That's thing number one. Number two, their running ability has been fabled throughout history. Periodically, people would come across the Tarahumara hundreds of miles from the canyons. These guys would tear off on 300 and 400-mile runs -- not just for a purpose, you know, like the Navahos used to have a whole systemof messengers. The Tarahumara essentially did it for fun.
I found everything all over the place. The Tarahumara were famous for chasing down deer this way. The most interesting story I found in persistence hunting is one tribe, I can't remember the name off the top of my head, where if you wanted to prove you had some cojones, you
strange correlation between sports and social living. The Tarahumara are remarkable for three things. Number one, when the Conquistadors arrived in Mexico, back in the 1600s, you basically had two choices: You either fight back or haul ass. The Mayans and the Aztecs fought back, which is why you see very few Mayans and Aztecs anymore.
haul ass. The Mayans and the Aztecs fought back, which is why you see very few Mayans and Aztecs anymore. The Tarahumara just turned around and took off. They disappeared down into this vast, spider-webbing network of canyons -- one of the most inaccessible places on the planet. And they've essentially been there ever since
Number three -- and this is where Vigil was really intrigued. The Tarahumara are free from crime, violence, warfare, heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes, clinical depression, high blood pressure, domestic abuse.
You could fight back like the Mayans and the Aztecs, or you could turn around and take off, like the Tarahumara did. Very few Mayans and Aztecs around today, but the Tarahumara have managed to hide themselves and live down there, almost untouched by the modern world. So, essentially, they are living today exactly the way they did 400 years ago in the 1600s. That's really tantalizing, because you know, we can blather on all we want about what history says and what humans evolved to do.
That's what they do. This is the elderly Tarahumara gentleman, who's sitting, and people in the village in Africa, where they're all sitting. People sit all over the world.
My grandmother was born in Texas and her mother-- my great-grandmother-- and my great-great-grandmother came to El Paso. They were Tarahumara from Chihuahua. And they were here a long time ago.
barefoot Batman, naked guy, the Kalahari bushmen, the toenail amputee, a cult devoted to distance running and sex parts, the wild man of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and ultimately, to the ancient tribe of the Tarahumara , and their shadowy disciple Caballo Blanco. In the end, I got my answer, but only after I found myself in the middle of the greatest race the world would never see -- the ultimate fighting competition of foot races, an underground
day before. And I sort of think, "There's something here, you know? Maybe there actually is a right way to do this thing. And maybe that's the first step toward unlocking the secret of the Tarahumara ." It's the simplest thing of all. You learn how to do it right, and everything else falls in place.
them to their prehistoric counterparts. And see whether there isn't not some sort of common ground there. Whether these ultra runners are not trying to rediscover what the Tarahumara have never forgotten.
And I was finishing up that book in 2012 when I went to do some fieldwork in the Sierra Tarahumara , which is in Chihuahua in northern Mexico. And I was doing research among the Tarahumara Native Americans who are well known for, among other things, their long distance running. It's really beautiful place.
He was twice my age, running four times the distance in the thinnest shoes imaginable. That was my first introduction to the Tarahumara . I made a lot of mistakes along the way trying to understand what they're all about. And I wish I had originally spoken to a guy named doctor Joe Vigil, who is a distant running coach in Colorado, who -- he's a strange guy,
burning, so I was wondering if you had any suggestions there. So if you took a bunch of Tarahumara and dropped them off in the Rift Valley among the Nandi, you know, would they run as fast as the Kenyans? Probably, if they cared to.
He can't believe that's there's not something out there that someone's going to figure out before him, and it's going to thrash him. And that's the reason why one of the few times that these reclusive runners known as the “Tarahumara ,” one of the few times they've ever turned up at the Leadville Trail 100 Ultra Marathon, Dr. Joe Vigil was there, which meant that, at the age of nearly seventy, this old man was standing out in the Colorado Rockies at 12,000 feet in the dark at four o'clock in the morning, waiting for a bunch
Most of it is basically, you come up with an idea of how you think humans should do, and then you go back and try to gin together some fossils and prove it. But what's interesting about the Tarahumara is they are there. They are our living proof. They are a Smithsonian exhibit come to life.
We're at the bottom of canyons. There's nothing for miles in every direction. He took me downstream to a little Tarahumara schoolhouse where the kids would come down from their cave homes at the beginning of the week and basically camp out and live there all week long, and then, at the end of the week, go back up to their hidden homes again.
