Chapter 27
I’D MET Eric the year before, right after I’d thrown off my running shoes in disgust and sprawled in an icy creek. I was hurt again—and for the last time, as far as I was concerned.
As soon as I’d gotten home from the Barrancas, I’d started putting Caballo’s lessons to work. I couldn’t wait to lace up my shoes every afternoon and try to recapture the sensation I’d had in the hills of Creel, back when running behind Caballo made the miles feel so easy, light, smooth, and fast that I never wanted to stop. As I ran, I screened my mental film footage of Caballo in action, remembering the way he’d floated up the hills of Creel as if he were being abducted by aliens, somehow keeping everything relaxed except those bony elbows, which pumped for power like a Rock’em-Sock’em Robot. For all his gangliness, Caballo on a trail reminded me of Muhammad Ali in the ring: loose as wave-washed seaweed, with just a hint of ferocity ready to explode.
After two months, I’d built up to six miles a day with a ten-miler on the weekend. My form hadn’t graduated to Smooth yet, but I was keeping the needle wavering pretty steadily between Easy and Light. I was getting a little anxious, though; no matter how gingerly I tried to take it, my legs were already starting to rebel; that little flamethrower in my right foot was shooting out sparks and the backs of both calves felt twangy, as if my Achilles tendons had been replaced with piano wire. I stocked up on stretching books and put in a dutiful half hour of loosening up before every run, but the long shadow of Dr. Torg’s cortisone needle loomed over me.
By late spring, the time had come for a test. Thanks to a forest-ranger friend, I lucked into the perfect opportunity: a three-day fifty-mile running trip through Idaho’s River of No Return, two and a half million acres of the most untouched wilderness in the continental U.S. The setup was perfect: our supplies would be hauled by a mule packer, so all that I and the other four runners had to do was kick up fifteen miles of dirt a day from campsite to campsite.
“I really didn’t know anything about the woods till I came to Idaho,” Jenni Blake began, as she led us down a thin wisp of a dirt trail winding through the junipers. Watching her flow over the trail with such teenage strength, it was hard to believe that nearly twenty years had passed since her arrival; at thirty-eight, Jenni still has the blonde bangs, winsome blue eyes, and lean, tan limbs of a college frosh on summer break. Oddly, though, she’s more of a carefree kid now than she was back then.
“I was bulimic in college and had a terrible self-image, until I found myself out here,” Jenni said. She came as a summer volunteer, and was immediately loaded with a lumberjack saw and two weeks of food and pointed toward the backcountry to go clear trails. She nearly buckled under the weight of the backpack, but she kept her doubts to herself and set off, alone, into the woods.
At dawn, she’d pull on sneakers and nothing else, then set off for long runs through the woods, the rising sun warming her naked body. “I’d be out here for weeks at a time by myself,” Jenni explained. “No one could see me, so I’d just go and go and go. It was the most fantastic feeling you can imagine.” She didn’t need a watch or a route; she judged her speed by the tickle of wind on her skin, and kept racing along the pine-needled trails until her legs and lungs begged her to head back to camp.
Jenni has been hard-core ever since, running long miles even when Idaho is blanketed by snow. Maybe she’s self-medicating against deep-seated problems, but maybe (to paraphrase Bill Clinton) there was never anything wrong with Jenni that couldn’t be fixed by what’s right with Jenni.
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Yet when I winced my way down the final downhill leg three days later, I could barely walk. I hobbled into the creek and sat there, simmering and wondering what was wrong with me. It had taken me three days to run the same distance as Caballo’s racecourse, and I’d ended up with one Achilles tear, maybe two, and a pain in my heel that felt suspiciously like the vampire bite of running injuries: plantar fasciitis.
Once PF sinks its fangs into your heels, you’re in danger of being infected for life. Check any running-related message board, and you’re guaranteed to find a batch of beseeching threads from PF sufferers begging for a cure. Everyone is quick to suggest the same remedies—night splints, elastic socks, ultrasound, electroshock, cortisone, orthotics—but the messages keep coming because none of them really seems to work.
