Born to Run

  By midafternoon, the heat had bottled up in the canyon until it was over 100 degrees. We’d lost sight of the others, so Eric and I took our time, running easily and sipping often from our quickly emptying hydration packs, feeling our way carefully down the confusing web of trails, unaware that an hour before, Jenn and Billy had vanished.

  “Goat’s blood is good” Billy kept insisting. “We can drink the blood, then eat the meat. Goat meat is good.” He’d read a book by a guy whose trick for cheating death in the Arizona desert was to stone a wild horse to death and suck the blood from its throat. Geronimo used to do that, too, Billy thought. Wait, it might’ve been Kit Carson….

  Drink the blood? Jenn, her throat so parched it hurt to talk, just stared at him. He’s losing it, she thought. We can barely walk, and Bone-head’s talking about killing a goat we can’t catch with a knife we don’t have. He’s in worse shape than I am. He’s—

  Suddenly, her stomach clenched so badly she could barely breathe. She got it. Billy didn’t sound crazy because of the heat. He sounded crazy because the only sane thing left to talk about was the one thing he wouldn’t admit: there was no way out of this.

  On a good day, no one in the world could have dropped Jenn and Billy on a measly six-mile trail run, but this was turning out to be a pretty bad day. The heat, their hangovers, and their empty stomachs had caught up with them before they’d made it halfway down the mountain. They lost sight of Caballo on one of the switchbacks, then they hit a fork in the trail. Next thing they knew, they were alone.

  Disoriented, Jenn and Billy wandered off the mountain and into a stone maze that webbed in every direction. The rock walls were mirroring the heat so hideously, Jenn suspected she and Billy were just going whichever way looked a little shadier. Jenn felt dizzy, as if her mind were floating free of her body. They hadn’t eaten since splitting that PowerBar six hours before, and hadn’t had a sip of water since noon. Even if heat stroke didn’t wipe them out, Jenn knew, they were still doomed: the 100- plus degree heat would drop, but keep on dropping. Come nightfall, they’d be shivering in the freezing dark in their surf shorts and T-shirts, dying of thirst and exposure in one of the most unreachable corners of Mexico.

  What weird corpses they’d make, Jenn thought as they trudged along. Whoever found them would have to wonder how a pair of twenty-two-year-old lifeguards in surf baggies ended up at the bottom of a Mexican canyon, looking like they’d been tossed in from Baja by a rogue wave. Jenn had never been so thirsty in her life; she’d lost twelve pounds during a hundred-mile race before and still didn’t feel as desperate as she did now.

  “Look!”

  “The Luck of the Bonehead!” Jenn marveled. Under a stone ledge, Billy had spotted a pool of fresh water. They ran toward it, fumbling the tops off their water bottles, then stopped.

  The water wasn’t water. It was black mud and green scum, buzzing with flies and churned by wild goats and burros. Jenn bent down for a closer look. Ugh! The smell was nasty They knew what one sip could do; come nightfall, they could be too weak with fever and diarrhea to walk, or infected with cholera or giardia or guinea worm disease, which has no cure except slowly pulling the three-foot-long worms out of the abscesses that erupt on your skin and eye sockets.

  But they knew what would happen without that sip. Jenn had just read about those two best friends who’d gotten lost in a canyon in New Mexico and became so sun-crazed after a single day without water that one stabbed the other to death. She’d seen photos of hikers who’d been found in Death Valley with their mouths choked with dirt, their last moments alive spent trying to suck moisture from scorching sand. She and Billy could stay away from the puddle and die of thirst, or they could swallow a few gulps and risk dying from something else.

  “Let’s hold off,” Billy said. “If we don’t find our way out in one hour, we’ll come back.”

  “Okay. This way?” she said, pointing away from Batopilas and straight toward a wilderness that stretched four hundred miles to the Sea of Cortez.

  Billy shrugged. They’d been too rushed and groggy that morning to pay attention to where they were going, not that it would have mattered: everything looked exactly the same. As they walked, Jenn flashed back to the way she’d scoffed at her mother the night before she and Billy had left for El Paso. “Jenn,” her mother had implored. “You don’t know these people. How do you know they’ll take care of you if something goes wrong?”

