Chapter 30
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.
—HERB ELLIOTT, Olympic champion and
world-record holder in the mile who trained in bare feet,
wrote poetry, and retired undefeated
OYE, OSO, a shopkeeper called, waving me inside.
Two days after we’d arrived in Urique, we were known everywhere by the spirit-animal nicknames Caballo had given us. “Everywhere,” of course, meant about five hundred yards in every direction; Urique is a tiny, Lost World village sitting alone at the bottom of the canyon like a pebble at the bottom of a well. By the time we’d finished breakfast on our first morning, we’d already been folded into the local social life. An army squad encamped on the outskirts would salute Jenn as they passed through on patrol, calling, “?Hola, Brujita!” Kids greeted Barefoot Ted with shouts of “Buenos días, Se?or Mono.” Good morning, Mr. Monkey.
“Hey, Bear,” the shopkeeper continued. “Do you know that Arnulfo has never been beaten? Do you know he’s won the one-hundred-kilometer race three times in a row?”
No Kentucky Derby, presidential election, or celebrity murder trial has ever been handicapped as passionately and personally as Caballo’s race was by the people of Urique. As a mining village whose best days were over more than a century ago, Urique had two things left to be proud of: its brutally tough landscape and its Tarahumara neighbors. Now, for the first time, a pack of exotic foreign runners had traveled all this way to test themselves against both, and it had exploded into much more than a race: for the people of Urique, it was the one chance in their lifetime to show the outside world just what they were made of.
And even Caballo was surprised to find that his race had surpassed his hopes and was growing into the Ultimate Fighting Competition of underground ultras. Over the past two days, Tarahumara runners had continued trickling in by ones and twos from all directions. When we awoke the morning after our hike from Batopilas, we saw a band of local Tarahumara traipsing down from the hills above the village. Caballo hadn’t even been sure the Urique Tarahumara still ran anymore; he’d been afraid that, as in the tragic case of the Tarahumara of Yerbabuena, government upgrades to the dirt road had converted the Urique Tarahumara from runners into hitchhikers. They certainly looked like a people in transition; the Urique Tarahumara still carried wooden palia sticks (their version of the ball race was more like high-speed field hockey), but instead of traditional white skirts and sandals, they wore running shorts and sneakers from the Catholic mission.
That same afternoon, Caballo was overjoyed to see a fifty-one-year-old named Herbolisto come jogging in from Chinivo, accompanied by Nacho, a forty-one-year-old champion from one of Herbolisto’s neighboring settlements. As Caballo had feared, Herbolisto had been laid up with the flu. But he was one of Caballo’s oldest Tarahumara friends and hated the idea of missing the race, so as soon as he felt a little better, he grabbed a pinole bag and set off on the sixty-mile trip on his own, stopping off on the way to invite Nacho along for the fun.
By the eve of Race Day, our numbers had tripled from eight to twenty-five. Up and down Urique’s main street, debate over who was now the true top seed was running hot: Was it Caballo Blanco, the wily old veteran who’d poached the secrets of both American and Tarahumara runners? Or the Urique Tarahumara, experts on the local trails who had hometown pride and support on their side? Some money was riding on Billy Bonehead, the Young Wolf, whose surf-god physique drew admiring stares whenever he went for a swim in the Urique River. But the heaviest street action was divided between the two stars: Arnulfo, king of the Copper Canyons, and El Venado, his mysterious foreign challenger.
“Sí, se?or,” I replied to the shopkeeper. “Arnulfo won a one-hundred-kilometer race in the canyons three times. But the Deer has won a one-hundred-mile race in the mountains seven times.”
“But it’s very hot down here,” the shopkeeper retorted. “The Tarahumara, they eat heat.”
“True. But the Deer won a one-hundred-thirty-five-mile race across a desert called Death Valley in the middle of summer. No one has ever run it faster.”
“No one beats the Tarahumara,” the shopkeeper insisted.
“So I’ve heard. So who are you betting on?”
He shrugged. “The Deer.”
