Imagine reading a book that evokes experiences so sublime you want to go out and run 100 miles on the world’s toughest trails.
Christopher McDougall’s “Born to Run” is just that good.
McDougall does much more. By challenging the high-dollar athletic-shoe/sports- medicine complex, he raises strong questions about the precipitous number of injuries contemporary runners endure.
In telling his own story of finally breaking free of injuries that hobbled his attempts at running a few miles every other day or so, McDougall’s superathletes reach out to the rest of us.
The former war correspondent finds himself seeking guidance from some of the world’s top sports-medicine experts. They tell him running is bad for his body.
They say running breaks the body down — crushing its joints to dust. High-end orthotics and expensive running shoes are prescribed. Cortisone is needled into the tender sole of his foot.
How can this be? After more than 30 years of so-called improvements to our shoes, why are injuries so common?
Such questions have been a central arguing point since the rise and fall of America’s distance-running dominance of the 1970s. And as health-care costs spike because of the obesity epidemic, getting to the bottom of such troubling injuries is of even greater importance.
McDougall ventures to the Copper Canyon of Mexico to seek out the elusive “Running People,” the Tarahumara tribe, whose days-long runs across wicked wilderness are fun-filled village games. He tells the story of the two times that Tarahumara runners came to race in Colorado’s Leadville 100 in a quixotic promotional scheme that left the Indians too distrustful to return.
From the ancients to the present, “Born to Run” also investigates the ultra-running scene and the joyful characters who people it.
Reading of their exploits, one wonders: Why are pampered Americans running such things?
Here the book moves into evolutionary science to argue that human ascendancy grew from biomechanical advantages that made us distance runners.
So if humankind was born to run, then why not McDougall?
The Tarahumara run in sandals; the ancients ran in bare feet. Have our over-padded, motion-controlling shoes ruined one of the greatest natural achievements in propulsion?
It’s a debate so far waged at the margin. Yes, Nike now has a shoe that attempts to mimic barefoot running.
But running stores load shelves with the foot cushions McDougall faults, and we remain addicted to flattening the gait of barefooted runners — a gait that has protected humans for millions of years.
The book’s finale features a contest of Tarahumara racing some of America’s top athletes — and a once-sidelined writer out to run 50 miles in the heat and hardscrabble conditions of the Copper Canyon.
For those who love to run, for those who ought to run, and for the professionals who cater to the sport, “Born to Run” starts a serious and necessary debate as it unravels a tale so mind-blowing as to be the stuff of legend.
Chuck Plunkett: 303-954-1333 or cplunkett@denverpost.com
NONFICTION
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
by Christopher McDougall
$24.95.
