Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
FOR DAYS, I'd been searching Mexico's Sierra Madre for the phantom known as Caballo Blanco -- the White Horse. I'd finally arrived at the end of the trail, in the last place I expected to find him -- not deep in the wilderness he was said to haunt, but in the dim lobby of an old hotel on the edge of a dusty desert town.
"Si, El Caballo esta," the desk clerk said, nodding. Yes, the Horse is here.
"For real?" After hearing that I'd just missed him so many times, in so many bizarre locations, I'd begun to suspect that Caballo Blanco was nothing more than a fairy tale, a local Loch Ness monstuo dreamed up to spook the kills and fool gullible gringos.
"He's always back by five," the clerk added. "It's like a ritual."
I didn't know whether to hug her in relief or high-five her in triumph. I checked my watch. That meant I'd actually lay eyes on the ghost in less than ... hang on.
"But it's already after six."
The clerk shrugged. "Maybe he's gone away."
I sagged into an ancient sofa. 1 was filthy, famished, and defeated. I was exhausted, and so were my leads.
Some said Caballo Blanco was a fugitive; others heard he was a boxer who'd run off to punish himself after beating a man to death in the ring. No one knew his name, or age, or where he was from. He was like some Old West gunslinger whose only traces were tail tales and a whiff of cigarillo smoke. Descriptions and sightings were all over the map; villagers who lived impossible distances apart swore they'd seen him traveling on foot on the same day, and described him on a scale that swung wildly from "funny and simplified" to "freaky and gigantic."
But in all versions of the Caballo Blanco legend, certain basic details were always the same: He'd come to Mexico years ago and trekked deep into the wild, impenetrable Barrancas del Cobre -- the Copper Canyons -- to live among the Tarahumara, a near-mythical tribe of Stone Age superathletes. The Tarahumara (pronounced Spanish-style by swallowing the "h": Tara-oo-mara) may be the healthiest and most serene people on earth, and the greatest runners of all time.
When it comes to ultradistances, nothing can beat a Tarahumara runner -- not a racehorse, not a cheetah, not an Olympic marathoner. Very few outsiders have ever seen the Tarahumara in action, but amazing stories of their superhuman toughness and tranquillity have drifted out of the canyons for centuries. One explorer swore he saw a Tarahumara catch a deer with his bare hands, chasing the bounding animal until it finally dropped dead from exhaustion, "its hoofs falling off." Another adventurer spent ten hours climbing up and over a Copper Canyon mountain by mule; a Tarahumara runner made the same trip in ninety minutes.
"Try this," a Tarahumara woman once told an exhausted explorer who'd collapsed at the base of a mountain. She handed him a gourd full of a murky liquid. He swallowed a few gulps, and was amazed to feel new energy pulsing in his veins. He got to his feet and scaled the peak like an overcaffeinated Sherpa. The Tarahumara, the explorer would later report, also guarded the recipe to a special energy food that leaves them trim, powerful, and unstoppable: a few mouthfuls packed enough nutritional punch to let them run all day without rest.
But whatever secrets the Tarahumara are hiding, they've hidden them well. To this day, the Tarahumara live in the side of cliffs higher than a hawk's nest in a land few have ever seen. The Barrancas are a lost world in the most remote wilderness in North America, a sort of a shorebound Bermuda Triangle known for swallowing the misfits and desperadoes who stray inside. Lots of bad things can happen down there, and probably will; survive the man-eating jaguars, deadly snakes, and blistering heat, and you've still got to deal with "canyon fever," a potentially fatal freak-out brought on by the Barrancas' desolate eeriness. The deeper you penetrate into the Barrancas, the more it feels like a crypt sliding shut around you. The walls tighten, shadows spread, phantom echoes whisper; even,' route out seems to end in sheer rock. Lost prospectors would be gripped by such madness and despair, they'd slash their own throats or hurl themselves oil cliffs. Little surprise that few strangers have ever seen the Tarahumara s homeland -- let alone the Tarahumara.
But somehow the White Hourse had made his way to the depths of the Barrancas. And there, its said, he was adopted by the Tarahumara as a friend and kindred spirit; a ghost among ghosts. He'd certainly mastered two Tarahumara skills -- invisibility and extraordinary endurance -- because even though he was spotted all over the canyons, no one seemed to know where he lived or when he might appear next. If anyone could translate the ancient secrets of the Tarahumara, I was told, it was this lone wanderer of the High Sierras.
I'd become so obsessed with finding Caballo Blanco that as 1 dozed on the hotel sofa, I could even imagine the sound of his voice. "Probably like Yogi Bear ordering burritos at Taco Bell," I mused. A guy like that, a wanderer who'd go anywhere but fit in nowhere, must live inside his own head and rarely hear his own voice. He'd make weird jokes and crack himself up. He'd have a booming laugh and atrocious Spanish. He'd be loud and chatty and ... and ...