But how come Caballo could hammer descents longer than the Grand Canyon in crappy old sandals, while I couldn’t manage a few easy months of miles without a major breakdown? Wilt Chamberlain, all seven feet one inch and 275 pounds of him, had no problem running a 50- mile ultra when he was sixty years old after his knees had survived a lifetime of basketball. Hell, a Norwegian sailor named Mensen Ernst barely even remembered what dry land felt like when he came ashore back in 1832, but he still managed to run all the way from Paris to Moscow to win a bet, averaging one hundred thirty miles a day for fourteen days, wearing God only knows what kind of clodhoppers on God only knows what kind of roads.
And Mensen was just cracking his knuckles before getting down to serious business: he then ran from Constantinople to Calcutta, trotting ninety miles a day for two straight months. Not that he didn’t feel it; Mensen had to rest three whole days before beginning the 5,400- mile jog back home. So how come Mensen never got plantar fasciitis? He couldn’t have, because his legs were in excellent shape a year later when dysentery killed him as he tried to run all the way to the source of the Nile.
Everywhere I looked, little pockets of superrunning savants seemed to emerge from the shadows. Just a few miles away from me in Maryland, thirteen-year-old Mackenzie Riford was happily running the JFK 50- miler with her mom (“It was fun!”), while Jack Kirk—a.k.a. “the Dipsea Demon”—was still running the hellacious Dipsea Trail Race at age ninety-six. The race begins with a 671- step cliffside climb, which means a man nearly half as old as America was climbing a fifty-story staircase before running off into the woods. “You don’t stop running because you get old,” said the Demon. “You get old because you stop running.”
So what was I missing? I was in worse shape now than when I’d started; not only couldn’t I race with the Tarahumara, I doubted my PF-inflamed feet could even get me to the starting line.
“You’re like everyone else,” Eric Orton told me. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
A few weeks after my Idaho debacle, I’d gone to interview Eric for a magazine assignment. As an adventure-sports coach in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the former fitness director for the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Eric’s specialty is tearing endurance sports down to their integral movements and finding transferable skills. He’d study rock climbing to find shoulder techniques for kayakers, and apply Nordic skiing’s smooth propulsion to mountain biking. What he’s really looking for are basic engineering principles; he’s convinced that the next great advance in fitness will come not from training or technology, but technique—the athlete who avoids injury will be the one who leaves the competition behind.
He’d read my article about Caballo and the Tarahumara and was intensely curious to hear more. “What the Tarahumara do is pure body art,” he said. “No one else on the planet has made such a virtue out of self-propulsion.” Eric had been fascinated with the Tarahumara since an athlete he’d trained for Leadville returned with amazing stories about fantastic Indians flying through the Druidic dusk in sandals and robes. Eric scoured libraries for books on the Tarahumara, but all he found were some anthropological texts from the ’50s and an amateur account by a husband-and-wife team who’d traveled through Mexico in their camper. It was a mystifying gap in sports literature; distance running is the world’s No. I participation sport, but almost nothing had been written about its No. I practitioners.
“Everyone thinks they know how to run, but it’s really as nuanced as any other activity,” Eric told me. “Ask most people and they’ll say, ‘People just run the way they run.’ That’s ridiculous. Does everyone just swim the way they swim?” For every other sport, lessons are fundamental; you don’t go out and start slashing away with a golf club or sliding down a mountain on skis until someone takes you through the steps and teaches you proper form. If not, inefficiency is guaranteed and injury is inevitable.
“Running is the same way,” Eric explained. “Learn it wrong, and you’ll never know how good it can feel.” He grilled me for details about the race I’d seen at the Tarahumara school. (“The little wooden ball,” he mused. “The way they learn to run by kicking it; that can’t be an accident.”) Then he offered me a deal; he’d get me ready for Caballo’s race, and in return, I’d vouch for him with Caballo.
“If this race comes off, we have to be there,” Eric urged. “It’ll be the greatest ultra of all time.”
“I just don’t think I’m built for running fifty miles,” I said.
“Everyone is built for running,” he said.
“Every time I up my miles, I break down.”