  Dang, Jenn thought. Mom nailed that one.

  “How long’s it been?” she asked Billy.

  “About ten minutes.”

  “I can’t wait anymore. Let’s go back.”

  “All right.”

  When they found the puddle again, Jenn was ready to drop to her knees and start slurping, but Billy held her back. He swirled aside the mold, covered the open mouth of his water bottle with his hand, then filled it from the bottom of the puddle, half hoping the water would be a little less bacteria-ridden beneath the muck. He handed his bottle to Jenn, then filled hers the same way.

  “I always knew you’d kill me,” Jenn said. They clinked their bottles, said “Cheers,” and started to gulp, trying not to gag.

  They drank their bottles dry, refilled them, and started walking west again into the wilderness. Before they’d gotten far, they noticed deep shadows were stretching farther across the canyon.

  “We’ve got to get more water,” Billy said. He hated the idea of backtracking, but their only chance of surviving through the night was getting to the puddle and hunkering down till dawn. Maybe if they chugged three bottles full of water, they’d be hydrated enough to climb up the mountain for a last look around before dark.

  They turned and, once again, trudged back into the maze.

  “Billy,” Jenn said. “We’re really in trouble.”

  Billy didn’t answer. His head was killing him, and he couldn’t shake a line from “Howl” that kept beating in time to the throbbing in his skull:

  … who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry….

  Disappeared in Mexico, Billy thought. Leaving nothing behind.

  “Billy,” Jenn repeated. They’d put each other through some bad times in the past, she and the Bonehead, but they’d found a way to stop breaking each other’s hearts and become best friends. She’d gotten Billy into this, and she felt worse for what was about to happen to him than what would happen to her.

  “This is for real, Billy,” Jenn said. Tears began trickling down her face. “We’re going to die out here. We’re going to die today.”

  “SHUT UP!” Billy screamed, so rattled by the sight of Jenn’s tears that he erupted in a total non-Bonehead frenzy. “JUST SHUT UP!”

  The outburst stunned both of them into silence. And in that silence, they heard a sound: rocks clattering somewhere behind them.

  “HEY!” Jenn and Billy shouted together. “HEY! HEY! HEY!”

  They began running before realizing that they didn’t know what they were running toward. Caballo had warned them that if they faced one danger out there greater than being lost, it was being found.

  Jenn and Billy froze, trying to peer into the shadows below the canyon’s crest. Could it be the Tarahumara? A Tarahumara hunter would be invisible, Caballo had told them; he’d watch from a distance, and if he didn’t like what he saw, he’d disappear back into the forest. What if it was drug cartel enforcers? Whoever it was, they had to risk it.

  “HEY!” they shouted. “WHO’S THERE?”

  They listened until the last echo of their voices died away. Then a shadow split from the canyon wall, and began moving toward them.

  “You hear that?” Eric asked me.

  It had taken us two hours to pick our way down the mountain. We’d kept losing the trail, and had to stop to backtrack and search our memories for landmarks before continuing. Wild goats had turned the mountain into a web of faint, crisscrossing trails, and with the sun fading below
the canyon lip, it was getting hard to keep track of which direction we were going.

  Finally, we spotted a dry creek bed down below that I was pretty sure led to the river. Just in time, too; I’d finished my water half an hour before and was already pasty mouthed. I broke into a jog, but Eric called me back. “Let’s make sure,” he said. He climbed back up the cliff to check our bearings.

  “Looks good,” he called. He started to climb down—and that’s when he heard voices echoing from somewhere inside the gorges. He called me up, and together we began following the echoes. A few moments later, we found Jenn and Billy. Tears were still streaking Jenn’s face. Eric gave them his water, while I handed them the last of my goos.

  “You really drank out of that?” I asked, looking at the wild burro dung in the puddle and hoping they’d confused it with another one.

  “Yeah,” Jenn said. “We were just coming back for more.”

  I dug out my camera in case an infectious-disease specialist wanted to see exactly what had gotten into their bowels. Foul as it was, though, that puddle had saved their lives: if Jenn and Billy hadn’t come back for another drink at precisely that moment, they’d still be walking deeper and deeper into no-man’s-land, the canyon walls closing behind them.

