Chapter 20
NINE MONTHS LATER, I found myself back on the Mexican border with a ticking clock and zero margin for error. It was Saturday evening, February 25, 2006, and I had twenty-four hours to find Caballo again.
As soon as he got a reply from Scott Jurek, Caballo began setting up a trapeze act of logistics. He only had a tiny window of opportunity, since the race couldn’t take place during the fall harvest, the winter rainy season, or the blistering heat of summer, when many of the Tarahumara migrate toward cooler caves higher in the canyons. Caballo also had to avoid Christmas, Easter Week, the Fiesta Guadalupana and at least a half-dozen traditional wedding weekends.
Caballo finally figured he could wedge the race in on Sunday, March 5. Then the real tricky work began: because he’d barely have enough time to Paul Revere from village to village to announce the race logistics, he had to figure out exactly where and when the Tarahumara runners should meet up with us on the hike to the racecourse. If he miscalculated, it was over; it was already a tremendous long shot that any Tarahumara would show up, and if they got to the meeting spot and we were a no-show, they’d be gone.
Caballo made his best-guess estimates, then set off into the can yons to spread the word, as he messaged me a few weeks later:
Ran 30 some miles out to Tarahumara country and back today, like the messenger that I am. The message fueled me more than the bag of pinole in my pocket. Was lucky enough to see both Manuel Luna and Felipe Quimare on the same loop, the same day. When I spoke to each of them, I could sense excitement even in the Geronimo like solemnness that is the face of Manuel.
But while things were looking up for Caballo, my end of the operation was maddeningly difficult. Once word hit the grapevine that Jurek might be going toe-to-toe with the Tarahumara, other ultra aces suddenly wanted a piece of the action. But there was no telling how many would really show up—and that included the star attraction himself.
In true Jurek fashion, Scott had told almost no one what he was up to, so word of his plans only began to spread a little more than a month before the race. He’d even kept me guessing, and I was pretty much his point man; Scott e-mailed me a few times with travel questions, but as crunch time approached, he dropped off the radar. Two weeks before race day, I was startled to see a posting on the Runner’s World message board from a runner in Texas who’d gotten a jolt of his own that morning when he arrived at the starting line of the Austin Marathon and found himself standing next to America’s greatest (and contender for most reclusive) ultrarunner.
Austin? Last I’d heard, Scott was supposed to be two thousand miles away at that very moment, crossing Baja with his wife to catch the Chihuahua-Pacific train to Creel. And what was the deal with the urban marathon—why was Scott flying across the country for a junior varsity road race, when he was supposed to be fine-tuning for the showdown of a lifetime on trails? He was up to something, no doubt about it; and as usual, whatever strategy he was developing remained locked in his own head.
So, until the moment I arrived in El Paso, Texas, that Saturday, I had no idea if I was leading a platoon or hucking solo. I checked into the airport Hilton, made arrangements for a ride across the border at five the next morning, then doubled back to the airport. I was pretty sure I was wasting my time, but there was a chance I’d be picking up Jenn “Mookie” Shelton and Billy “Bonehead” Barnett, a pair of twenty-one-year-old hotshots who’d been electrifying the East Coast ultra circuit, at least whenever they weren’t otherwise occupied surfing, partying, or posting bail for simple assault (Jenn), disorderly conduct (Billy), or public indecency (both, for a burst of trail-side passion that resulted in an arrest and community service).
Jenn and Billy had only started running two years before, but Billy was already winning some of the toughest 50ks on the East Coast, while “the young and beautiful Jenn Shelton,” as the ultrarace blogger Joey Anderson called her, had just clocked one of the fastest 100-mile times in the country. “If this young lady could swing a tennis racket as well as she runs,” Anderson wrote, “she would be one of the richest women in sports with all the sponsors she would attract.”
I’d spoken to Jenn once on the phone, and while she and Billy were wildly eager to join the trek into the Copper Canyons, I didn’t see any way they’d pull it off. She and the Bonehead had no money, no credit cards, and no time off from school: they were both still in college and Caballo’s race was smack in the middle of midterms, meaning they’d flunk the semester if they skipped out. But two days before my flight to El Paso, I suddenly got this frantic e-mail:
Wait for us! we can get in by 8:10 pm.
El Paso is texas, right?
After that—silence. On the slim chance that Jenn and Billy had actually found the right city and finagled their way onto a flight, I headed over to the airport for a look around. I’d never met them, but their outlaw reputation created a pretty vivid mental image. When I got to baggage claim, I immediately locked in on a couple who looked like teenage runaways hitchhiking to Lollapalooza.
“Jenn?” I asked.
“Right on!”
Jenn was wearing flip-flops, surf shorts, and a tie-dyed T-shirt. Her summer-wheat hair was in braids, giving her the look of a blonder, lesser-known Longstocking. She was pretty and petite enough to pass for a figure skater, an image she’d tried in the past to scruff up by shaving her head down to stubble and getting a big, black vampire bat tattooed on her right forearm, only discovering later that it was a dead ringer for the Bacardi rum logo. “Whatever,” Jenn said with a shrug. “Truth in advertising.”
Billy shared Jenn’s raw good looks and beach-bum wardrobe. He had a tribal tattoo across the back of his neck and thick sideburns that blended into shaggy, sun-streaked hair. With his flowery board shorts and ripped surfer’s build, he looked—to Jenn, at least—“like some little yeti who raided your underwear drawer.”
“I can’t believe you guys made it,” I said. “But there’s been a change of plans. Scott Jurek isn’t going to be meeting us in Mexico.”
“Oh, f*ck me,” Jenn said. “I knew this was too good to be true.”
“He came here instead.” On my way to the airport, I’d spotted two guys jogging across the parking lot. They were too far away for me to see their faces, but their smooth-glide strides gave them away. After quick introductions, they’d headed to the bar while I continued to the airport.
“Scott’s here?”
“Yup. I just saw him on the way over. He’s back at the hotel bar with Luis Escobar.”
“Scott drinks?”
“Looks that way.”
“Suh-weet!!”
Jenn and Billy grabbed their gear—a Nike shopping bag with a chiropractic stick jutting out the top and a duffel with the tail of a sleeping bag stuck in the zipper—and we began heading across the parking lot.
“So what’s Scott like?” Jenn asked. Ultrarunning, like rap music, was split by geography; as East Coast playas, Jenn and Billy had done most of their racing close to home and hadn’t yet crossed paths (or swords) with many of the West Coast elites. To them—to just about all ultrarunners, actually—Scott was as much of a mythic figure as the Tarahumara.
“I only caught a glimpse of him myself,” I said. “Pretty tough guy to read, I can tell you that much.”
Right there, I should have shut my stupid mouth. But who can predict when the trivial will become tragic? How could I have known that a friendly gesture, like giving Caballo my running shoes, would nearly cost him his life? Likewise, I never suspected that the next ten words out of my mouth would snowball into disaster:
“Maybe,” I suggested, “you can get him drunk and loosen him up.”