Born to Run

  “… the Tarahumara have been VERY inspirational for me. The first time I read that the Tarahumara could run a one-hundred-mile race in sandals, that realization was so shocking and SUBVERSIVE, so counterintuitive to what I had assumed was NECESSARY for a human being to go that distance, I remember thinking What in the HELL? How in the HELL is this possible? That was the first thing, the first CHINK IN THE WALL, that MAYYYBEE modern shoe companies don’t have all the answers. …”

  You didn’t even have to hear Barefoot Ted to appreciate his cocktail shaker of a mind; just seeing him was enough. His outfit was a combination of Tibetan Warrior Monk and skateboard chic: denim kickboxing pants with a drawstring waist, a skintight white tank top, Japanese bathhouse slippers, a brass skeleton amulet dangling to the middle of his chest, and a red bandanna knotted around his neck. With his shaved head, cinder-block build, and dark eyes that danced around seeking attention as much as his voice, he looked like Uncle Fester in good fighting trim.

  “Yeah. Okay, man,” Caballo muttered, easing past Ted to greet the rest of us. We grabbed our backpacks and followed Caballo across Creel’s one main street toward lodging he’d arranged on the edge of town. We were all starving and exhausted after the long trip, shivering in the high-mesa cold and longing for nothing except a warm bed and a hot bowl of Mamá’s frijoles—all of us except Ted, that is, who believed the first order of business was continuing the life story he’d begun telling Caballo the second they met.

  Caballo’s teeth were on edge, but he decided not to interrupt. He had some terrible news, and he hadn’t figured out yet how to break it without all of us turning around and getting right back on the bus.

  “My life is a controlled explosion,” Barefoot Ted likes to say. He lives in Burbank, in a small compound that resembles Tom Hanks’s kid-gone-wild apartment in Big. The grounds are full of gumball-colored Spyder sports cars, carousel horses, Victorian high-wheel bicycles, vintage Jeeps, circus posters, a saltwater swimming pool, and a hot tub patrolled by an endangered California desert tortoise. Instead of a garage, there are two giant circus tents. Wandering in and out of the single-story bungalow are an assortment of dogs and cats, plus a goose, a tame sparrow, thirty-six homing pigeons, and a handful of odd Asian chickens with claws covered in fur-like feathers.

  “I forget that heavy Heidegger word, but it’s the one that means I’m an expression of this place,” Ted says, although the place isn’t his at all. It belongs to his cousin Dan, a self-taught mechanical genius who single-handedly created the world’s leading carousel-restoration business. “Dita Von Teese strips on one of our horses,” Ted says. “Christina Aguilera brought one on tour with her.” While Dan was going through a bad divorce a few years ago, Ted decided that what his cousin needed most was more Ted, so he showed up at Dan’s door with his wife, daughter, and menagerie and never left. “Dan spends all day fighting with big, cold, mean, mechanical things and emerges with grease dripping off his fingers like blood off the talons of a bird of prey,” Ted says. “That’s why we’re indispensable. He’d be a sociopath if he didn’t have me around to argue with.”

  Ted made himself useful by setting up a little online store for carousel trinkets, which he ran from a Mac in one of Dan’s spare bedrooms. It didn’t pay much, but it left Ted a lot of time to train for fifty- mile rides on his six-foot-tall Victorian bike and to cross-train by hauling his wife and daughter around in a rickshaw. Caballo had gotten totally the wrong impression of Ted’s wealth, mostly because Ted’s e-mails tended to be full of schemes better suited to an early Microsoft investor. While the rest of us were pricing economy flights to El Paso, for instance, Ted was asking about landing strips in the Mexican outback for a private bush plane. Not that Ted has a plane; he barely has a car. He sputters around in a ’66 VW Beetle in such coughing decline, he can’t take it more than twenty-five miles from home. But that’s just fine by Ted; in fact, it’s all part of the master plan. “That way, I never have to travel very far,” he explains. “I’m a pauper by choice, and I find it extremely liberating.”

