Book Review: BORN TO RUN

"Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone"
- Ken Chlouber, Creator of the Leadville Trail 100

BORN TO RUN is filled with great quotes and fine writing. The following is just such a snippet. "Scott" is Scott Jurek, one of the greatest ultra runners of all time. Wikipedia him. In this section, Scott had just crushed the course record at the Western States 100 and now is attempting his first Badwater; "the world's toughest footrace" which, travels 135 miles across Death Valley during the summer. Temperatures typically hover around 120 degrees...in the shade...if you can find shade....but you can't.

By mile 60 Scott was vomiting and shaky. His hands dropped to his knees, then his knees dropped to the pavement. He collapsed by the side of the road, lying in his own sweat and spittle. Leah (his wife) and his friends didn't bother trying to help him up: they knew there was no voice in the world more persuasive than the one inside Scott's own mind. Scott lay there, thinking about how hopeless it all was. He wasn't even halfway done, and the others were already too far ahead for him to see. And the wind! It was like running into the blast of a jet engine. A couple of miles back, Scott had tried to cool off by sinking his entire head and torso into a giant cooler full of ice and holding himself underwater until his lungs were screaming. As soon as he got out, he was roasting again. There's no way, Scott told himself. You're done. You'd have to do something totally sick to win this thing now. Sick like what? Like starting all over again. Like pretending you just woke up from a great night's sleep and the race hasn't even started yet. You'd have to run the next 80 miles as fast as you've ever run eighty miles in your life. No chance ...Yeah, I know ...

For the next ten minutes, Scott lay like a corpse.

Then he got up and did it, shattering the Badwater record with a time of 24:36.

I was skeptical of this book. The book flaps talked about barefoot running and Mexican Indians who could run "for hundreds of miles without getting tired". I rolled my eyes; I had heard these tales before. Yawn. My dad insisted I read it. My mom said it was great. Okay, fine. A bad running book is still a good book. I had just finished a 600 page epic on Operation TORCH (the allied invasion of North Africa in '43) and was in the midst of a sequel documenting the allied invasion of Italy. After 1000 pages of World War Two, I was ready for some running reading.

I don't want to give too much of the book away or rant into a full scale collegiate book report (because that would make blogging not fun), but I strongly encourage all those who read this blog to read this book. By highlighting the heroic performances of ultra-nut jobs, discussing anthropology, relaying the history of races like Leadville and others, BORN TO RUN explains how human beings were born to run long distances. We run marathons now "for fun", but in reality our ancestors ran "marathons" for survival (one example illustrates how bushmen in Africa ran down a deer over the course of a day). We, humans, can outrun almost any other animal...outrun it, in order to exhaust it...in order to kill it. We can out-run all these creatures, and we can do it BAREFOOT. The author argues that shoes CAUSE most of our injuries. He backs it up with facts and evidence. Believe it or not. It makes we want to go to the prairies of Nebraska and, over the course of a day, walk down a whitetail. I'll at least wear spikes though.

"Running unites our two primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time"
- Christopher McDougall, author of BORN TO RUN

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I met the GRC at THE LINE on Sunday morning for a run through what was left of the snow storm. Thankfully there was a little left. We trekked down the trails and ran down the roads and eventually found our way to the National Zoo. The polar bears smiled, but I frowned as our pack made our way down the concrete hill. My legs felt like hamburger after yesterday's workout and I just wanted to get back to THE LINE in one piece. I limped home, limped to the coffee shop and then limped to the ice bath on my balcony. The mercury read 30 degrees. I nuked my coffee cup in the microwave and got it piping hot, then I stripped off my running pants, grabbed an extra jacket, swore like a wounded Marine then stepped into a cold hell. After 10 minutes I frog hopped my way back into my apartment and danced around like Pitbull as I tried to regain the feeling in my toes. Eventually all was good. The ice bath did the trick.