Books On The Run- Born To Run pp. 1-100

Part 1 of a Series

Nuance is not Chris McDougall's style. He writes like a heel striker slamming the pavement in their ultra-padded running shoes. Born To Run is as interesting and exciting as it is maddening and annoying. McDougall shoehorns an inspiring tale of unlikely heroes into a worldview that, at least so far, begs so many questions it's almost as if the author took exactly no time whatsoever thinking through the implications of his thoughts. In the first one hundred pages, I have felt compelled to enjoy the story despite the often disappointing commentary. Let's tackle the two separately.

The Story

Born To Run is an inspiring story of triumph, innovation, and the incredible things humans can do when they set their minds and bodies against impossible tasks. McDougall's writing keeps you right there with the runners. Writing about the actual events of an ultramarathon is a tricky task that he handles well. The action moves seamlessly and you feel the pulse of the race right along with the runners. The Tarahumara are compelling characters in the narrative. They're mysterious and joyful and insouciant in a way that recalls something far older than themselves.

On pg. 74, McDougall tells the tale of "Martimano Cervantes, a forty-two-year-old master of the ball game, and his protege, twenty-five-year-old Juan Herrera. Choguita is bitterly cold at night and sun-scorched by day, so even when running, the Choguita Tarahumara protect themselves with fine woolen ponchos that hang nearly to their feet. As they fly down the trail, capes flowing around them, they look  like magicians appearing from a puff of smoke." This a great description that captures the mystery of the hidden tribe, and you can't help but root for these guys, especially when they run up against the iron-willed Ann Trason, a community college science professor who, at least according to the book, is the champion of the female ultramarathon world. By the end of pg. 100 (and the close of Chapter 15), their showdown is not yet finished, and I can't wait to find out what happens. This is by far the strongest part of Born To Run: this story needed to be told.

Ann Trason

Still, my favorite moment of the book so far was McDougall's framing of the strategy of ultramarathons. Ultras, he decides, are at their essence "a binary equation made of up hundreds of yes/no questions: Eat now or wait? Bomb down this hill, or throttle back and save the quads for the flats? Find out what is itching in your sock, or push on? Extreme distance magnifies every problem (a blister becomes a blood-soaked sock, a declined PowerBar becomes a woozy inability to follow trail markers), so all it takes is one wrong answer to ruin a race."

He should do more of this kind of discussion. This is the kind of insight he's good at, and that I want to hear more of. I don't care that the Tarahumara are really good at running; I want to know why. I want to know what decisions they make and what their thought processes are. They are, of course, famously reticent, and they speak another language, so it's perhaps not suprising that McDougall's strategy discussion is about Ann Trason, the American. Further, I think McDougall is building a larger argument; namely, that the Tarahumara worldview is why they run so well. But I want more about the technical ins and outs of the ultramarathon and the solutions each competitor comes up with to deal with their myriad challenges.

The Ideology

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for McDougall's ideas. So far this book has not been the barefoot bible that many people, myself included, think it is. There hasn't been much in the way of barefoot evangelism, save for a short moment on pg. 93 where he discusses the American runners of the '70s who "didn't know enough to worry about 'pronation' and 'supination;' that fancy running-store jargon hadn't even been invented yet." He notes that if you "slice the top off a '70s running shoe,...you [have] a sandal." I suspect he's building to his ultimate barefoot point, but I'm willing to be patient and let him build his case. My objections so far have nothing to do with barefoot running or its wisdom.

What I object to most in McDougall's reasoning is his seeming disdain for expertise and knowledge, and my fear that that bodes ill for his thought process when he finally does get around to discussing barefoot running. He consistently conflates ignorance with superior wisdom. Take the prior quote about the "fancy running-store jargon." That isn't fancy, it's just science. If running stores use that jargon improperly, then science can correct them. Write that book instead. There are people who study these things, and they know what they're talking about. That there are a few Mexican tribesmen who don't know these things and still run well is evidence of exactly nothing. He has a bad habit of using correlation to prove his causation. Correlations give you hints, but you need to go further than that, and McDougall doesn't. He's content to declare the wisdom of the ancients superior to everything modern. To do so, he indulges in repeated flights of, well...to use his style of vernacular, just total piss-poor reasoning.

On pg. 93, for instance, McDougall opines on the role of running in human history: "Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everything else we love- everything we sentimentally call our "passions" and "desires"- it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known."

Where to even start? Running was no doubt important to nascent humanity's survival, but McDougall is ignoring the importance of tools. Humans are descended from apes that had opposable thumbs, which let them grasp things with greater precision. This greater precision led to tool-making, and it is tool-making that sets apart humanity from every other species we have ever encountered. Early humans had to chase their prey, of course- but they fashioned weapons to kill that prey with. They made tools to cut it faster, to cook it over open fires, and to protect themselves from any other creature that might have tried to steal their kill. McDougall is arguing for the wisdom of the ancients, but the ancients knew exactly what we still know today: make tools to make life easier. If McDougall has considered this, there is no evidence so far in the text.

Another problematic idea, which occurs on pg. 92 and directly precedes the previous one: "That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle- behold, the Running Man."

Hand stencils in El Castillo Cave, Spain. They are 40,800 years old. 

Except that McDougall is just wrong. Right now, the earliest cave paintings we've found are the ones pictured at right. They're not running men at all; they're hands. I find those hand stencils somehow beautiful and affecting. They look like the work of little children, and in a literal way they were. They were the work of men when were just children in the world, just beginning to become the supreme tool makers that would dominate the planet. These stencils are as natural as any child who has ever traced his hand in a kindergarten class. They are not about running. They're just lonely humans. I picture them looking at their hands by dim firelight in a cave at night, the wind howling outside, the world dark and horrifying, the noises of animals drifting through the night. And I imagine them knowing, on some level, the uniqueness of what they saw when they looked at their own hands, and them being fascinated by their consciousness of that utter novelty and its attendant loneliness.

The problem with McDougall's reasoning so far is that he's projecting his macho fantasies about running onto the Tarahumara, and by extension primal man. He doesn't, at least so far, ever talk to the Tarahumara runners, so I'm not sure he actually knows what they think at all. Modern humans associate running with something primal and primeval, but that's as much a part of our culture and its assumptions as anything else we believe. Were early humans joyful when they ran? Maybe. Probably they were sometimes. But maybe they were also often terrified and stressed and completely adrift in the world. And maybe they made stencils on cave walls of their hands, so that if they didn't make it through another day, there would be some testament to their existence, some remaining scrap to say, "I was here." Existential dread is primal, too.

Which is all a long way to say: McDougall should stick to reporting what happens. When he tries to interpret, he wanders far off the beaten trail (marathon).

Tomorrow! Chris McDougall and Barefoot Evangelism, before we get back to reviewing the book.