Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (Alfred A. Knopf, May 2009)
With such a meandering subtitle, one could perhaps be forgiven for wondering if the resulting narrative will be just as apparently random. And there is no doubt that Born To Run (BTR), like the runners in some of the classic ultra races it describes, speeds wildly from station to station, hurtling pell-mell around cliff edges and chasing down blind alleys, losing its way temporarily only to reconnect with the main trail, all while barely stopping for air along the way. The results for the reader — who might feel at times like he or she is actually running in an ultra — can swing wildly from joyful exhilaration to annoyance and frustration, to exhaustion and back again. And again.
BTR begins with the running injury-prone Mr. McDougall searching for an answer to a question: “Why does my foot hurt?” His quest takes him, and us, on an international roller-coaster ride that takes countless side-trips to the history of running shoes, ultra marathon race reports, colorful profiles of ultra running personalities such as Barefoot Ted, Scott Jurek, and others; sports nutrition, and evolutionary bioscience – just to name a few subjects. After many misadventures and digressions, his journey finally leads him into a precariously staged 50-mile showdown race with a handful of elite North American ultra runners and the elusive Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s Copper Canyon, considered by many as the best pure long-distance runners in the world.
It all sounds like the kind of shaggy dog story you might overhear in a bar at 2 a.m., and it’s written that way, too. This is a good and bad thing. Mr. McDougall’s chosen narrative style for BTR is a sort of attention-defict, wisecracking approach that, despite all of the colorful and engaging material the author has to work with, comes across as being inexplicably terrified of losing his audience. Unfortunately, this peripatetic, hyper-slangy prose will probably begin to seriously date the book no more than five years from now. And it’s frankly exhausting to read for more than a short chapter at a time.
Still, the many stories and anecdotes are for the most part entertaining, and Mr. McDougall is especially good at sustaining excitement and tension when describing racing and races. Being an ultra runner himself, his first-hand descriptions of the thrills and many challenges of ultra racing come across as genuine and vivid. One runner’s dehydration symptoms are described as “having pee the color of convenience store coffee,” which more than a few marathoners and ultra marathoners can certainly identify with. It’s just the kind of TMI runners love to relate. But a few side forays into evolutionary biomechanics, just when the story is beginning to pick up speed, don’t hold the same level of interest and seem a little tacked-on. Here is where BTR could have used a little judicious pruning to keep it more on course. In fact, McDougall seems torn between offering scientific explanations of why barefoot is the way nature intended humans to run and serving up a rip-roaring ultra running adventure story.
But perhaps continually veering off course and finding new trails is part of the charm and spirit of BTR, a book that could easily become something of a cult classic. With more and more people crowding the trails using GPS devices and wearing high-tech running gear, along with ever more sophisticated approaches to training, competing, and marketing, the “Wild West” frontier era of ultrarunning described in this book already sadly seems like part of history.
While it’s great to see the sport of ultra marathoning continue to grow, it would be a shame to lose that pioneering outsider spirit Mr. McDougall relates so exuberantly. His inspirational personal discovery that humans were, indeed, born to run leaves you ready to hit the trails yourself. And while BTR often comes across as if Jack Kerouac were slamming down Red Bulls and writing on deadline for Trail Runner, you really don’t want to rein in that kind of spirit. But I suppose you shouldn’t be at all surprised at the places you wind up, or the zig-zag route you take to get there.
