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

by Christopher McDougall

Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.

Vigil knew that if he could understand Ann Trason, he’d grasp what one amazing person could do. But if he could understand the Tarahumara, he’d know what everyone could do.

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation.

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.

had fun with it. It wasn’t a grind.” They were so ignorant, they didn’t even realize they were supposed to be burned out, overtrained, and injured. Instead, they were fast; really fast.

Vigil couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running.

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.

“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.”

Strictly by accident, Scott stumbled upon the most advanced weapon in the ultrarunner’s arsenal: 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.

“You don’t stop running because you get old,” said the Demon. “You get old because you stop running.”

The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold—your hard-breathing point—during your endurance runs. Respecting that speed limit was a lot easier before the birth of cushioned shoes and paved roads; try blasting up a scree-covered trail in open-toed sandals sometime and you’ll quickly lose the temptation to open the throttle.

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.

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.

“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.”

lose the habit, and the loudest voice in your ear is your ancient survival instinct urging you to relax. And there’s the bitter irony: our fantastic endurance gave our brain the food it needed to grow, and now our brain is undermining our endurance.

“Just move your legs. Because if you don’t think you were born to run, you’re not only denying history. You’re denying who you are.”

It wasn’t Arnulfo’s and Scott’s matching form so much as their matching smiles; they were both grinning with sheer muscular pleasure, like dolphins rocketing through the waves.

“Look, I got some bad news,” he said. “You’re not going to win. No matter what you do, you’re going to be out there all day. So you might as well just relax, take your time, and enjoy it. Keep this in mind—if it feels like work, you’re working too hard.”