Wait. 1 was hearing him. My eyes popped open to see a dusty cadaver in a tattered straw hat bantering with the desk clerk.
It all began with a simple question that no one could answer.
It was a five-word puzzle that led me to a photo of a very fast man in a very short skirt, and from there it only got stranger. Soon, I was dealing with a murder, drug guerrillas, and a one-armed man with a cream-cheese cup strapped to his head. 1 met a beautiful blonde forest ranger who slipped out of her clothes and found salvation by running naked in the Idaho forests, and a young surfer babe in pigtails who ran straight toward her death in the desert. A talented young runner would die. Two others would barely escape with their lives.
I kept looking, and stumbled across the Barefoot Batman ... Naked Guy... Kalahari Bushmen ... the Toenail Amputee ... a cult devoted to distance running and sex parties ... the Wild Man of the Blue Ridge Mountains... and, ultimately, the ancient tribe of the Tarahumara and their shadowy disciple, Caballo Blanco.
In the end, 1 got my answer, but only after I found myself in the middle of the greatest race the world would never see: the Ultimate Fighting Competition of footraces, an underground showdown pitting some of the best ultradistance runners of our time against the best ultrarunners of all time, in a fifty-mile race on hidden trails only Tarahumara feet had ever touched. I'd be startled to discover that the ancient saying of the Tao Te Cbing -- "The best runner leaves no tracks'" -- wasn't some gossamer koan, but real, concrete, how-to, training advice.
And all because in January 2001 I asked my doctor this:
"How come my foot hurts?"
I'd gone to see one of the top sports-medicine specialists in the country because an invisible ice pick was driving straight up through the sole of my foot. The week before, I'd been out for an easy three-mile jog on a snowy farm road when I suddenly whinnied in pain, grabbing my right foot and screaming curses as I toppled over in the snow. When I got a grip on myself, 1 checked to see how badly I was bleeding. I must have impaled my foot on a sharp rock, I figured, or an old nail wedged in the ice. But there wasn't a drop of blood, or even a hole in my shoe.
"Running is your problem," Dr. Joe Torg confirmed when 1 limped into his Philadelphia examining room a few days later. He should know; Dr. Torg had not only helped create the entire field of sports medicine, but lie also co-wrote The Running Athlete, the definitive radiographic analysis of every conceivable running injury. He ran me through an X-ray and watched me hobble around, then determined that I'd aggravated my cuboid, a cluster of bones parallel to the arch that 1 hadn't even known existed until it reengineered itself into an internal Taser.
"But I'm barely running at all," I said. "I'm doing, like, two or three miles every other day. And not even on asphalt. Mostly dirt roads."
Didn't matter. "The human body is not designed for that kind of abuse," Dr. Torg replied. "Especially not your body."
I knew exactly what lie meant. At six feet four inches and two hundred thirty pounds, I'd been told many times that nature intended guys my size to post up under the hoop or take a bullet for the President, not pound our bulk down the pavement. And since I'd turned forty, I was starting to see why; in the five years since I'd stopped playing pickup hoops and tried turning myself into a marathoner, I'd ripped my hamstring (twice), strained my Achilles tendons (repeatedly), sprained my ankles (both, alternately), suffered aching arches (regularly), and had to walk down stairs backward on tiptoe because my heels were so sore. And now, apparently, the last docile spot on my feet had joined the rebellion.
I thanked him, promised I'd take his advice, then immediately went behind his back to someone else. Doc Torg was getting up in years, 1 realized; maybe he'd gotten a little too conservative with his advice and a little too quick with his cortisone. A physician friend recommended a sports podiatrist who was also a marathoner, so 1 made an appointment for the following week.
The podiatrist took another X-ray, then probed my foot with his thumbs. "Looks like you've got cuboid syndrome," he concluded. "1 can blast the inflammation out with some cortisone, but then you're going to need orthotics."
"Damn," 1 muttered. "That's just what Torg said.
He'd started to leave the room for the needle, but then he stopped short. "You already saw Joe Torg?" "Yes." "You already got a cortisone shot?" "Uh, yeah." "So what are you doing here?" he asked, suddenly looking impatient and a little suspicious, as if lie thought I really enjoyed having needles shoved into the tenderest part of my foot. Maybe he suspected 1 was a sadomasochistic junkie who was addicted to both pain and painkillers.
"You realize Dr. Torg is the godfather of sports medicine, right? His diagnoses arc usually well respected."
"I know. 1 just wanted to double-check."
"I'm not going to give you another shot, but we can schedule a titling for the orthotics. And you should really think about finding some other activity besides running."
"Sounds good," I said. He was a better runner than I'd ever be, and he'd just confirmed the verdict of a doctor he readily admitted was the sensei of sports physicians. There was absolutely no arguing with his diagnosis. So 1 started looking for someone else.
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: 1 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 scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.