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

by Christopher McDougall

We couldn’t even tell them the truth; if they believed us, we were dead. If Mexico’s drug gangs hated anything as much as cops, it was singers and reporters. Not singers in any slang sense of snitches or stool pigeons; they hated real, guitar-strumming, love-song-singing crooners. Fifteen singers were executed by drug gangs in just eighteen months, including the beautiful Zayda Peña, the twenty-eight-year-old lead singer of Zayda y Los Culpables, who was gunned down after a concert; she survived, but the hit team tracked her to the hospital and blasted her to death while she was recovering from surgery.

In the Tarahumara tongue, humans come in only two forms: there are Rarámuri, who run from trouble, and chabochis, who cause it. It’s a harsh view of the world, but with six bodies a week tumbling into their canyons, it’s hard to say they’re wrong.

THE BIG, fat flaw in Rick Fisher’s plan was the fact that the Leadville race happens to be held in Leadville. Hunkered in a valley two miles up in the Colorado Rockies, Leadville is the highest city in North America and, many days, the coldest (the fire company couldn’t ring its bell come winter, afraid it would shatter).

“You cannot let people run a hundred miles at this altitude,” railed Dr. Robert Woodward. He was so pissed off he had a finger in Ken’s face, which didn’t bode well for his finger. If you’ve seen Ken, with those steel-toed boots on his size 13 stompers and that mug as craggy as the rock he blasted for a living, you figure out pretty quick you don’t put a hand near his face unless you’re dead drunk or dead serious. Doc Woodward wasn’t drunk. “You’re going to kill anyone foolish enough to follow you!” “Tough shit!” Ken shot back. “Maybe killing a few folks will get us back on the map.”

Even as late as the 1940s, the 10th Mountain Division commandos were forbidden to set foot in downtown Leadville; they might be fierce enough for the Nazis, but not for the cutthroat gamblers and prostitutes who ruled State Street.

For five years, 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.

The Czechs were like the Zimbabwean bobsled team; they had no tradition, no coaching, no native talent, no chance of winning. But being counted out was liberating; having nothing to lose left Zatopek free to try any way to win.

Zatopek’s inexperience quickly became obvious. It was a hot day, so England’s Jim Peters, then the world-record holder, decided to use the heat to make Zatopek suffer. By the ten-mile mark, Peters was already ten minutes under his own world-record pace and pulling away from the field. Zatopek wasn’t sure if anyone could really sustain such a blistering pace. “Excuse me,” he said, pulling alongside Peters. “This is my first marathon. Are we going too fast?” “No,” Peters replied. “Too slow.” If Zatopek was dumb enough to ask, he was dumb enough to deserve any answer he got. Zatopek was surprised. “You say too slow,” he asked again. “Are you sure the pace is too slow?” “Yes,” Peters said. Then he got a surprise of his own. “Okay. Thanks.” Zatopek took Peters at his word, and took off.

“I am the only one of which I am aware who has ever performed an autopsy during a race,” he remarked. Not that he was any stranger to the morbid; “Badwater Ben” was also known for having his crew haul a coffin full of ice water out on the highway to help him cool off. When slower runners caught up, they were jolted to find the most experienced athlete in the field lying by the side of the road in a casket, eyes closed and arms folded over his chest.

That 2005 doubleheader was one of the greatest performances in ultraracing history, and it couldn’t have come at a better moment: just when Scott was becoming the greatest star in ultrarunning, ultrarunning was getting sexy. There was Dean Karnazes, shucking his shirt for magazine covers and telling David Letterman how he ordered pizzas on his cell phone in the middle of a 250-mile run. And check out Pam Reed; when Dean announced he was preparing for a 300-mile run, Pam went straight out and ran 301, landing her own Letterman appearance, and a book contract, and one of the greatest magazine headlines ever written: DESPERATE HOUSEWIFE STALKS MALE SUPERMODEL IN SPORTS DEATH MARCH.

