Born to Run

I just finished reading Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall. Wow!

Some people you meet are just really hard core, and this book was all about them. Except for excessive quotations of people dropping the f-bomb, I highly recommend it to everyone.

McDougall tells a meandering story that doesn't really even seem like a story because he goes off on so many tangents, but they all sort of tie together in the end—at a showdown race featuring some of the greatest distance runners of the Western hemisphere, in the middle of nowhere. He's a journalist and writes like a journalist (although his is of the magazine style, which still has creative integrity, as opposed to the newspaper style, which is really an anti-style): sensationalist, hyperbolic, and full of narrative cliché. In spite of it, and even because of it, I was completely absorbed from start to finish.

The major question he wanted answered from the start was really why so many doctors tell people that running is bad for them. He was an athlete who jumped from sport to sport and never encountered any problem until he attempted distance running. In search of a cure for the pain, he began to wonder if running really is so bad, why do some of the healthiest people in the world run so much and never get injured.

What's not to love about a book full of ultra-running anecdotes including barefoot running, vegan diets, beat poetry addicts, crack-pot scientists in search of the key to the reason humans have survived so successfully as a species, and Bushmen hunting parties; centered around a fighter who dropped out of time and memory for a life of solitary running all over the mountains and canyons of southern Mexico, scores of miles away from even a telephone?

It makes me want to go for extreme living. I thought I was pretty hot stuff for having run a marathon, but reading Born to Run has made me realize that a marathon is just ho-hum old news to these people. Last night, motivated by what I had read so far, I went for my very first run in my Vibram five finger toe shoes—I even went without my headphones, and didn't even miss them. People say when you run "barefoot" for the first time your calves get really sore, so I opted to do only a mile. I felt so great after a mile that I didn't want to quit. Alas, it was getting dark and I had told my brother that if I didn't return in less than 15 minutes he had to come looking for me. So I did one extra block and went in, but I'm so excited about those shoes!

And I'm excited to have new stuff to think about as a result of reading the book. Thank you, Heather, for the book recommendation. Stellar, as usual.