“You won’t this time.”
“Should I get the orthotics?”
“Forget the orthotics.”
I was dubious, but Eric’s absolute confidence was winning me over. “I should probably cut weight first to make it easier on my legs.”
“Your diet will change all by itself. Wait and see.”
“How about yoga? That’ll help, yeah?”
“Forget yoga. Every runner I know who does yoga gets hurt.”
This was sounding better all the time. “You really think I can do it?”
“Here’s the truth,” Eric said. “You’ve got zero margin of error. But you can do it.” I’d have to forget everything I knew about running and start over from the beginning.
“Get ready to go back in time,” Eric said. “You’re going tribal.”
A few weeks later, a man with a right leg twisted below the knee limped toward me carrying a rope. He looped the rope around my waist and pulled it taut. “Go!” he shouted.
I bent against the rope, churning my legs as I dragged him forward. He released the rope, and I shot off. “Good,” the man said. “Whenever you run, remember that feeling of straining against the rope. It’ll keep your feet under your body, your hips driving straight ahead, and your heels out of the picture.”
Eric had recommended I begin my tribal makeover by heading down to Virginia to apprentice myself to Ken Mierke, an exercise physiologist and world champion triathlete whose muscular dystrophy forced him to squeeze every possible bit of economy out of his running style. “I’m living proof of God’s sense of humor,” Ken likes to say. “I was an obese kid with a drop foot whose dad lived for sports. So as an overweight Jerry’s Kid, I was way slower than everyone I ever played against. I learned to examine everything and find a better way.”
In basketball Ken couldn’t drive the lane, so he practiced three-pointers and a deadly hook shot. He couldn’t chase a quarterback or shake a safety, but he studied body angles and lines of attack and became a formidable left tackle. He couldn’t outsprint a cross-court volley, so in tennis he developed a ferocious serve and service return. “If I couldn’t outrun you, I’d outthink you,” he says. “I’d find your weakness and make it my strength.”
Because of the withered calf muscles in his right leg, when he began to compete in triathalons Ken could only run with a heavy shoe he’d built from a Rollerblade boot and a leaf spring. That put him at a substantial weight disadvantage to the amputee athletes in the physically challenged division, so ramping up his energy efficiency to compensate for his seven-pound shoes could make a huge difference.
Ken got a stack of videos of Kenyan runners and ran through them frame by frame. After hours of viewing, he was struck by a revelation: the greatest marathoners in the world run like kindergartners. “Watch kids at a playground running around. Their feet land right under them, and they push back,” Ken said. “Kenyans do the same thing. The way they ran barefoot growing up is astonishingly similar to how they run now—and astonishingly different from how Americans run.” Grabbing a pad and pen, Ken went back through the tapes and jotted down all the components of a Kenyan stride. Then he went looking for guinea pigs.
Fortunately, Ken had already begun doing physiological testing on triathletes as part of his kinesiology studies at Virginia Polytechnic, so that gave him access to a lot of athletes to experiment on. Runners would have been resistant to having someone tinker with their stride, but Ironmen are up for anything. “Triathletes are very forward thinking,” Ken explains. “It’s a young sport, so it’s not mired in tradition. Back in 1988, triathletes started to use aero bars on their bikes and cyclists mocked them mercilessly—until Greg Lemond used one and won the Tour de France by eight seconds.”
Ken’s first test subject was Alan Melvin, a world-class Masters triathlete in his sixties. First, Ken set a baseline by having Melvin run four hundred meters full out. Then he clipped a small electric metronome to his T-shirt.
“What’s this for?”
“Set it for one hundred eighty beats a minute, then run to the beat.”
“Why?”
“Kenyans have superquick foot turnover,” Ken said. “Quick, light leg contractions are more economical than big, forceful ones.”
“I don’t get it,” Alan said. “Don’t I want a longer stride, not a shorter one?”
“Let me ask you this,” Ken replied. “You ever see one of those barefoot guys in a 10K race?”
“Yeah. It’s like they’re running on hot coals.”
“You ever beat one of those barefoot guys?”
