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

by Christopher McDougall

So instead of a marathon, Ken created a monster. To get a sense of what he came up with, try running the Boston Marathon two times in a row with a sock stuffed in your mouth and then hike to the top of Pikes Peak. Done? Great. Now do it all again, this time with your eyes closed. That’s pretty much what the Leadville Trail 100 boils down to: nearly four full marathons, half of them in the dark, with twin twenty-six-hundred-foot climbs smack in the middle. Leadville’s starting line is twice as high as the altitude where planes pressurize their cabins, and from there you only go up. “The hospital does make a lot of money off us,” Ken Chlouber happily agrees today, twenty-five years after the inaugural race and his showdown with Doc Woodward. “It’s the only weekend when all the beds in the hotels and the emergency room are full at the same time.”

To this day, Dr. Hartmann believes that the best injury-prevention advice he’s ever heard came from a coach who advocated “running barefoot on dewy grass three times a week.”

Bowerman’s deftest move was advocating a new style of running that was only possible in his new style of shoe. The Cortez allowed people to run in a way no human safely could before: by landing on their bony heels. Before the invention of a cushioned shoe, runners through the ages had identical form: Jesse Owens, Roger Bannister, Frank Shorter, and even Emil Zatopek all ran with backs straight, knees bent, feet scratching back under their hips. They had no choice: the only shock absorption came from the compression of their legs and their thick pad of midfoot fat. Fred Wilt verified as much in 1959 in his classic track text, How They Train, which detailed the techniques of more than eighty of the world’s top runners. “The forward foot moves toward the track in a downward, backward, ‘stroking’ motion (not punching or pounding) and the outer edge of the ball of the foot makes first contact with the track,” Wilt writes. “Running progression results from these forces pushing behind the center of gravity of the body.…”

Lieberman kept looking, and found an even more telling comparison: the top galloping speed for most horses is 7.7 meters a second. They can hold that pace for about ten minutes, then have to slow to 5.8 meters a second. But an elite marathoner can jog for hours at 6 meters a second. The horse will erupt away from the starting line, as Dennis Poolheco had discovered in the Man Against Horse Race, but with enough patience and distance, you can slowly close the gap. You don’t even have to go fast, Lieberman realized. All you have to do is keep the animal in sight, and within ten minutes, you’re reeling him in.