  “Can you run a little more?” I asked Jenn. “I think we’re not that far from the village.”

  “Okay,” Jenn said.

  We set off at an easy trot, but as the water and goo revived them, Jenn and Billy set a pace I could barely keep up with. Once again, I was amazed at their ability to bounce back from the dead. Eric led us down the creek bed, then spotted a bend in the gorge he recognized. We doglegged left, and even with the light getting dim, I could see that the dust ahead of us had been tromped by feet. A mile and a half later, we emerged from the gorges to find Scott and Luis waiting anxiously for us on the outskirts of Batopilas.

  We got four liters of water from a little grocery store and dumped in a handful of iodine pills. “I don’t know if it will work,” Eric said, “but maybe you can flush out whatever bacteria you swallowed.” Jenn and Billy sat on the curb and began gulping. While they drank, Scott explained that no one had noticed that Jenn and Billy were missing until the rest of the group had gotten off the mountain. By then, everyone was so dangerously dehydrated that turning back to search would have put them all in danger. Caballo grabbed a bottle of water and went back on his own, urging the others to sit tight; the last thing he wanted was for all his gringos to go scattering into the canyons at nightfall.

  About half an hour later, Caballo ran back into Batopilas, red-faced and drenched in sweat. He’d missed us in the branching gorges, and when he realized the hopelessness of his one-man search party, he’d returned to town for help. He looked at Eric and me— tired but still on our feet—and then at the two ace young ultrarunners, exhausted and distraught on the curb. I could tell what Caballo was thinking before he said it.

  “What’s your secret, man?” he asked Eric, nodding toward me. “How’d you fix this guy?”

  CHAPTER 27

  I’D MET Eric the year before, right after I’d thrown off my running shoes in disgust and sprawled in an icy creek. I was hurt again—and for the last time, as far as I was concerned.

  As soon as I’d gotten home from the Barrancas, I’d started putting Caballo’s lessons to work. I couldn’t wait to lace up my shoes every afternoon and try to recapture the sensation I’d had in the hills of Creel, back when running behind Caballo made the miles feel so easy, light, smooth, and fast that I never wanted to stop. As I ran, I screened my mental film footage of Caballo in action, remembering the way he’d floated up the hills of Creel as if he were being abducted by aliens, somehow keeping everything relaxed except those bony elbows, which pumped for power like a Rock’em-Sock’em Robot. For all his gangliness, Caballo on a trail reminded me of Muhammad Ali in the ring: loose as wave-washed seaweed, with just a hint of ferocity ready to explode.

  After two months, I’d built up to six miles a day with a ten-miler on the weekend. My form hadn’t graduated to Smooth yet, but I was keeping the needle wavering pretty steadily between Easy and Light. I was getting a little anxious, though; no matter how gingerly I tried to take it, my legs were already starting to rebel; that little flamethrower in my right foot was shooting out sparks and the backs of both calves felt twangy, as if my Achilles tendons had been replaced with piano wire. I stocked up on stretching books and put in a dutiful half hour of loosening up before every run, but the long shadow of Dr. Torg’s cortisone needle loomed over me.

  By late spring, the time had come for a test. Thanks to a forest-ranger friend, I lucked into the perfect opportunity: a three-day fifty-mile running trip through Idaho’s River of No Return, two and a half million acres of the most untouched wilderness in the continental U.S. The setup was perfect: our supplies would be hauled by a mule packer, so all that I and the other four runners had to do was kick up fifteen miles of dirt a day from campsite to campsite.

  “I really didn’t know anything about the woods till I came to Idaho,” Jenni Blake began, as she led us down a thin wisp of a dirt trail winding through the junipers. Watching her flow over the trail with such teenage strength, it was hard to believe that nearly twenty years had passed since her arrival; at thirty-eight, Jenni still has the blonde bangs, winsome blue eyes, and lean, tan limbs of a college frosh on summer break. Oddly, though, she’s more of a carefree kid now than she was back then.

