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

by Christopher McDougall

“Caballo?” I croaked. The cadaver turned, smiling, and I felt like an idiot. He didn’t look wary; he looked confused, as any tourist would when confronted by a deranged man on a sofa suddenly hollering “Horse!”

It was a five-word puzzle that led me to a photo of a very fast man in a very short skirt, and from there it only got stranger. Soon, I was dealing with a murder, drug guerrillas, and a one-armed man with a cream-cheese cup strapped to his head.

Running seemed to be the fitness version of drunk driving: you could get away with it for a while, you might even have some fun, but catastrophe was waiting right around the corner.

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.

Ghosts were evil phantoms who traveled by night and galloped around on all fours, killing sheep and spitting in people’s faces.

And if I really wanted to understand the Rarámuri, I should have been there when this ninety-five-year-old man came hiking twenty-five miles over the mountain. Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn’t. No one ever told him he oughta be off dying somewhere in an old age home. You live up to your own expectations, man. Like when he named himself after his dog. That’s where the name “True” really came from, his old dog. He didn’t always measure up to good old True Dog, but that was another story, too….

No problem. Fisher just whipped out a packet of news articles about himself he carries everywhere he goes (yup, even on very wet rafts through non-English-speaking Mexican badlands).

Secret agents, whizzing bullets, prehistoric kingdoms … even Ernest Hemingway would have shut up and surrendered the floor if Fisher walked into the bar. But no matter where he roamed, Fisher kept circling back home to his greatest passion: the bewitching girl next door, the Copper Canyons.

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).

Leadville’s backcountry was so brutal that the army’s elite 10th Mountain Division used to train there for Alpine combat.

Leadville’s reputation was as scary as its geography. For decades, it was the wildest city in the Wild West, “an absolute death trap,” as one chronicler put it, “that seemed to take pride in its own depravity.”

Doc Holliday, the dentist turned gun-slinging gambler, used to hang out in the Leadville saloons with his quick-drawin’ O.K. Corral buddy Wyatt Earp. Jesse James used to slink through as well, attracted by the stages loaded with gold and excellent hideouts just a lick away in the mountains. Even as late as the 1940s, the 10th Mountain Division commandos were forbidden to set foot in downtown Leadville; they migh...

makes Lance Armstrong, with his piddlin’ little seven Tour de France wins, look like a flash in the pan. And a pampered flash in the pan, at that: Lance never pedaled a stroke without a team of experts at his elbow to monitor his caloric intake and transmit microsecond split analyses into his earbud, while Ann only had her husband, Carl, waiting in the woods with a Timex and half a turkey sandwich.

During one stretch, she averaged an ultramarathon every other month for four years.

ran 6:44 a mile for 62 miles to win the World Ultra Title,

The Arkansas River would be a roaring mess; they’d have to haul themselves hand over hand along a safety rope to cross, and then claw their way two thousand feet to the top of Hope Pass. Then spin around and do the same again coming home.

In the 1990 World Chess Championship, Kasparov made a horrible mistake and lost his queen right at the start of a decisive game. Chess grand masters around the world let out a pained groan; the bad boy of the chessboard was now road kill (a less-gracious observer for The New York Times visibly sneered). Except it wasn’t a mistake; 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.

“To move into the lead means making an act requiring fierceness and confidence,” Roger Bannister once noted. “But fear must play some part … no relaxation is possible, and all discretion is thrown to the wind.”

Coach Vigil was a hard-data freak, but as he watched Ann plunge into the Rockies with her ballsy do-or-die game plan, he loved the fact that ultrarunning had no science, no playbook, no training manual, no conventional wisdom. That kind of freewheeling self-invention is where big breakthroughs come from, as Vigil knew (and Columbus, the Beatles, and Bill Gates would happily agree).

Luckily, a group of Leadville llama farmers shrugged and said, Eh, what the hell. Sounded like a party. They loaded their llamas with enough food and booze to make it through the weekend, and hammered in tent stakes at 12,600 feet. Since then, the Hopeless Crew has grown into an army eighty-some strong of llama owners and friends. For two days, they endure fierce winds and frostbitten fingers while dispensing first aid and hot soup, packing injured runners out by llama and partying in between like a tribe of amiable yetis. “Hope Pass is a bad son of a bitch on a good day,” Ken says. “If it weren’t for those llamas, we’d have lost a good many lives.”

The night before, Rick Fisher had brought the Tarahumara to a prerace spaghetti dinner at the Leadville VFW hall to see if he could recruit a few pacers.

The flesh about my body felt soft and relaxed, like an experiment in functional background music. —RICHARD BRAUTIGAN, Trout Fishing in America

Glee and determination are usually antagonistic emotions, yet the Tarahumara were brimming with both at once, as if running to the death made them feel more alive.