Alan reflected. “Good point.”
After practicing for five months, Alan came back for another round of testing. He ran four one-mile repeats, and every lap of the track was faster than his previous four hundred-meter best. “This was someone who’d been running for forty years and was already Top Ten in his age group,” Ken pointed out. “This wasn’t the improvement of a beginner. In fact, as a sixty-two-year-old athlete, he should have been declining.”
Ken was working on himself, as well. He’d been such a weak runner that in his best triathlon to date, he’d come off the bike with a ten-minute lead and still lost. Within a year of creating his new technique in 1997, Ken became unbeatable, winning the world disabled championship the next two years in a row. Once word got out that Ken had figured out a way to run that was not only fast but gentle on the legs, other triathletes began hiring him as their coach. Ken went on to train eleven national champions and built up a roster of more than one hundred athletes.
Convinced that he’d rediscovered an ancient art, Ken named his style Evolution Running. Coincidentally, two other barefoot-style running methods were popping up around the same time. “Chi Running,” based on the balance and minimalism of tai chi, began taking off in San Francisco, while Dr. Nicholas Romanov, a Russian exercise physiologist based in Florida, was teaching his POSE Method. The surge in minimalism did not arise through copying or cross-pollination; instead, it seemed to be testament to the urgent need for a response to the running-injury epidemic, and the pure mechanical logic of, as Barefoot Ted would call it, “the bricolage of barefooting”—the elegance of a less-is-more cure.
But a simple system isn’t necessarily simple to learn, as I found out when Ken Mierke filmed me in action. My mind was registering easy, light, and smooth, but the video showed I was still bobbing up and down while bending forward like I was leaning into a hurricane. My ease with Caballo’s style, Ken explained, had been my mistake.
“When I teach this technique and ask someone how it feels, if they say ‘Great!,’ I go ‘Damn!’ That means they didn’t change a thing. The change should be awkward. You should go through a period where you’re no longer good at doing it wrong and not yet good at doing it right. You’re not only adapting your skills, but your tissues; you’re activating muscles that have been dormant most of your life.”
Eric had a foolproof system for teaching the same style.
“Imagine your kid is running into the street and you have to sprint after her in bare feet,” Eric told me when I picked up my training with him after my time with Ken. “You’ll automatically lock into perfect form—you’ll be up on your forefeet, with your back erect, head steady, arms high, elbows driving, and feet touching down quickly on the forefoot and kicking back toward your butt.”
Then, to embed that light, whispery foot strike into my muscle memory, Eric began programming workouts for me with lots of hill repeats. “You can’t run uphill powerfully with poor biomechanics,” Eric explained. “Just doesn’t work. If you try landing on your heel with a straight leg, you’ll tip over backward.”
Eric also had me get a heart-rate monitor so I could correct the second-most common mistake of the running class—pace. Most of us are just as clueless about speed as we are about form. “Nearly all runners do their slow runs too fast, and their fast runs too slow,” Ken Mierke says. “So they’re just training their bodies to burn sugar, which is the last thing a distance runner wants. You’ve got enough fat stored to run to California, so the more you train your body to burn fat instead of sugar, the longer your limited sugar tank is going to last.”
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. When your feet aren’t artificially protected, you’re forced to vary your pace and watch your speed: the instant you get recklessly fast and sloppy, the pain shooting up your shins will slow you down.
I was tempted to go the Full Caballo and chuck my running shoes for a pair of sandals, but Eric warned me that I was cruising for a stress fracture if I tried to suddenly go naked after keeping my feet immobilized for forty years. Since the No. I priority was getting me ready for fifty backcountry miles, I didn’t have time to slowly build up foot strength before starting my serious training. I’d need to start off with some protection, so I experimented with a few low-slung models before settling on a classic I found on eBay: a pair of old-stock Nike Pegasus* from 2000, something of a throwback to the flat-footed feel of the old Cortez.
