Few books about the sport of running (or ostensibly about the sport of running) have attracted as polyglot an audience as Born to Run has. As a publishing phenomenon, Christopher McDougall’s boundary-crossing bestseller is a good-news story at a time when the industry is reeling. It is a gripping narrative, offering a bold look at one of the world’s most popular exercise activities. It features a dazzling set of characters, vividly rendered by journalist and former war correspondent McDougall. But a key attribute that hasn’t been properly appreciated in the ongoing conversation about this book is the author’s ability to show how we all, like Daniel, open our windows each day, point toward Jerusalem, bow on our knees, and pray to God—or, in some pilgrims’ progress, his proxy.
Spend a lot of time around élite track & field athletes or marathon runners, and you’ll quickly recognize similarities between a monastic devotion to the spiritual life and the quest for Olympic gold. In Born to Run, McDougall masterfully interconnects a diverse crew of people who range from world-class distance runners to members of “higher consciousness cults.” But the converging quests that these subjects find themselves on are depicted in such a way that they aren’t aware of their own search.
On its surface, McDougall’s book is a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale, an implausible chronicle that carries the reader with maniacal, contagious joy into the isolated world of the Tarahumara, a tribe living frugally in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. The Tarahumara run ultra-long distances with grace and ease, in treacherous conditions. Their North American counterparts would envy the tribe’s track record of avoiding the injuries that plague runners in contemporary civilization. And the Tarahumara enjoy this clean bill of health in spite of relying largely on a diet of pinole, chia seeds, and grain alcohol, along with a cultural technology that is centuries behind that of today’s Garmin-equipped, technical gear-wearing Americans. To add insult to non-injury, the Tarahumara wear sandals to run in, rather than the sophisticated footwear that the running shoe industry mass-produces each year.
McDougall’s conclusion about running shoes is that they alter the stride that was perfectly crafted through evolution (hence the title). His book has inspired online dialogues that sound like testimonies at tent revivals, posted by runners who for years suffered from debilitating injuries. Then they read Born to Run.
But the book’s most poignant theme is perhaps an accidental one (though not so accidental if indeed “God writes straight with crooked lines”). While attempting to cohere with the Tarahumara, McDougall meets a mysterious American who lives in the canyons among them, going by the name Caballo Blanco (the “White Horse”). The author/protagonist learns that Caballo is hatching an ultimate ultra-marathon, pitting the best ultra-runners in the civilized world versus the Tarahumara on a 50-mile wilderness course.
Spend a significant amount of time around NCAA Division I runners and it becomes clear to those with a religious sensibility that most of these athletes purposefully shrink the world to fit what can be captured by a sixty-second stopwatch. Everything else—the hoopla, the celebrity—is an afterthought. And the same is true, even more so, of the obscure competitors McDougall describes: “Ultrarunners had no reason to cheat, because they had nothing to gain: no fame, no wealth, no medals. No one knew who they were, or cared who won their strange rambles through the woods. They didn’t even get prize money; all you get for winning an ultra is the same belt buckle as the guy who comes in last.”
Echoing that theme, as the launch of the climactic race approaches, its participants swear a blood oath: “If I get hurt, lost or die, it’s my own damn fault. Uh … Amen.” As irreligious as the opening of James Joyce’s Ulysses, where the Catholic mass is satirized by the ceremonial presentation of a shaving kit posing as Sacrament, the scene reflects well the devotion we can apply to distraction.
Though the reader isn’t given the feeling that most of these characters will find what they’re looking for any time soon, there are frequent indications of what’s at stake. So, for instance, McDougall evokes a famous ultramarathon that takes place in Leadville, Colorado: “Leadville was a tough place, Ken knew. Full of tough men, and even tougher women, and—And damn! God damn! That was it.” Yeah, that’s it. In the same vein, the author-protagonist, approaching a famous ultra-runner drinking a Fat Tire Ale in a hotel bar, tells a fellow competitor to “prepare to meet your god sucking down a cold one.”
Many of the collaborations to pull off the book’s mega-races sound like those of an organized religion, but without a God at its head:
These Young Guns wanted something fresh, tough, and exotic, and they were flocking to trail-running in such numbers that, by 2002, it had become the fastest-growing outdoor sport in the country. It wasn’t just the racing they loved; it was the thrill of exploring the brave new world of their own bodies. Ultra god Scott Jurek summed up the Young Guns’ unofficial creed with a quote from William James he stuck on the end of every e-mail he sent: “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.”
The 1998 movie Without Limits, about American athlete Steve Prefontaine, also chronicled the cult-like aspect of this quest, but in a conventional track & field environment.
Many of the figures who appear in Born to Run could be classified as “seekers,” embodying a happy, blessed spirit when they’re running, but restless when they’re not: “I never really discussed this with anyone because it sounds pretentious,” one competitor tells McDougall, “but I started running ultras to become a better person. I thought if you could run one hundred miles, you’d be in this Zen state. You’d be the [expletive] Buddha, bringing peace and a smile to the world. It didn’t work in my case—I’m the same old punk-ass as before—but there’s always that hope that it will turn you into the person you want to be, a better, more peaceful person.” It would be interesting to read a sequel, to learn what happens to some of these people over time.
At one point, McDougall describes a brief identity crisis for Caballo, when he is recovering from an ankle injury and beginning to have doubts about what he’s made the center of his life: the planning of a race that no one will watch on television, a race supported by zero sponsorship dollars. Stepping inside Caballo’s head for a moment, McDougall writes, “What was the point? Why was he chasing a dream everyone else thought was a joke? … [H]e was still recovering in Urique when he received a message from God. The only god he’d been praying to, at least.”
Arthur Menke writes and runs in Kansas City.
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