Over the previous few years, Vigil had become convinced that the next leap forward in human endurance would come from a dimension he dreaded getting into: character. Not the “character” other coaches were always rah-rah-rah-ing about; Vigil wasn’t talking about “grit” or “hunger” or “the size of the fight in the dog.” In fact, he meant the exact opposite. Vigil’s notion of character wasn’t toughness. It was compassion. Kindness. Love. That’s right: love.

Look, Vigil was a scientist, not a swami. He hated straying into this Buddha-under-the-lotus-tree stuff, but he wasn’t going to ignore it, either. He’d made his bones by finding connections where everyone else saw coincidence, and the more he examined the compassion link, the more intriguing it became. Was it just by chance that the pantheon of dedicated runners also included Abraham Lincoln (“He could beat all the other boys in a footrace”) and Nelson Mandela (a college cross-country standout who, even in prison, continued to run seven miles a day in place in his cell)? Maybe Ron Clarke wasn’t being poetic in his description of Zatopek—maybe his expert eye was clinically precise: His love of life shone through every movement. Yes! Love of life! Exactly!

Extraordinary compassion is accurate for Lincoln, but not sure he's a good proof for a 'love of life' connection. Lincoln was historically melancholic, although good natured.

Juan crossed the finish line in 17:30, setting a new Leadville course record by twenty-five minutes. (He also established another first by shyly ducking under the tape instead of breasting it, never having seen one before.)

Needless to say, you’ve got to work hard to earn a rejection slip from UltraRunning, which made me afraid to even ask what Caballo, isolated in his hut like the Unabomber, had manifestoed about.

nothing to do with running: it was stuff like “Practice abundance by giving back,” and “Improve personal relationships,” and “Show integrity to your value system.” Vigil’s dietary advice was just as bare of sports or science. His nutrition strategy for an Olympic marathon hopeful was this: “Eat as though you were a poor person.”

Once, he missed checking messages because he’d been attacked by wild dogs and had to abort his trip to go in search of rabies shots.

Not that Scott had much time for training. When he was in grade school, his mother contracted multiple sclerosis. It was up to Scott, as the oldest of three kids, to nurse his mother after school, clean the house, and haul logs for the woodstove while his father was at work. Years later, ultrarunning vets would sniff at Scott’s starting-line screams and flying kung-fu leaps into aid stations. But when you’ve spent your childhood working like a deckhand and watching your mother sink into a nightmare of pain, maybe you never get over the joy of leaving everything behind and running for the hills.

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.

win a six-day race in the Sahara, talks about exhaustion as if it’s a playful pet. “I love the Beast,” she says. “I actually look forward to the Beast showing up, because every time he does, I handle him better. I get him more under control.”

You can’t hate the Beast and expect to beat it; the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.

“Miss! Miss!” the appalled desk clerk pleaded, before remembering that pleading doesn’t work on drunks in fountains.

When I stepped through the door, I found Caballo staring in appalled disbelief at Barefoot Ted.

“No wonder your feet are so sensitive,” Ted mused. “They’re self-correcting devices. Covering your feet with cushioned shoes is like turning off your smoke alarms.”

it seemed, the words of the social critic Eric Hoffer were ringing true: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and turns into a racket.”

Under the tree was a natural stone basin carved out by centuries of cool, trickling spring water. Except there was no water. “We’re in a drought,” Caballo said. “I forgot about that.”

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

Because stray cells left behind after surgery seem to be stimulated by animal proteins.

Good; this was good. David was getting somewhere. Big cats and little rabbits run the same way, but one has Slinkies stuck to its diaphragm and one doesn’t.

That hypothetical account was actually a pretty accurate description of the Neanderthal Riddle. Most people think Neanderthals were our ancestors, but they were actually a parallel species (or subspecies, some say) that competed with Homo sapiens for survival. “Competed,” actually, is being kind; the Neanderthals had us beat any way you keep score.

“In the whole history of vertebrates on Earth—the whole history—humans are the only running biped that’s tailless,”

But what we don’t share, Bramble noted, is an Achilles tendon, which connects the calf to the heel: we’ve got one, chimps don’t.

One of their first big discoveries came by accident when David took a horse for a jog.

“So where the fuck did they get it?” Lieberman asks, with all the gusto of a man who’s not squeamish about hacking into goats with a rock.

Lieberman began calculating temperatures, speed, and body weight. Soon, there it was before him: the solution to the Running Man mystery. To run an antelope to death, Lieberman determined, all you have to do is scare it into a gallop on a hot day. “If you keep just close enough for it to see you, it will keep sprinting away. After about ten or fifteen kilometers’ worth of running, it will go into hyperthermia and collapse.” Translation: if you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can’t pant while they gallop.

After all, what else did we have going for us? Nothing, except we ran like crazy and stuck together.

You and I know how good running feels because we’ve made a habit of it.” But lose the habit, and the loudest voice in your ear is your ancient survival instinct urging you to relax.