Back Cover Blurb of Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall
Isolated by Mexico’s deadly Copper Canyons, the blissful Tarahumara Indians have honed the ability to run hundreds of miles without rest or injury. In a riveting narrative, award-winning journalist and often-injured runner Christopher McDougall sets out to discover their secrets. In the process, he takes his readers from science labs at Harvard to the sun-baked valleys and freezing peaks across North America, where ever-growing numbers of ultra-runners are pushing their bodies to the limit, and, finally, to a climactic race in the Copper Canyons that pits America’s best ultra-runners against the tribe. McDougall’s incredible story will not only engage your mind but inspire your body when you realize that you, indeed all of us, were born to run.
“You were amazing,” Scott said. “Yeah,” I said. “Amazingly slow.” It had taken me over twelve hours, meaning that Scott and Arnulfo could have run the course all over again and still beaten me. “That’s what I’m saying,” Scott insisted. “I’ve been there, man. I’ve been there a lot. It takes more guts than going fast.”
Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
This book was not what I expected based on the title and enthusiastic recommendations. I tend to alternate between fiction and non-fiction books as an optimal balance for me and I read this book in a non-fiction spot, but it felt more like fiction than non-fiction. I enjoyed the fantastical story telling. However, I took the facts and figures as hyperbolic representations of what we were supposed to remember rather than exact representations of research after everything was either 99.9% or a round number.
I came to this book after reading about the rise of ultrarunning in Hurt So Good, about masochism. This book really downplays the amount of pain obviously involved with running for 12 hours straight. Rather, runners bound and float through dead defying courses. But then, maybe a performance is always that way.
I don’t run enough myself to determine if the running advice is useful. It does seem likely that our ancestors were good runners, but it is also not a trait currently being explicitly selected for, so I’m not convinced that I can get up off my couch and not just marathon but ultramarathon. I’m a fan of being barefoot in general, but not sure about barefoot running curing all injuries and form problems. I also may be past the point in my life where drinking all night and then running all day sounds like a good time, if it ever did. Like at least one other reviewer, I bought some chia seeds and have been enjoying them quite a bit. I also downloaded a metronome and figured out how fast 180 steps per minute is… and it is very fast.
Perhaps the most useful notion from the book for me was the idea of learning to rest while still performing a peak activity. He discusses different tricks runners have for relaxing while still running. This is a powerful idea for endurance and avoiding burnout, and I am looking for ways to pull this concept into other areas of my life.