And, he also had busted-up ankles, and was pretty discouraged with running. He came down to study the Tarahumara , and run with them. And, by this point in his 50's, he was a totally transformed guy.
she gives you one of those. When I looked at some of the runners in the Tarahumara Valley, the callus on the bottom of their feet were tremendous.
for this crazy cross country race that he had created as a way of trying to blend the cultures, trying to bring people from the outside world down to the canyons to let them realize what the Tarahumara knew and letting the Tarahumara know that there were people in the outside world who valued and respected what they could do. So it's this gigantic race.
Instead of erring on the side of how far, how fast, how long – how about how does it feel? Meeting the Rarámuri, the Tarahumara people, running with some of the greatest runners in the world, being part of a great story.
Daily Show, speaking about his book, "Born to Run," which he's speaking about again today for us. I hope some of you got copies. The book is a chronicle of the tribe of the Tarahumara , who live in Chihuahua, Mexico, and their extraordinary running ability, as well as the politics surrounding running in this particular tribe. And I'm very excited to welcome Chris to speak with us today. Come on up.
Specifically, he wanted to know, How do you make anybody actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you make someone actually want to run? And that was the real secret of the Tarahumara . They've never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remember that running was mankind's first fine art -- our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollowed trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our
And, at that moment, Lumholtz's words revealed their hidden treasure. So that's what he meant when he called the Tarahumara "The founders and makers of the history of mankind." Perhaps all of our troubles -- all the violence and obesity and illness, all the depression and greed we can't overcome -- began when we stopped living as a running people. If you deny your nature, it will erupt in
So essentially, you can look at them as this born-again Smithsonian exhibit. Nothing has changed since the Stone Age for the Tarahumara . That's thing number one. Number two, their running ability has been fabled throughout history. Periodically, people would come across the
Tarahumara hundreds of miles from the canyons. These guys would tear off on 300 and 400-mile runs -- not just for a purpose, you know, like the Navahos used to have a whole systemof messengers. The Tarahumara essentially did it for fun. Their recreational games were these super-long, endurance contests.
years. Defying all odds -- and I sort of get into this in detail in the book how it actually turned out, but I actually located this guy. And he is just as reclusive as the Tarahumara , except for one thing. At that point, he realized that the thing he was there to discover, was on the verge of being extinguished. You know, the Tarahumara only number about
this slid on up the hill. And it looked exactly like some of the Tarahumara children I'd seen the day before. Here's a guy in his 50's, running like five-year-olds, not just with the same joyfulness and elasticity,
Just smile a lot, and then you actually become happy by mimicking the behavior of someone who is happy. That's what I wanted to do. If I could mimic the behavior of the Tarahumara , maybe I could get the rest of the benefits. So things are kind of cool, except for one thing.
Scott Jurek, who actually is a legitimate runner, a 7-time winner of the Western States 100, course record holder for the Badwater ultra marathon Death Valley, and myself. And we ended up heading down for this race with the Tarahumara and Caballo Blanco. Every step of the way I assumed was going to be the last step, especially when -- on his first day as a guide -- Caballo lost two out of the six people that were part of his
Chris McDougall: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's exactly the question that Caballo wrestled with for a long time before he decided to launch this race. You know, the Tarahumara have voluntarily lived in seclusion. That's the way they wanted it. And so, to have some arrogant outsider show up and say, "Here's what you need is this race."
burning, so I was wondering if you had any suggestions there. I made this distinction between the way the Tarahumara run and the way the Kenyans run marathons. You know, we are endurance animals.
alive.” And at that point, he was starting to spiral down in something that's really unusual about the Tarahumara . You know, the Tarahumara are a tribe which have essentially lived in isolation at the bottom of this deep, dangerous, very inaccessible network of canyons in north-westernish Mexico called the "Copper Canyons." Back in the 1600s, when the conquistadors arrived and started taking heads, there were two options.
I was intrigued because I wanted to find out whether Vigil's theory was true. Are there transferable skills that we can take from the Tarahumara , and incorporate into our own lives? Because, you know, it's nice to say, "Hey. They're great. They're wonderful.” But, it's pointless if we don't all go down to the canyons and eat mice and run through the hills.