The Urique villagers had grown up in awe of the Tarahumara, but this tall gringo with the flashy orange shoes was unlike anyone they’d ever seen. It was eerie watching Scott run side by side with Arnulfo; even though Scott had never seen the Tarahumara before and Arnulfo had never seen the outside world, somehow these two men separated by two thousand years of culture had developed the same running style. They’d approached their art from opposite ends of history, and met precisely in the middle.
I first saw it up on Batopilas mountain, after we’d finally gotten to the top and the trail flattened as it circled the peak. Arnulfo took advantage of the plateau to open it up. Scott locked in beside him. As the trail curled into the setting sun, the two of them vanished into the glare. For a few moments, I couldn’t tell them apart—they were two fiery silhouettes moving with identical rhythm and grace.
“Got it!” Luis said, dropping back to show me the image in his digital camera. He’d sprinted ahead and wheeled around just in time to capture everything I’d come to understand about running over the past two years. It wasn’t Arnulfo’s and Scott’s matching form so much as their matching smiles; they were both grinning with sheer muscular pleasure, like dolphins rocketing through the waves. “This one is going to make me cry when I get back home,” Luis said. “It’s like getting Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle in the same shot.” If Arnulfo had an advantage, it wouldn’t be style or spirit.
But I had another reason to put my money on Scott. During the last, hardest miles of the hike to Urique, he kept hanging back with me and I’d wondered why. He’d come all this way to see the best runners in the world, so why was he wasting his time with one of the worst? Didn’t he resent me for holding everyone up? Seven hours of descending that mountain eventually gave me my answer:
What Coach Joe Vigil sensed about character, what Dr. Bramble conjectured with his anthropological models, Scott had been his entire life. The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other. Scott learned that before he had a choice, back when he was trailing Dusty and the boys through the Minnesota woods. He was no good and had no reason to believe he ever would be, but the joy he got from running was the joy of adding his power to the pack. Other runners try to disassociate from fatigue by blasting iPods or imagining the roar of the crowd in Olympic Stadium, but Scott had a simpler method: it’s easy to get outside yourself when you’re thinking about someone else.*
That’s why the Tarahumara bet like crazy before a ball race; it makes them equal partners in the effort, letting the runners know they’re all in it together. Likewise, the Hopis consider running a form of prayer; they offer every step as a sacrifice to a loved one, and in return ask the Great Spirit to match their strength with some of his own. Knowing that, it’s no mystery why Arnulfo had no interest in racing outside the canyons, and why Silvino never would again: if they weren’t racing for their people, then what was the point? Scott, whose sick mother never left his thoughts, was still a teenager when he absorbed this connection between compassion and competition.
The Tarahumara drew strength from this tradition, I realized, but Scott drew strength from every running tradition. He was an archivist and an innovator, an omnivorous student who gave as much serious thought to the running lore of the Navajo, the Kalahari Bushmen, and the Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei as he did to aerobic levels, lactate thresholds, and the optimal recruitment of all three types of muscle-twitch fiber (not two, as most runners believe).
Arnulfo wasn’t going up against a fast American. He was about to race the world’s only twenty-first-century Tarahumara.
While the shopkeeper and I were busy setting the over-under, I saw Arnulfo strolling past. I grabbed a couple of Popsicles to pay him back for the sweet limes he’d given me at his house, and together we went looking for a shady spot to relax. I saw Manuel Luna sitting under a tree, but he looked so alone and lost in thought, I didn’t think we should disturb him. Barefoot Monkey, however, saw it differently.
“MANUEL!” Barefoot Ted shouted from across the street.
Manuel’s head jerked up.
“Amigo, am I glad to see you,” Barefoot Ted said. He’d been looking around for some tire rubber so he could make his own pair of Tarahumara sandals, but figured he needed some expert advice. He grabbed mystified Manuel by the arm and led him into a tiny shop. As it turned out, Ted was right; all tire rubber is not the same. What Ted wanted, Manuel demonstrated with his hands, was a strip with a groove right down the middle, so the knot for the toe strap can be countersunk and not get torn off by the ground.
