Christopher McDougall's book Born to Run is not about running, at least not what most of us consider to be running. Born to Run is a wide-ranging adventure story about elite, ultra-distance trail running, a cultish specialty of running that involves 50-mile races through wilderness terrain.
Ultra running shares little common ground with the intended reader of Born to Run, the average American runner. Hard-core ultra runners seem like rock climbers; McDougall describes dirtball outdoors people who camp out near trail systems to run all day and party all night. By contrast, the average American runner is delighted to run a few hours a week on sidewalks, roads, and paths. To say that Born to Run is about running would be more than a small stretch.
In Born to Run, McDougall describes the events leading to a 50-mile trail race through Mexico's Copper Canyon. The race features a handful of native Mexican runners and elite American trail runners, and McDougall builds the race into a clash of cultures. The Tarahumara Mexicans are an indigenous society of agrarian hunter-gatherers that practices long-distance running for sport and survival. The Americans are mostly professional ultra runners who run impressive distances -- 50-mile and 100-mile races are typical.
But McDougall's book is written more like fiction than nonfiction. He has a mythology -- the Tarahumara are like a mythical people living in Shangri-La where all societal evils are neutralized through running. The Tarahumara have no cancer or metabolic disease. They have no violence or theft. They have no concept of sexism. The Tarahumara are the perfect society, McDougall says, because of running.
McDougall explains that the Tarahumara began running to escape eradication at the hands of Spanish colonialism. The people were driven into Mexico's Copper Canyon, a brutal environment lacking water, farmland, and so baked under the hot Mexican sun that colonists could not give pursuit. Realistically, the Tarahumara are a destitute people who live hand to mouth in a lawless, cartel-infested Mexican desert because they have no choice and few opportunities. McDougall provides the historical context, but his book conjures innumerable opportunities to characterize the Tarahumara as an ideal society when, in fact, they are an unfortunate lot.
For McDougall, the Tarahumara way of running has a magical quality; he characterizes it as "easy, smooth, fast" with little motion above the waist, but it's difficult to imagine. This video profiles the Tarahumara and Caballo Blanco, the hero of Born to Run who organizes an annual Copper Canyon race between Tarahumara and Americans. You can watch them run.
To me, these runners simply look like people who run a lot. The Tarahumara are not magical runners; they simply look that much better when compared to the average running American.
Chapter 25 of Born to Run lays blame for bad American running at the feet of Nike. Educated runners (and anyone who reads the New York Times fitness section) know the story: padding reduces the sensation of impact when our feet hit the ground. Reducing the feeling of shock makes it seem as if running is more comfortable, so it changes how we run. Untrained runners wearing shoes tend to land their feet heel first into the ground. Barefoot runners tend to land farther forward on the foot. Many biomechanists have shown that padded shoes distort our naturally evolved running form and actually may cause injuries rather than prevent them. (Stay tuned for a VeloPress book on how to run with shoes as if you were barefoot.)
McDougall takes the blame a step farther, saying that Nike's padded shoes have caused far more than millions of running injuries, they've also turned people off running, which has led to obesity, metabolic disease, and cancer. In short, Nike is the root of all Western ailments. The book pretty much says this.
In all of Born to Run, only chapter 25 seems grounded in reality, mostly because McDougall so heavily relies on what seem like second-hand interviews of authoritative sources like academics and scientists from interviews in the New York Times and on National Public Radio (specifically this 1997 This American Life episode about persistence hunting.). Still, I feel the comparison between normal running and the running in Born to Run too far of a leap. Trail running is very different from road running, requiring very different motions. Perhaps trail running's soft surfaces and its inherent variety of motions reduce its incidence of injury. After all, trail running must mimic the conditions under which we evolved to run much more closely than the hard surfaces and repetitive motions of road running. Unfortunately, I'm aware of no studies comparing injury incidence between trail and road running.
It's easy to overlook an important point here: none of the characters in Born to Run run without shoes. The traditional Tarahumara -- not all of them -- run with tire treads laced to their feet. Take a look at the video above and you'll see that their tire tread shoes are at least a half-inch thick. Even the character "Barefoot Ted" runs with Vibram Five Fingers, though the book seems vague about how often he actually wore them. Born to Run's entire mythology is based on the benefits of running -- specifically barefoot running -- and McDougall proclaims that America would be a better place to live if we all ran barefoot... yet just one person in the book runs barefoot and only some of the time.
Even McDougall runs shod -- in Nikes nonetheless. McDougall says he was inspired to write the book while seeking a cure for his own running injuries. Along the way, he comes to believe that running shoes injured him, but his own description of his rehabilitation at the hands of a running coach illustrates that McDougall was simply another bad American runner. His coach teaches him proper run technique and McDougall is cured. His comeback is evidence that Born to Run is a work of fiction: McDougall keeps his shoes on and is cured long before he runs with the Tarahumara.
This is the great joke of Born to Run: its entire premise is detached from reality. Born to Run is a make-believe book. McDougall tells us we should all run trail ultra marathons. The average American runner, for very practical and sensible reasons, should be skeptical. McDougall proclaims the benefits of barefoot running, yet no one in the book runs barefoot and back in Kansas, few competitive runners seem interested. McDougall's hero, Caballo Blanco, nearly gets into a fistfight with Barefoot Ted over what Blanco considers to be Ted's ceaseless and suicidal evangelism of barefoot running.
Born to Run was an interesting and entertaining read, but the book requires suspension of disbelief from the first page to the end. Its writing style, which I've heard many compare to Outside magazine, is full of overstatement, jumped conclusions, and wondrous imagery. The day after I finished the book, I found myself Googling "Tarahumara" and "Caballo Blanco" during lunch at work.
I found this Running Times interview with Caballo Blanco. (The last question is telling.) I learned that, although the race has grown from 25 to 200 runners, the Tarahumara don't win Caballo Blanco's race anymore. I wonder how many Tarahumara compete for the corn and cash prizes for participants. You can read about Blanco's mission on his website.
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