By week two, Eric was sending me off for two hours at a stretch, his only advice being to focus on form and keep the pace relaxed enough to occasionally breathe with my mouth shut. (Fifty years earlier, Arthur Lydiard offered an equal but opposite tip for managing heart rate and pace: “Only go as fast as you can while holding a conversation.”) By week four, Eric was layering in speedwork: “The faster you can run comfortably,” he taught me, “the less energy you’ll need. Speed means less time on your feet.” Barely eight weeks into his program, I was already running more miles per week—at a much faster pace—than I ever had in my life.
That’s when I decided to cheat. Eric had promised that my eating would self-regulate once my mileage began climbing, but I was too doubtful to wait and see. I have a cyclist friend who dumps his water bottles before riding uphill; if twelve ounces slowed him down, it wasn’t hard to calculate what thirty pounds of spare tire were doing to me. But if I was going to tinker with my diet a few months before a 50- mile race, I had to be careful to do it Tarahumara-style: I had to get strong while getting lean.
I tracked down Tony Ramirez, a horticulturist in the Mexican border town of Laredo who’s been traveling into Tarahumara country for thirty years and now grows Tarahumara heritage corn and grinds his own pinole. “I’m a big fan of pinole. I love it,” Tony told me. “It’s an incomplete protein, but combined with beans, it’s more nutritious than a T-bone steak. They usually mix with it with water and drink it, but I like it dry. It tastes like shredded popcorn.
“Do you know about phenols?” Tony added. “They’re natural plant chemicals that combat disease. They basically boost your immune system.” When Cornell University researchers did a comparison analysis of wheat, oats, corn, and rice to see which had the highest quantity of phenols, corn was the hands-down winner. And because it’s a low-fat, whole-grain food, pinole can slash your risk of diabetes and a host of digestive-system cancers—in fact, of all cancers. According to Dr. Robert Weinberg, a professor of cancer research at MIT and discoverer of the first tumor-suppressor gene, one in every seven cancer deaths is caused by excess body fat. The math is stark: cut the fat, and cut your cancer risk.
So the Tarahumara Miracle, when it comes to cancer, isn’t such a mystery after all. “Change your lifestyle, and you can reduce your risk of cancer by sixty to seventy percent,” Dr. Weinberg has said. Colon, prostate, and breast cancer were almost unknown in Japan, he points out, until the Japanese began eating like Americans; within a few decades, their mortality rate from those three diseases skyrocketed. When the American Cancer Society compared lean and heavy people in 2003, the results were even grimmer than expected: heavier men and women were far more likely to die from at least ten different kinds of cancer.
The first step toward going cancer-free the Tarahumara way, consequently, is simple enough: Eat less. The second step is just as simple on paper, though tougher in practice: Eat better. Along with getting more exercise, says Dr. Weinberg, we need to build our diets around fruit and vegetables instead of red meat and processed carbs. The most compelling evidence comes from watching cancer cells fight for their own survival: when cancerous tumors are removed by surgery, they are 300 percent more likely to grow back in patients with a “traditional Western diet” than they are in patients who eat lots of fruit and veggies, according to a 2007 report by The Journal of the American Medical Association. Why? Because stray cells left behind after surgery seem to be stimulated by animal proteins. Remove those foods from your diet, and those tumors may never appear in the first place. Eat like a poor person, as Coach Joe Vigil likes to say, and you’ll only see your doctor on the golf course.
“Anything the Tarahumara eat, you can get very easily,” Tony told me. “It’s mostly pinto beans, squash, chili peppers, wild greens, pinole, and lots of chia. And pinole isn’t as hard to get as you think.” Nativeseeds.org sells it online, along with heritage seeds in case you want to grow your own corn and whiz up some homemade pinole in a coffee grinder. Protein is no problem; according to a 1979 study in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the traditional Tarahumara diet exceeds the United Nations’ recommended daily intake by more than 50 percent. As for bone-strengthening calcium, that gets worked into tortillas and pinole with the limestone the Tarahumara women use to soften the corn.
“How about beer?” I asked. “Any benefit to drinking like the Tarahumara?”
