"The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen"
Here's a book I read a couple of years back, and one of those often recommended in running circles.
It's about one man's quest to arrange the ultimate race and discovers all kinds of characters along the way, not least the elusive 'running tribe'. These people you won't have seen or heard about (unless you read up on these matters) but they encapsulate a spirit and are some of the best out there.
It's a fascinating journey of discovery and contains plenty of running tips galore!
Caballo Blanco
Caballo Blanco (White Horse) is a central character of the book and was a real person by the name of Micah True. An ultrarunner from Colorado, he was the elusive character the author was looking for and who also wanted to arrange the big race with the Tarahumara people.
Tarahumara
So who are they? They are otherwise known as the 'running tribe', and are a group of indigenous people living in Mexico. They are renowned for their long-distance running ability but are well out of the public eye, so a cause for intrigue… not least for Caballo Blanco and Chris McDougall!
Could they teach us a thing or 2?
For five years, Leadville’s reigning champion was Steve Peterson, a member of a Colorado higher-consciousness cult called Divine Madness, which seeks nirvana through sex parties, extreme trail running, and affordable housecleaning.
Quite a lot going on in that lot! The Leadville 100 is an ultrarun and this chap had won several in a row. I probably highlighted it due to all the other wacky stuff in that paragraph.
you’re tougher than you think you are, and you can do more than you think you can.
We're capable of so much more in multiple ways. Here we're chatting about running and fitness, but it can be applied in all ways. David Goggins talks plenty about this, as do many others.
you can’t muscle through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it, like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it. Relax enough, and your body becomes so familiar with the cradle-rocking rhythm that you almost forget you’re moving.
It's not so much about fighting it, but relaxing and easing into it. Going with the flow to a degree, rather than going into battle.
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.
They see it as a fundamental of human existence. Running isn't just something to do to keep fit, but an inherent part of our nature and a spiritual pursuit.
“There are two goddesses in your heart,” he told them. “The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.” Ask nothing from your running, in other words, and you’ll get more than you ever imagined.
Profound, and something to think about. Getting our priorities straight and allowing wealth to be a happy side effect of pursuing our passions, interests, feeding our soul, and developing our wisdom.
“Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry,” Mark Twain used to say. Zatopek found a way to run so that when he won, even other teams were delighted.
Mark Twain had a lot to say. But I get his point…
“Suffering is humbling. It pays to know how to get your butt kicked,” Caballo said.
It's all part of the process. Be humble or you will be humbled!
It’s not that Caballo is so fast; it’s just that he seems so light, as though he wills himself uphill by mind power instead of muscle.
He has a certain style. Not necessarily the quickest but glides over the ground and is very much in the zone.
Ultra god Scott Jurek summed up the Young Guns’ unofficial creed with a quote from William James he stuck on the end of every e-mail he sent: “Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”
We have a BookBabble coming up from Scott Jurek (Eat & Run). He's a famous ultrarunner.
What this quote is saying is that beyond those limits lies a whole other world. We meet another person and go to amazing places.
“he repeats a saying of the Tarahumara Indians: ‘When you run on the earth and run with the earth, you can run forever.’
At one with the earth rather than against it, together are very powerful.
I always start these events with very lofty goals, like I’m going to do something special. And after a point of body deterioration, the goals get evaluated down to basically where I am now—where the best I can hope for is to avoid throwing up on my shoes. —Nuclear engineer and ultrarunner EPHRAIM ROMESBERG, sixty-five miles into the Badwater Ultramarathon
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face… Mike Tyson uttered those words. I've done it to a lesser extent in a 10k; you feel great before it starts and think there are all sorts of possibilities, then you get out there and are just happy to finish with a bit of dignity!
most advanced weapon in the ultrarunner’s arsenal: instead of cringing from fatigue, you embrace it.
Excepting it, embracing it, letting it drive you. Rather than killing you off.
the only way to truly conquer something, as every great philosopher and geneticist will tell you, is to love it.
You have to love what you do. Not every moment of course, but a lot of it and at least the general involvement.