  During his student days at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Ted had a major crush on a classmate, Jenny Shimizu. While hanging out at her apartment one evening, he met two of Jenny’s new friends: Chase Chen, a young artist from China, and Chase’s sister, Joan. Neither of the Chen siblings spoke much English, so Ted anointed himself their personal cultural ambassador. The friendship worked out great for everyone: Ted had a captive audience for his symphonic stream-of-consciousness, the Chens were exposed to a flood of new vocabulary, and Jenny got a little breathing room from Ted’s wooing. Within a few years, three of the foursome would be international names: Joan Chen became a Hollywood star and one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People.” Chase became a critically acclaimed portrait painter and the most highly paid Asian artist of his generation. Jenny Shimizu became a model and one of the planet’s best-known lesbians (“a homo-household name,” as The Pink Paper declared) for her affairs with Madonna and Angelina Jolie (a career trajectory that, despite the tattoo on Jenny’s right biceps of a hot babe straddling a Snap-on tool, Ted never saw coming).

  As for Ted, well…

  He did manage to crack the Top 30 in the world for breath-holding. “I got up to five minutes and fifteen seconds,” Ted says. “Spent the whole summer practicing in the pool.” But breath-holding, alas, is a fickle mistress, and it wasn’t long before Ted was knocked out of the rankings by other competitors even more dedicated to the art of inhaling less than the rest of us. You have to feel a pang of sympathy for the poor guy, burbling away with dreams of glory at the bottom of his cousin’s swimming pool, while just about everyone he knew was painting masterpieces, bedding superstars, and getting close-ups from Bernardo Bertolucci.

  And the worst part? Ted holding his breath was actually Ted at his best. In a way, that’s even what attracted Lisa, the woman who’d become his wife. They were roommates in the group house, but because Lisa was a bouncer at a heavy-metal bar and only got home at 3 a.m., her exposure to Ted was limited to the dry-land version of the bottom of the pool: after work, she’d come home to find Ted sitting quietly at the kitchen table, eating rice and beans with his nose buried in French philosophy. His stamina and intelligence were already legendary among his roommates; Ted could paint all morning, skateboard all afternoon, and memorize Japanese verbs all night. He’d fix Lisa a hot plate of beans, and then, with his manic motor finally running down, he’d stop performing and let her talk. Every once in a while, he’d chip in a sensitive insight, then encourage her to go on. Few ever saw this Ted. That was their great loss—and his.

  But Chase Chen got it. His artist’s eye also spotted the quiet intensity in the aftermaths of Hurricane Ted. Chase’s specialty, after all, was “the dramatic dance between sunlight and shadow,” and brother, was dramatic dancing ever Ted to a tee. 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. He could see the same thing during Ted’s quiet moments, the same simmering power and unlimited possibility, and that’s when Chase reached for his sketch pad. For years, Chase would use Ted as a model; some of his finest works, in fact, are portraits of Ted, Lisa, and their incandescently lovely daughter, Ona. Chase was so entranced by the world as reflected by Ted that he released an entire book with nothing but portraits of Ted and his family: Ted and Ona cooped up in the old Beetle … Ona buried in a book … Lisa glancing over her shoulder at Ona, the living product of her father’s sunlight and shadow.

  By the time Ted was pushing forty, though, his four decades of dramatic dancing had gotten him no further than cameos in another man’s masterpiece and a spare room in his cousin’s bungalow. But just when it seemed he’d crossed that bridge between great potential and squandered talent, something wonderful happened:

  He got a backache.

  In 2003, Ted decided to celebrate his fortieth birthday with his own
endurance event, “The Anachronistic Ironman.” It would be a full Ironman triathlon—2.4- mile ocean swim, 112- mile bike ride, and 26.2- mile run—except, for reasons only clear to Ted, all the gear had to date from the 1890s. He was already two-thirds of the way there; he was strong enough to handle the swim in full-length woollies, and he’d become an ace on his high-wheel bike. But the run— the run was murdering him.