And if that animal gets an opportunity to use its body the way it was intended, things fall into place. When we lose that opportunity, then we start to have problems. And we can dismiss the Tarahumara as being this kind of quirky, funky, ancient, indigenous tribe that has nothing to do with us. Or, we can look at them and say, you know, "Let's be humble and realize that there are some serious transferable skills that we need to look for, or else we're going to continue
Well, try knocking about a dozen of those out, one after the other, in the same day. Besides their ability to do that, the Tarahumara are also free from greed, crime, violence, warfare, heart disease, high cholesterol, diabetes, clinical depression, almost every single form of cancer, domestic abuse. Everything.
You could do a whole itemized list of all the things we're trying to get rid of in modern culture, and these guys don't even know what that language is. They are free from it. The Tarahumara don't even have money. They don't have a currency. They're form of economics is by trading favors and beer. So, you know, not capitalism, not socialism.
I was intrigued for one other reason as well, too. When I got out of the canyons after that visit with Caballo and the Tarahumara , I started to look into long distance running. And I discovered that there have been certain mysteries of human history that, to this day, have never been answered.
So anyway, I was thinking about mismatch diseases. And I was finishing up that book in 2012 when I went to do some fieldwork in the Sierra Tarahumara , which is in Chihuahua in northern Mexico. And I was doing research among the Tarahumara Native Americans who are well known for, among other things, their long distance running.
she gives you one of those. There's one in the Copper Canyon, which were Tarahumara Indians.
she gives you one of those. So there's a book called "Born to Run." Some of you-- so you know about the Tarahumara Indians.
show up. I found myself down at the bottom of the canyons, and I actually had the luck to locate a hidden home of a guy named Arnulfo Quimare, one of the greatest, living, Tarahumara runners. His home is so concealed that, if you were standing on it right now, you would not realize it's there. It is totally blended into the landscape. I actually got there, found this hidden home.
And finally, the guy who was guiding said, "Let's get out of here." So, we got up, and we sort of retreated. And there's nowhere else to go. So we went deeper into the canyons, and we found this little Tarahumara schoolhouse. And there's a schoolteacher there, who's half-Mexican, half-Tarahumara -- one of the few guys from the tribe who'd ever actually left and gone to the outside world.
shorts, and got a cup of water and a little bit of food, and then disappeared again, off into the canyons. And he would periodically reappear. And over the months and the years, he'd become friendly with the Tarahumara . And bit by bit, they had sort of absorbed him into the tribe, and looked at him as kind of like this sort of freaky, you know, foreign, ghostly half-cousin.
So, I said to her, "You know, it's weird how much you sound like this guy I met in Mexico. I'm heading down there in a few weeks for this race he's putting on with the Tarahumara ." "No way!" "And I think Scott Jurek" -- you know, the greatest ultra-distance runner in the world, I think there's a chance he may be there too." "You're shitting me!" the budding Buddha exclaimed. "Really? Can me and my friend go? Oh shit,
as a running inspiration, as a runner who's marvelous in that respect. One of the parts of the book is quite sad is that, any observation of the Tarahumara is going to impact on them. And I was interested to know, What's happened to them since the book's come out? And the attention that may have been drawn to them as a result of the book?
burning, so I was wondering if you had any suggestions there. is true, it essentially gives you a culture much like the Tarahumara .
steep dirt embankment that seems to be there for no other reason other than to just really beat the crap out of runners. And no matter how good a race you're having, that embankment is just rituous torture. And what Vigil saw when he saw the Tarahumara come running up there was something he had never seen on a runner's face, ever. And of all the things he would have picked out, I was impressed by the fact that he was not interested in the Tarahumara 's nutritional strategy on their race tactics on their biomechanics
They got that magic gene, that special chromosome.” And we try to find apologies for ourselves why -- any time someone does something better than we do, why, "Well, that's just the way it goes. There's nothing we can do.” When Vigil looks at the Tarahumara , he's not trying to find excuses. He's trying to find cause and effect. He's trying to find the causal logical sequence that he can then reproduce. He looks at the Tarahumara , and he goes, "You
I got down to the bottom of the canyons and sort of finagled my way through drug cartels and, against all odds, I actually located this hidden, sort of subterranean home of the guy named Arnulfo Quimare. He was one of the best of the living Tarahumara runners. I finally got there in the presence of the master, the keys to the kingdom at my feet. And we sat down, knee to knee, and I looked into his eyes, and began to ask him questions. And then, for the next four hours, he said