Charles Bukowski stepped up: “If you’re going to try, go all the way,” the original Barfly wrote. “There is no other feeling like that. / you will be alone with the gods / and the nights will flame with fire… . you will ride life straight to / perfect laughter, it’s / the only good fight there is.”
Ah yes, good ol' Charles Bukowski, he was a chracter. This is a great poem from him.
“When I’m out on a long run,” she continued, “the only thing in life that matters is finishing the run. For once, my brain isn’t going blehblehbleh all the time. Everything quiets down, and the only thing going on is pure flow. It’s just me and the movement and the motion. That’s what I love—just being a barbarian, running through the woods.”
When you're running, it's the only thing on your mind. Running. Everything else pales into the background for that time and it's just you and the road, and your mind.
What fascinated Chase wasn’t action, but anticipation; not the ballerina’s leap, but the instant before takeoff when her strength is coiled and anything is possible.
The anticipation of an event is often the most exciting time. Whatever happens after, and however good it may or may not be, just the moment before is where there's a keen feeling of what's to come.
Shoes block pain, not impact! Pain teaches us to run comfortably! From the moment you start going barefoot, you will change the way you run.
Now we get into some mechanics, and the whole debate over shoes, types, advanced technologies and more natural approaches.
If your running shoes are so great and block everything so it's comfortable, is that such a good thing? This means you aren't feeling the various permutations and adjusting accordingly. Eliminating pain may make things a bit easier in the short-term but you're missing out on valuable feedback.
And you're still pounding the pavement either way. Is it a good idea to run bare foot though, or close to it?
“No wonder your feet are so sensitive,” Ted mused. “They’re self-correcting devices. Covering your feet with cushioned shoes is like turning off your smoke alarms.”
You're not receiving the warnings, the nudges that tell you what's going on. If you're not exposed to these things, then when you do have a jolt at some point it will cause more damage as you haven't built that strength.
Whenever he hit gravel and broken glass, he yanked on rubber foot gloves called the Vibram FiveFingers and kept going.
One of the makes of 'foot gloves'. These are designed to make it so you're as close to bare feet and natural as you can be, whilst still having something on your feet. You do need to be wearing something in most cases for obvious reasons and these have also been designed for the runner in mind too. They fit on like a glove around your toes and off you go! I don't know how cushioned or not they are and how they feel (or how effective/'better') they are but some research into this area would make sense.
running shoes may be the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot.
This is a more controversial statement, and people may object as things evolve to be better, right? Well, in some cases, but sometimes it needs to be brought back to basics too. Could it be that many modern running shoes are bad for us?
Dr. Lieberman said in 2008. “If there’s any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.”
Back to why running is such a great activity. It's such a good all-rounder and is far more about the mental aspect than the physical. And where those too meet is where the magic happens.
You won't find a magic bullet, but you can always go for a run. There's the fitness aspect of course, but also very meditative, and you can adjust your speed to work for you as you go. No (or very little) equipment needed, just out the door and hit the road!
You have to land on your heel to overpronate, and you can only land on your heel if it’s cushioned.
We should be landing in the middle of the foot, not the heal. People think it's the other way round which is a common misconception and leads to all sorts of issues. It takes a little getting used to if you change but feels right as you get into a rhythm.
Having cushioned heels actually encourages you to use your heel, increasing the chance of overpronation. Without that cushion, you'd be less inclined to use it.
Also, the time each foot is on the ground should be limited, not stretched out over the whole foot, more of a glide.
Every time we put someone in a corrective device, we’re creating new problems by treating ones that don’t exist.”
Creating problems, then paying for the 'solutions'. Sound familiar, and it stems wider than the running industry.
Arthur Lydiard reportedly snorted. “You support an area, it gets weaker. Use it extensively, it gets stronger… . Run barefoot and you don’t have all those troubles.
Labouring the point a bit but this is clearly an area of debate. Things need to be used to be strengthened. Shoes can sometimes be the cause of some of our issues not the saviour.