  “Every time I ran for an hour, I had excruciating lower-back pain,” Ted says. “It was so discouraging. I couldn’t even imagine being able to run a marathon.” And the worst was yet to come: if he couldn’t handle six miles in bouncy modern running shoes, then he was in for a world of hurt when he went hard-core Victorian. Running shoes have only been around about as long as the space shuttle; before that, your dad wore flat rubber gym shoes and your granddad was in leather ballet slippers. For millions of years, humans ran without arch support, pronation control, or gel-filled pods under their heels. How the hell they managed, Ted had no idea. But first things first; he was less than six months out from his birthday, so Priority No. 1 was finding some way, any way, to cover twenty-six miles on foot. Once he figured that out, he could worry later about transitioning into the cowhide widow-makers.

  “If I make up my mind, I will find a way,” Ted says. “So I started doing research.” First, he got checked by a chiropractor and an orthopedic surgeon, and both said there was really nothing wrong with him. Running was just an inherently dangerous sport, they told him, and one of the dangers was the way impact shock shoots up your legs and into your spine. But the docs did have some good news: if Ted insisted on running, he could probably be cured with a credit card. Top-of-the-line running shoes and some spongy heel pads, they said, should cushion his legs enough to get him through a marathon.

  Ted spent a fortune he really didn’t have on the most expensive shoes he could find, and was crushed to discover that they didn’t help. But instead of blaming the docs, he blamed the shoes: he must need even more cushioning than thirty years of Nike air-injection R&D had come up with. So he gulped hard and sent three hundred dollars to Switzerland for a pair of Kangoo Jumps, the springiest shoes in the world. Kangoos are basically Rollerblades as designed by Wile E. Coyote: instead of wheels, each boot sits atop a full-length steel-spring suspension that lets you boing along like you’re in a Moon bounce.

  When the box arrived, six weeks later, Ted was almost quivering with excitement. He took a few tentative bounces … fantastic! It was like walking with Mick Jagger’s mouth strapped to the bottom of each foot. Oh, this was going to be the answer, Ted thought as he began bouncing down the street. By the time he got to the corner, he was clutching his back and cursing. “The sensation I got after an hour in running shoes, I got almost instantly from these Kangoo boots,” Ted says. “My worldview of what I needed was shattered.”

  Furious and frustrated, he yanked them off his feet. He couldn’t wait to shove the stupid Kangoos back in the box and mail them back to Switzerland with instructions for further shoving. He stalked home barefoot, so pissed off and disappointed that it took him nearly the entire walk to notice what was happening: his back didn’t hurt. Didn’t hurt a bit.

  Heyyy … Ted thought. Maybe I can speed walk the marathon in bare feet. Bare feet certainly qualified as 1890s sportswear.

  So every day, Ted put on his running shoes and walked over to Hansen Dam, an oasis of scrub brush and lakes he calls “L.A.’s last wilderness.” Once there, he pulled off his shoes and hiked barefoot along the bridle paths. “I was totally amazed at how enjoyable it was,” he recalled. “The shoes would cause so much pain, and as soon as I took them off, it was like my feet were fish jumping back into water after being held captive. Finally, I just left the shoes at home.”

  But why did his back feel better with less cushioning, instead of more? He went online in search of answers, and the result was like parting the foliage in a rain forest and discovering a secret tribe of the Amazon. Ted stumbled across an international community of barefoot runners, complete with their own ancient wisdom and tribal nicknames and led by their great bearded sage, “Barefoot Ken Bob” Saxton. And luckily, this was one tribe that loved to write.

  Ted pored over years’ worth of Barefoot Ken Bob’s archives. He discovered that Leonardo da Vinci considered the human foot, with its fantastic weight-suspension system comprising one quarter of all the bones in the human body, “a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.” He learned about Abebe Bikila—the Ethiopian marathoner who ran barefoot over the cobblestones of Rome to win the 1960 Olympic marathon—and about Charlie Robbins, M.D., a lone voice in the medical wilderness who ran barefoot and argued that marathons won’t hurt you, but shoes sure as shooting will.

  Most of all, Ted was transfixed by Barefoot Ken Bob’s “Naked Toe Manifesto.” It gave Ted chills, the way it seemed directed personally at him. “Many of you may be suffering from chronic running related injuries,” Barefoot Ken Bob begins:

  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.