Back in the adjoining bedroom, Eric filled me in. They’d gone to a Tex-Mex place, and while everyone else was eating, Jenn and Billy had had a drinking contest with fishbowl-sized margaritas. At some point, Billy wandered off in search of a bathroom and never returned. Jenn, meanwhile, entertained herself by snatching Scott’s cell phone while he was saying good night to his wife and shouting, “Help! I’m surrounded by penises!” Luckily, that’s when Barefoot Ted turned up. When he got to the hotel and heard that his traveling companions were out drinking, he commandeered the courtesy van and convinced the driver to shuttle him around till he found them. At the first stop, the driver spotted Billy asleep in the parking lot. The driver hauled Billy into the van while Barefoot Ted gathered the others. Whatever Billy was lacking in pep, Jenn made up for; during the ride back to the hotel, she did backflips over the seats until the driver slammed on the brakes and threatened to throw her out if she didn’t sit the hell down. The driver’s jurisdiction, however, only extended as far as the van door. When he pulled up in front of the hotel, Jenn burst loose. She ran into the hotel, skidded across the lobby, and crashed into a giant fountain full of water plants, smashing her face against the marble and blackening her eye. She emerged soaking wet, waving fists full of foliage overhead like a Kentucky Derby winner.

They needed some serious help, so Jenn looked where she always did when she needed guidance. And as usual, her favorite chainsmoking alcoholics came through in the clutch. First, she and Billy dug into The Dharma Bums and began memorizing Jack Kerouac’s description of hiking the Cascadia mountains. “Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by,” Kerouac wrote. “Trails are like that: you’re floating along in a Shakespearean Arden paradise and expect to see nymphs and fluteboys, then suddenly you’re struggling in a hot broiling sun of hell in dust and nettles and poison oak … just like life.” “Our whole approach to trail-running came from Dharma Bums,” Billy told me later. As for inspiration, that’s where Charles Bukowski stepped up: “If you’re going to try, go all the way,” the original Barfly wrote. “There is no other feeling like that. / you will be alone with the gods / and the nights will flame with fire…. you will ride life straight to / perfect laughter, it’s / the only good fight there is.”

In 2003, Ted decided to celebrate his fortieth birthday with his own endurance event, “The Anachronistic Ironman.” It would be a full Ironman triathlon—2.4-mile ocean swim, 112-mile bike ride, and 26.2-mile run—except, for reasons only clear to Ted, all the gear had to date from the 1890s.

At McGill University in Montreal, Steven Robbins, M.D., and Edward Waked, Ph.D., performed a series of tests on gymnasts. They found that the thicker the landing mat, the harder the gymnasts stuck their landings. Instinctively, the gymnasts were searching for stability. When they sensed a soft surface underfoot, they slapped down hard to ensure balance. 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.

Your foot’s centerpiece is the arch, the greatest weight-bearing design ever created. The beauty of any arch is the way it gets stronger under stress; the harder you push down, the tighter its parts mesh. No stonemason worth his trowel would ever stick a support under an arch; push up from underneath, and you weaken the whole structure. Buttressing the foot’s arch from all sides is a high-tensile web of twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, twelve rubbery tendons, and eighteen muscles, all stretching and flexing like an earthquake-resistant suspension bridge.

In fact, when the biomedical designer Van Phillips created a state-of-the-art prosthetic for amputee runners in 1984, he didn’t even bother equipping it with a heel. As a runner who lost his left leg below the knee in a water-skiing accident, Phillips understood that the heel was needed only for standing, not motion. Phillips’s C-shaped “Cheetah foot” mimics the performance of an organic leg so effectively, it allowed the South African double amputee Oscar Pistorius to compete with the world’s greatest sprinters.

After about a mile, Caballo veered onto a steep, rocky washout that climbed up into the mountain. Eric and I eased back to a walk, obeying the ultrarunner’s creed: “If you can’t see the top, walk.” When you’re running fifty miles, there’s no dividend in bashing up the hills and then being winded on the way down; you only lose a few seconds if you walk, and then you can make them back up by flying downhill. Eric believes that’s one reason ultrarunners don’t get hurt and never seem to burn out: “They know how to train, not strain.”

“I was bulimic in college and had a terrible self-image, until I found myself out here,” Jenni said. She came as a summer volunteer, and was immediately loaded with a lumberjack saw and two weeks of food and pointed toward the backcountry to go clear trails. She nearly buckled under the weight of the backpack, but she kept her doubts to herself and set off, alone, into the woods. At dawn, she’d pull on sneakers and nothing else, then set off for long runs through the woods, the rising sun warming her naked body. “I’d be out here for weeks at a time by myself,” Jenni explained. “No one could see me, so I’d just go and go and go. It was the most fantastic feeling you can imagine.” She didn’t need a watch or a route; she judged her speed by the tickle of wind on her skin, and kept racing along the pine-needled trails until her legs and lungs begged her to head back to camp.

Wilt Chamberlain, all seven feet one inch and 275 pounds of him, had no problem running a 50-mile ultra when he was sixty years old after his knees had survived a lifetime of basketball.