“Yes and no,” Tony said. “Tarahumara tesgüino is very lightly fermented, so it’s low in alcohol and high in nutrients.” That makes Tarahumara beer a rich food source—like a whole-grain smoothie— while ours is just sugar water. I could try home-brewing my own corn near-beer, but Tony had a better idea. “Grow some wild geranium,” he suggested. “Or buy the extract online.” Geranium niveum is the Tarahumara wonder drug; according to the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, it’s as effective as red wine at neutralizing disease-causing free radicals. As one writer put it, wild geranium is “anti-everything—anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antibacterial, antioxidant.”
I stocked up on pinole and chia, and even ordered some Tarahumara corn seeds to plant out back: cocopah and mayo yellow chapalote and pinole maiz. But realistically, I knew it was only a matter of time before I got sick of seeds and dried corn and started double-fisting burgers again. Luckily, I spoke to Dr. Ruth Heidrich first.
“Have you ever had salad for breakfast?” she asked me. Dr. Ruth is a six-time Ironman triathlete and, according to Living Fit magazine, one of the ten Fittest Women in America. She only became an athlete and a Ph.D. in health education, she told me, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, twenty-four years ago. Exercise has been shown to cut the risk of breast cancer reoccurrence by up to 50 percent, so even with the sutures still in her chest from her mastectomy, Dr. Ruth began training for her first triathlon. She also started researching the diets of noncancerous cultures and became convinced that she needed to immediately transition from the standard American diet—or SAD, as she calls it—and eat more like the Tarahumara.
“I had a medical gun at my head,” Dr. Ruth told me. “I was so scared, I’d have bargained with the devil. So by comparison, giving up meat wasn’t that big a deal.” She had a simple rule: if it came from plants, she ate it; if it came from animals, she didn’t. Dr. Ruth had much more to lose than I did if she got it wrong, but almost immediately, she felt her strength increasing.
Her endurance increased so dramatically that within one year, she’d progressed from 10ks to marathons to the Ironman. “Even my cholesterol dropped from two hundred thirty to one hundred sixty in twenty-one days,” she adds. Under her Tarahumara-style eating plan, lunch and dinner were built around fruit, beans, yams, whole grains, and vegetables, and breakfast was often salad.
“You get leafy greens in your body first thing in the morning and you’ll lose a lot of weight,” she urged me. Because a monster salad is loaded with nutrient-rich carbs and low in fat, I could stuff myself and not feel hungry—or queasy—when it came time to work out. Plus, greens are packed with water, so they’re great for rehydrating after a night’s sleep. And what better way to down your five vegetables a day than forking them all down at once?
So the next morning, I gave it a stab. I wandered around the kitchen with a mixing bowl, throwing in my daughter’s half-eaten apple, some kidney beans of questionable vintage, a bunch of raw spinach, and a ton of broccoli, which I chopped into splinters, hoping to make it more like coleslaw. Dr. Ruth fancies up her salads with blackstrap molasses, but I figured I’d earned the extra fat and sugar, so I went upscale, dousing mine with gourmet poppy-seed dressing.
After two bites, I was a convert. A breakfast salad, I was happy to find, is also a sweet-topping delivery system, just like pancakes and syrup. It’s far more refreshing than frozen waffles, and, best of all, I could cram myself till my eyes were green and still shoot out the door for a workout an hour later.
“The Tarahumara aren’t great runners,” Eric messaged me as we began my second month of those workouts. “They’re great athletes, and those two things are very different.” Runners are assembly-line workers; they become good at one thing—moving straight ahead at a steady speed—and repeat that motion until overuse fritzes out the machinery. Athletes are Tarzans. Tarzan swims and wrestles and jumps and swings on vines. He’s strong and explosive. You never know what Tarzan will do next, which is why he never gets hurt.
“Your body needs to be shocked to become resilient,” Eric explained. Follow the same daily routine, and your musculoskeletal system quickly figures out how to adapt and go on autopilot. But surprise it with new challenges—leap over a creek, commando-crawl under a log, sprint till your lungs are bursting—and scores of nerves and ancillary muscles are suddenly electrified into action.