  “That was my Eureka! moment,” Ted recalled. Suddenly, it all made sense. So that’s why those stinkin’ Kangoo Jumps made his back ache! All that cushioning underfoot let him run with big, sloppy strides, which twisted and tweaked his lower back. When he went barefoot, his form instantly tightened; his back straightened and his legs stayed squarely under his hips.

  “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.”

  On his first barefoot run, Ted went five miles and felt… nothing. Not a twinge. He bumped it up to an hour, then two. Within months, Ted had transformed himself from an aching, fearful non-runner into a barefoot marathoner with such speed that he was able to accomplish something that 99.9 percent of all runners never will: he qualified for the Boston Marathon.

  Intoxicated with his startling new talent, Ted kept pushing further. He went on to run the Mother Road 100—one hundred miles of asphalt on the original Route 66—and the Leona Divide fifty-miler, and the Angeles Crest 100-Mile Endurance Run through the rugged San Gabriel Mountains. Whenever he hit gravel and broken glass, he yanked on rubber foot gloves called the Vibram FiveFingers and kept going. Soon, he wasn’t just some runner; he was one of the best barefoot runners in America and a sought-after authority on stride technique and ancient footwear. One newspaper even ran an article on foot health headlined WHAT WOULD BAREFOOT TED DO?

  Ted’s evolution was complete. He’d emerged from the watery depths, learned to run, and captured the only quarry he desired—not fortune, just fame.

  “Stop!”

  Caballo was talking to all of us, not just Ted. He brought us to an abrupt halt in the middle of a wobbly footbridge over a sewage ditch.

  “I need you all to swear a blood oath,” he said. “So put up your right hands and repeat after me.”

  Eric looked over at me. “What’s this all about?”

  “Beats me.”

  “You’ve got to make the oath right here, before we cross over to the other side,” Caballo insisted. “Back there is the way out. This is the way in. If you’re in, you’ve got to swear it.”

  We shrugged, dropped our packs, and lifted our hands.

  “If I get hurt, lost, or die,” Caballo began.

  “If I get hurt, lost, or die,” we chanted.

  “It’s my own damn fault.”

  “It’s my own damn fault!”

  “Uh … amen.”

  “AMEN!”

  Caballo led us over to the tiny house where he and I had eaten the day we met. We all squeezed into Mamá’s living room as her daughter jammed two tables together. Luis and his dad ducked across the street and returned with two big bags of beer. Jenn and Billy took a few sips of Tecate and began to perk up. We all raised our beers and clinked cans with Caballo. T
hen he turned to me and got down to business. Suddenly, the oath on the bridge made sense.

  “You remember Manuel Luna’s son?”

  “Marcelino?” Of course I remembered the Human Torch. I’d been mentally signing Nike contracts on his behalf ever since I’d seen him at the Tarahumara school. “Is he coming?”

  “No,” Caballo said. “He’s dead. Someone beat him to death. They murdered him out on the trail. He was stabbed in the neck and under the arm and his head was bashed in.”

  “Who … what happened?” I stammered.

  “There’s all kind of drug shit going on these days,” Caballo said. “Maybe Marcelino saw something he wasn’t supposed to see. Maybe they were trying to get him to carry weed out of the canyon and he said no. No one really knows. Manuel is just heartbroken, man. He stayed over at my house when he came to tell the federales. But they’re not going to do anything. There’s no law down here.”

  I sat, stunned. I remembered the drug runners in the shiny red Deathmobile we’d seen on the way to the Tarahumara school the year before. I pictured stealthy Tarahumara tipping it over the edge of a cliff at night, the drug runners clawing frantically at their seat belts, the truck bouncing down the canyon and exploding in a giant fireball. I had no idea if the men in the Deathmobile had been involved. All I knew was I wanted to kill somebody.

  Caballo was still talking. He had already absorbed Marcelino’s death and was back to obsessing over his race. “I know Manuel Luna won’t come, but I’m hoping Arnulfo will show up. And maybe Silvino.” Over the winter, Caballo managed to put together a nice pot of prizes; not only was he kicking in his own money, but he’d also been contacted out of the blue by Michael French, a Texas triathlete who’d made a fortune from his IT company. French was intrigued by my Runner’s World article, and while he couldn’t make it to the race himself, he offered to put up cash and corn for the top finishers.