Nike / Phil Knight
Nike were pioneers in the space and are still one of the most successful to this day. My first BookBabble was Shoe Dog by Phil Knight (co-founder and former CEO).
Marathon Monks in Japan he’d just been reading about; they ran an ultramarathon every day for seven years, covering some twenty-five thousand miles
That's some running right there ;). Bit much but interesting that these people are out there. As lot of these monks, tribes and other groups do these kind of things as a spiritual quest and are a form of suffering as a quest for enlightenment.
On a more human level (just about), a few BookBabbles back we chatted about a guy doing 50 marathons in 50 days!
Running downhill can trash your quads, not to mention snap your ankle, so the trick is to pretend you’re running uphill: keep your feet spinning under your body like you’re a lumberjack rolling a log, and control your speed by leaning back and shortening your stride.
Running uphill is a bit of a pain of course, but downhill can be much worse in some ways and you need to be careful. Uphill is harder but you're less prone to injury (partly for that reason as you're much slower and are better supported). Downhill can get out of control too, so you need to treat it in a similar way.
“You don’t stop running because you get old,” said the Demon. “You get old because you stop running.”
We get it the wrong way round. We need to keep moving (figuratively and literally) to stay young.
Evolution Running
As system for teaching runners efficient and injury reducing techniques.
Chi Running
Applying the principle of Tai Chi to running.
The technique teaches the runner to use the core muscles, upper body and gravity to do the hard work, rather than placing all the strain on the leg muscles.
There's also a book called ChiRunning by Danny Dreyer.
POSE Method
Another set of techniques identifying running postures. See more here.
The way to activate your fat-burning furnace is by staying below your aerobic threshold—your hard-breathing point—during your endurance runs.
Speaks for itself and is worth knowing and applying where it makes sense.
Geranium niveum is the Tarahumara wonder drug
A medicinal herb used by this tribe and apparently works wonders.
pinole and chia
The staple diet of the Tarahumara!
Persistence hunting
This is where the hunter wears the prey down. They keep going and going and the hunted can no longer go on… thus getting captured.
It's believed that that's the human strength and what we were designed for. We may not be the quickest over short sharp distances or have particularly powerful bodies (in terms of some beasts in the animal kingdom). Where we excelled was our ability to keep going and outlast our opponents, whether that be in pursuit of them or them pursuing us.
We now have advanced brains too that can do a fair bit without moving at all!
humans have a mind-body conflict: we have a body built for performance, but a brain that’s always looking for efficiency.”
Yes, and a brain looking to keep you safe. Keeping you alive and a bit back to face any emergencies or changes in the situation. Peak performance needs to bridge some of that gap.
Nearly every top killer in the Western world—heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, hypertension, and a dozen forms of cancer—was unknown to our ancestors.
Why is that? Something has changed since those days and it's clear there is much in our diet and routines that has affected these things.
the Hopis consider running a form of prayer; they offer every step as a sacrifice to a loved one, and in return ask the Great Spirit to match their strength with some of his own.
It's a form of meditation, and yes, prayer if that's how you'd like to view it. This is going a bit deeper, but it can be a more religious experience or just a simple jogging for fitness vibe.
The Hopi are a Native American ethnic group who primarily live on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona.
The worst mistake I could make would be getting lulled into someone else’s race.
Run your own race. Probably the best advice for anything, and worth remembering when you're out running. There are many different levels and abilities, and if you get sucked in to an unsuitable pace, it's not likely to end well.
“I don’t want anyone to do anything except come run, party, dance, eat, and hang with us. Running isn’t about making people buy stuff. Running should be free, man.”
Great remit!
A really enjoyable book that combines a great story with the mechanics of running and exercise. A true bible for many in this space and one of the top running books out there.
The fact it is based around a quest, gives it that edge and interest in the characters involved and how it all turns out. You also have that mystery element of tribes and other people operating out of sight who have these traditions and abilities.
It also begs the question, what and who else is out there? What can they achieve, and can we tap into that?
Have you read it and what do you think?
First image my own, others linked to source
Check out the others in the series…