Minutes later, Barefoot Ted and Manuel Luna were outside with their heads together, tracing Ted’s feet and slicing away at the tire tread with my big-bladed Victorinox knife. They worked through the afternoon, trimming and measuring, until, just before dinner, Ted was able to do a test run down the street in his new pair of Air Lunas. From then on, he and Manuel Luna were inseparable. They arrived for dinner together and hunted around the packed restaurant for a place to sit.
Urique has only one restaurant, but when it’s run by Mamá Tita, one is plenty. From daybreak till midnight for four straight days, this cheerful sixty-something woman kept the four burners on her old propane stove blazing full blast, bustling away in a kitchen hot as a boiler room as she turned out mountains of food for all Caballo’s runners: stewed chicken and goat, batter-fried river fish, grilled beef, refried beans and guacamole, and minty, tangy salsas, all garnished with sweet limes and chili oil and fresh cilantro. For breakfast, she served eggs scrambled with goat cheese and sweet peppers, and on the side, heaping bowls of pinole and flapjacks that tasted so much like pound cake, I volunteered to apprentice in her kitchen one morning to learn the secret recipe.*
As the American and Tarahumara runners squeezed around the two long tables in Tita’s back garden, Caballo banged on a beer bottle and stood up. I thought he was going to deliver our final race instructions, but he had something else on his mind.
“There’s something wrong with you people,” he began. “Rarámuri don’t like Mexicans. Mexicans don’t like Americans. Americans don’t like anybody. But you’re all here. And you keep doing things you’re not supposed to. I’ve seen Rarámuri helping chabochis cross the river. I’ve watched Mexicans treat Rarámuri like great champions. Look at these gringos, treating people with respect. Normal Mexicans and Americans and Rarámuri don’t act this way.”
Over in the corner, Ted thought he could help Manuel by translating Caballo’s clumsy Spanish into clumsier Spanglish. As Ted yammered, a faint smile kept flitting across Manuel’s face. Finally, it just stayed there.
“What are you doing here?” Caballo went on. “You have corn to plant. You have families to take care of. You gringos, you know it can be dangerous down here. No one has to tell the Rarámuri about the danger. One of my friends lost someone he loved, someone who could have been the next great Rarámuri champion. He’s suffering, but he’s a true friend. So he’s here.”
Everyone got quiet. Barefoot Ted laid a hand on Manuel’s back. Of all the Tarahumara he could have asked for help with his huaraches, I realized, he hadn’t picked Manuel Luna by accident.
“I thought this race would be a disaster, because I thought you’d be too sensible to come.” Caballo scanned the garden, found Ted in the corner, and locked eyes with him. “You Americans are supposed to be greedy and selfish, but then I see you acting with a good heart. Acting out of love, doing good things for no reason. You know who does things for no good reason?”
“CABALLO!” the shout went up.
“Yah, right. Crazy people. Más Locos. But one thing about crazy people—they see things other people don’t. The government is putting in roads, destroying a lot of our trails. Sometimes Mother Nature wins and wipes them out with floods and rock slides. But you never know. You never know if we’ll get a chance like this again. Tomorrow will be one of the greatest races of all time, and you know who’s going to see it? Only crazy people. Only you Más Locos.”
“Más Locos! ” Beers were shoved in the air, bottles were clinking. Caballo Blanco, lone wanderer of the High Sierras, had finally come out of the wild to find himself surrounded by friends. After years of disappointments, he was twelve hours from seeing his dream come true.
“Tomorrow, you’ll see what crazy people see. The gun fires at daybreak, because we’ve got a lot of running to do.”
“CABALLO! VIVA CABALLO!”
*Any doubts I had about this theory were laid to rest the following year, when I went to crew for Luis Escobar at Badwater. At three o’clock in the morning, I drove ahead to check on Scott and found him bearing down in the midst of a four-mile-high hill. He’d already run eighty miles in 125-degree heat and was on pace for a new course record, but when he saw me, the first words out of his mouth were, “How’s Coyote?”
*Tita’s secret (it’s okay, she won’t mind): she whips boiled rice, overripe bananas, a little cornmeal, and fresh goat milk into her batter. Perfection.