  “I was bulimic in college and had a terrible self-image, until I found myself out here,” Jenni said. She came as a summer volunteer, and was immediately loaded with a lumberjack saw and two weeks of food and pointed toward the backcountry to go clear trails. She nearly buckled under the weight of the backpack, but she kept her doubts to herself and set off, alone, into the woods.

  At dawn, she’d pull on sneakers and nothing else, then set off for long runs through the woods, the rising sun warming her naked body. “I’d be out here for weeks at a time by myself,” Jenni explained. “No one could see me, so I’d just go and go and go. It was the most fantastic feeling you can imagine.” She didn’t need a watch or a route; she judged her speed by the tickle of wind on her skin, and kept racing along the pine-needled trails until her legs and lungs begged her to head back to camp.

  Jenni has been hard-core ever since, running long miles even when Idaho is blanketed by snow. Maybe she’s self-medicating against deep-seated problems, but maybe (to paraphrase Bill Clinton) there was never anything wrong with Jenni that couldn’t be fixed by what’s right with Jenni.

  ————

  Yet when I winced my way down the final downhill leg three days later, I could barely walk. I hobbled into the creek and sat there, simmering and wondering what was wrong with me. It had taken me three days to run the same distance as Caballo’s racecourse, and I’d ended up with one Achilles tear, maybe two, and a pain in my heel that felt suspiciously like the vampire bite of running injuries: plantar fasciitis.

  Once PF sinks its fangs into your heels, you’re in danger of being infected for life. Check any running-related message board, and you’re guaranteed to find a batch of beseeching threads from PF sufferers begging for a cure. Everyone is quick to suggest the same remedies—night splints, elastic socks, ultrasound, electroshock, cortisone, orthotics—but the messages keep coming because none of them really seems to work.

  But how come Caballo could hammer descents longer than the Grand Canyon in crappy old sandals, while I couldn’t manage a few easy months of miles without a major breakdown? Wilt Chamberlain, all seven feet one inch and 275 pounds of him, had no problem running a 50- mile ultra when he was sixty years old after his knees had survived a lifetime of basketball. Hell, a Norwegian sailor named Mensen Ernst barely even remembered what dry land felt like when he came ashore back in 1832, but he still managed to run all the way from Paris to Moscow to win a bet, averaging one hundred thirty miles a day for fourteen days, wearing God only knows what kind of clodho
ppers on God only knows what kind of roads.

  And Mensen was just cracking his knuckles before getting down to serious business: he then ran from Constantinople to Calcutta, trotting ninety miles a day for two straight months. Not that he didn’t feel it; Mensen had to rest three whole days before beginning the 5,400- mile jog back home. So how come Mensen never got plantar fasciitis? He couldn’t have, because his legs were in excellent shape a year later when dysentery killed him as he tried to run all the way to the source of the Nile.

  Everywhere I looked, little pockets of superrunning savants seemed to emerge from the shadows. Just a few miles away from me in Maryland, thirteen-year-old Mackenzie Riford was happily running the JFK 50- miler with her mom (“It was fun!”), while Jack Kirk—a.k.a. “the Dipsea Demon”—was still running the hellacious Dipsea Trail Race at age ninety-six. The race begins with a 671- step cliffside climb, which means a man nearly half as old as America was climbing a fifty-story staircase before running off into the woods. “You don’t stop running because you get old,” said the Demon. “You get old because you stop running.”

  So what was I missing? I was in worse shape now than when I’d started; not only couldn’t I race with the Tarahumara, I doubted my PF-inflamed feet could even get me to the starting line.

  “You’re like everyone else,” Eric Orton told me. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  A few weeks after my Idaho debacle, I’d gone to interview Eric for a magazine assignment. As an adventure-sports coach in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and the former fitness director for the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, Eric’s specialty is tearing endurance sports down to their integral movements and finding transferable skills. He’d study rock climbing to find shoulder techniques for kayakers, and apply Nordic skiing’s smooth propulsion to mountain biking. What he’s really looking for are basic engineering principles; he’s convinced that the next great advance in fitness will come not from training or technology, but technique—the athlete who avoids injury will be the one who leaves the competition behind.