everything else we love—everything we sentimentally call our “passions” and “desires”—it’s really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We’re all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.
“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.
That was pure Zatopek, though; races for him were like a pub crawl. He loved competing so much that instead of tapering and peaking, he jumped into as many meets as he could find. During a manic stretch in the late ’40s, Zatopek raced nearly every other week for three years and never lost, going 69-0. Even on a schedule like that, he still averaged up to 165 miles a week in training.
Yes! Love of life! Exactly! That’s what got Vigil’s heart thumping when he saw Juan and Martimano scramble happy-go-luckily up that dirt hill. He’d found his Natural Born Runner.
Lumholtz meant when he called the Tarahumara “the founders and makers of the history of mankind.” 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.
Maybe the ancient Hindus were better crystal-ball-gazers than Hollywood when they predicted the world would end not with a bang but with a big old yawn.
“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.”
“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.”
“A lot of foot and knee injuries that are currently plaguing us are actually caused by people running with shoes that actually make our feet weak, cause us to over-pronate, give us knee problems. Until 1972, when the modern athletic shoe was invented by Nike, people ran in very thin-soled shoes, had strong feet, and had much lower incidence of knee injuries.”
“Since the first real studies were done in the late ’70’s, Achilles complaints have actually increased by about 10 percent, while plantar fasciitis has remained the same,”
In a 2008 research paper for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr. Craig Richards, a researcher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, revealed that there are no evidence-based studies—not one—that demonstrate that running shoes make you less prone to injury.
RUNNERS wearing top-of-the-line shoes are 123 percent more likely to get injured than runners in cheap shoes, according to a study led by Bernard Marti, M.D.,
So how do foot control and a flapping old sole add up to injury-free legs? Because of one magic ingredient: fear. Contrary to what pillowy-sounding names like the Adidas MegaBounce would have you believe, all that cushioning does nothing to reduce impact. Logically that should be obvious—the impact on your legs from running can be up to twelve times your body weight, so it’s preposterous to believe a half inch of rubber is going to make a bit of difference against, in my case, 2,760 pounds of earthbound beef. You can cover an egg with an oven mitt before rapping it with a hammer, but that egg
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Runners do the same thing, Robbins and Waked found: just the way your arms automatically fly up when you slip on ice, your legs and feet instinctively come down hard when they sense something squishy underfoot. When you run in cushioned shoes, your feet are pushing through the soles in search of a hard, stable platform.
Handy Hammer Syndrome, in which the hammer in your hand makes everything look like a nail.
And if I were going to design a long-distance running machine, Dr. Bramble thought, that’s exactly what I’d load it with—lots of rubber bands to maximize endurance. Running is really just jumping, springing from one foot to another. Tendons are irrelevant to walking, but great for energy-efficient jumping. So forget speed; maybe we were born to be the world’s greatest marathoners.
“Your head works with your arms to keep you from twisting and swaying in midstride,” Dr. Lieberman said. The arms, meanwhile, also work as a counterbalance to keep the head aligned. “That’s how bipeds solved the problem of how to stabilize a head with a movable neck. It’s yet another feature of human evolution that only makes sense in terms of running.”
Once temperatures climb above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, a few extra pounds of body weight make a huge difference—so much so that to maintain heat balance, a 160-pound runner would lose nearly three minutes per mile in a marathon against a one hundred-pound runner. In a two-hour pursuit of a deer, the Running Men would leave the Neanderthal competition more than ten miles behind.
Louis found out only in his second, third, and fourth persistence hunts how lucky he’d gotten in the first; that debut kudu dropped after only two hours, but every one after that kept the Bushmen on the run for three to five hours (neatly corresponding, one might note, to how long it takes most people to run our latter-day version of prehistoric hunting, the marathon. Recreation has its reasons).
Know why people run marathons? he told Dr. Bramble. Because running is rooted in our collective imagination, and our imagination is rooted in running. Language, art, science; space shuttles, Starry Night, intravascular surgery; they all had their roots in our ability to run. Running was the superpower that made us human—which means it’s a superpower all humans possess.
“You’re right,” Bramble said. “It can’t be. It’s sixty-four.” “Are you serious? That’s a—” I scribbled out the math. “That’s a forty-five-year difference. You’re saying teenagers can’t beat guys three times their age?” “Isn’t that amazing?” Bramble agreed. “Name any other field of athletic endeavor where sixty-four-year-olds are competing with nineteen-year-olds. Swimming? Boxing? Not even close.
we’re not only really good at endurance running, we’re really good at it for a remarkably long time. We’re a machine built to run—and the machine never wears out.”
Men and women are basically the same size, at least compared with other primates: male gorillas and orangutans weigh twice as much as their better halves; male chimps are a good one-third bigger than females; but between the average human him and the average human her, the difference in bulk is only a slim 15 percent. As we evolved, we shucked our beef and became more sinuous, more cooperative … essentially, more female.
“You start with Easy, because if that’s all you get, that ain’t 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, work on making it Smooooth. You won’t have to worry about the last one—get those three, and you’ll be fast.”
