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October 25 - November 12, 2025
It’s not that I’m all that stubborn. It’s not that I’m even all that crazy about running. If I totaled all the miles I’d ever run, half were aching drudgery. But it does say something that even though I haven’t read The World According to Garp in twenty years, I’ve never forgotten one minor scene, and it ain’t the one you’re thinking of: I keep thinking back to the way Garp used to burst out his door in the middle of the workday for a five-mile run. There’s something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we’re
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“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.”
“You’re alive because your father can run down a deer. He’s alive because his grandfather could outrun an Apache war pony. That’s how fast we are when we’re weighed down by our sapá, our fleshiness. Imagine how you’ll fly once you shuck it.”
Korima sounds like karma and functions the same way, except in the here and now. It’s your obligation to share whatever you can spare, instantly and with no expectations: once the gift leaves your hand, it was never yours to begin with. The Tarahumara have no monetary system, so korima is how they do business: their economy is based on trading favors and the occasional cauldron of corn beer.
Even a superstar like Manuel Luna couldn’t win without a village behind him.
To endure a challenge like that, you had to possess all the Tarahumara virtues—strength, patience, cooperation, dedication, and persistence. Most of all, you had to love to run.
“I’m always getting lost and having to vertical-climb, water bottle between my teeth, buzzards circling over head,” he said. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone.
At its essence, an ultra is a binary equation made up of hundreds of yes/no questions: Eat now or wait? Bomb down this hill, or throttle back and save the quads for the flats? Find out what is itching in your sock, or push on? Extreme distance magnifies every problem (a blister becomes a blood-soaked sock, a declined PowerBar becomes a woozy inability to follow trail markers), so all it takes is one wrong answer to ruin a race. But not for honor-student Ann; when it came to ultras, she always aced her quizzes.
he hoped to pit the Tarahumara against each other. Let them tear after each other, he figured, and win Leadville in the bargain. It was a shrewd plan—and totally misguided. If Fisher had known more about Tarahumara culture, he’d have understood that racing doesn’t divide villages; it unites them. It’s a way for distant tribesmen to tighten the bonds of kinship and buddyhood, and make sure everyone in the canyon is in fine enough fettle to come through in an emergency.
Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else. 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.
So here’s what Coach Vigil was trying to figure out: was Zatopek a great man who happened to run, or a great man because he ran?
Vigil, an old man alone in the woods, suddenly felt a burst of immortality. He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn’t just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we’re meant to be.
“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.”
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.
Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude—they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.