For the Tarahumara, that’s just daily life. The Tarahumara step into the unknown every time they leave the cave, because they never know how fast they’ll have to sprint after a rabbit, how much firewood they’ll have to haul home, how tricky the climbing will be during a winter storm. The first challenge they face as kids is surviving on the edge of a cliff; their first and lifelong way to play is the ball game, which is nothing if not an exercise in uncertainty. You can’t drive a wooden ball over a jumble of rocks unless you’re ready to lunge, lope, backpedal, sprint, and leap in and out of ditches.
Before the Tarahumara run long, they get strong. And if I wanted to stay healthy, Eric warned me, I’d better do likewise. So instead of stretching before a run, I got right to work. Lunges, pushups, jump squats, crunches; Eric had me powering through a half hour of raw strength drills every other day, with nearly all of them on a fitness ball to sharpen my balance and fire those supportive ancillary muscles. As soon as I finished, it was off to the hills. “There’s no sleepwalking your way up a hill,” Eric pointed out. Long climbs were an exercise in shock and awe, forcing me to focus on form and shift gears like a Tour de France cyclist. “Hills are speedwork in disguise,” Frank Shorter used to say.
That was the year my hometown in Pennsylvania got a heat flash for Christmas. On New Year’s Day, I pulled on shorts and a thermal top for a five-mile trail run, just an easy leg-stretcher on a rest day. I rambled through the woods for half an hour, then cut through a field of winter hay and headed for home. The warm sun and the aroma of sun-baked grass were so luxurious, I kept slowing down, dragging out that last half mile as long as I could.
When I got within one hundred yards of my house, I stopped, shucked my thermal shirt, and turned back for one last lap through the hay. I finished that one and started another, tossing my T-shirt aside as well. By lap four, my socks and running shoes were on the pile, my bare feet cushioned by dry grass and warm dirt. By lap six, I was fingering my waistband, but decided to keep the shorts out of consideration for my eighty-two-year-old neighbor. I’d finally recovered that feeling I’d had during my run with Caballo—the easy, light, smooth, fast sensation that I could outrun the sun and still be going by morning.
Like Caballo, the Tarahumara secret had begun working for me before I even understood it. Because I was eating lighter and hadn’t been laid up once by injury, I was able to run more; because I was running more, I was sleeping great, feeling relaxed, and watching my resting heart rate drop. My personality had even changed: The grouchiness and temper I’d considered part of my Irish-Italian DNA had ebbed so much that my wife remarked, “Hey if this comes from ultrarunning, I’ll tie your shoes for you.” I knew aerobic exercise was a powerful antidepressant, but I hadn’t realized it could be so profoundly mood stabilizing and—I hate to use the word—meditative. If you don’t have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain’t getting them.
I kept waiting for all the old ghosts of the past to come roaring out—the screaming Achilles, the ripped hamstring, the plantar fasciitis. I started carrying my cell phone on the longer runs, convinced that any day now, I’d end up a limping mess by the side of the road. Whenever I felt a twinge, I ran through my diagnostics:
Back straight? Check.
Knees bent and driving forward? Check.
Heels flicking back? … There’s your problem. Once I made the adjustment, the hot spot always eased and disappeared. By the time Eric bumped me up to five-hour runs in the last month before the race, ghosts and cell phone were forgotten.
For the first time in my life, I was looking forward to superlong runs not with dread, but anticipation. How had Barefoot Ted put it? Like fish slipping back into water. Exactly. I felt like I was born to run.
And, according to three maverick scientists, I was.
*Nike’s policy of yanking best-selling shoes from the shelves every ten months has inspired some truly operatic bursts of profanity on running message boards. The Nike Pegasus, for instance, debuted in 1981, achieved its sleek, waffled apotheosis in ’83, and then—despite being the most popular running shoe of all time—was suddenly discontinued in ’98, only to reappear as a whole new beast in 2000. Why so much surgery? Not to improve the shoe, as a former Nike shoe designer who worked on the original Pegasus told me, but to improve revenue; Nike’s aim is to triple sales by enticing runners to buy two, three, five pairs at a time, stockpiling in case they never see their favorites again.