“Everyone thinks they know how to run, but it’s really as nuanced as any other activity,” Eric told me. “Ask most people and they’ll say, ‘People just run the way they run.’ That’s ridiculous. Does everyone just swim the way they swim?” For every other sport, lessons are fundamental; you don’t go out and start slashing away with a golf club or sliding down a mountain on skis until someone takes you through the steps and teaches you proper form. If not, inefficiency is guaranteed and injury is inevitable.

Convinced that he’d rediscovered an ancient art, Ken named his style Evolution Running. Coincidentally, two other barefoot-style running methods were popping up around the same time. “Chi Running,” based on the balance and minimalism of tai chi, began taking off in San Francisco, while Dr. Nicholas Romanov, a Russian exercise physiologist based in Florida, was teaching his POSE Method. The surge in minimalism did not arise through copying or cross-pollination; instead, it seemed to be testament to the urgent need for a response to the running-injury epidemic, and the pure mechanical logic of, as Barefoot Ted would call it, “the bricolage of barefooting”—the elegance of a less-is-more cure.

“When I teach this technique and ask someone how it feels, if they say ‘Great!,’ I go ‘Damn!’ That means they didn’t change a thing. The change should be awkward. You should go through a period where you’re no longer good at doing it wrong and not yet good at doing it right. You’re not only adapting your skills, but your tissues; you’re activating muscles that have been dormant most of your life.”

The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold—your hard-breathing point—during your endurance runs.

if David was right, he’d just solved the greatest mystery in human evolution. No one had ever figured out why early humans had separated themselves from all creation by taking their knuckles off the ground and standing up. It was to breathe! To open their throats, swell out their chests, and suck in air better than any other creature on the planet.

“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.”

To succeed as a hunter, Louis had to reinvent himself as a runner. He’d been an excellent middle-distance athlete in high school, winning the 1,500-meter championship and finishing a close second in the 800, but to hang with the Bushmen, he had to forget everything he’d been taught by modern coaches and study the ancients. As a track athlete, he’d drop his head and hammer, but as an apprentice Bushman, he had to be eyes high and tinglingly alert every step of the way. He couldn’t zone out and ignore pain; instead, his mind was constantly tap-dancing between the immediate—scratches in the dust, sweat on his own forehead—and the imaginary, as he played mental war games to think one step ahead of his prey.

The Utah-Harvard docs would turn out to be wrong about one part of their Running Man theory: persistence hunting doesn’t depend on killer heat, because the ingenious Bushmen had devised ways to run down game in every weather.

The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science

Our greatest talent, he explained, also created the monster that could destroy us. “Unlike any other organism in history, humans have a mind-body conflict: we have a body built for performance, but a brain that’s always looking for efficiency.” We live or die by our endurance, but remember: endurance is all about conserving energy, and that’s the brain’s department. “The reason some people use their genetic gift for running and others don’t is because the brain is a bargain shopper.”

The Urique villagers had grown up in awe of the Tarahumara, but this tall gringo with the flashy orange shoes was unlike anyone they’d ever seen. It was eerie watching Scott run side by side with Arnulfo; even though Scott had never seen the Tarahumara before and Arnulfo had never seen the outside world, somehow these two men separated by two thousand years of culture had developed the same running style. They’d approached their art from opposite ends of history, and met precisely in the middle.

Thanks to the genius of Caballo’s planning, we’d all get to witness the battle in real time. Caballo had laid out his course in a Y pattern, with the starting line dead in the middle. That way, the villagers would see the race several times as it doubled back and forth, and the racers would always know how far they were trailing the leaders. That Y-formation also provided another unexpected benefit: at that very moment, it was giving Caballo plenty of reason to be very suspicious of the Urique Tarahumara.

“… So I tell myself if I’ve got to pee, I’d better pee into one of these bottles in case I’m down to the last, you know, the last of the last. So I pee into this bottle and it’s like, orange. It’s not looking good. And it’s hot. I think people were watching me pee in my bottle and thinking, ‘Wow, these gringos are really tough.’ ” “Wait,” I said, starting to understand. “You’re not drinking piss?” “It was the worst! The worst-tasting urine I’ve ever tasted in my entire life. You could bottle this stuff and sell it to bring people back from the dead. I know you can drink urine, but not if it’s been heated and shaken in your kidneys for forty miles. It was a failed experiment. I wouldn’t drink that urine if it was the last liquid on planet Earth.”