Born to Run

Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run lived on the bestseller lists for four months: obviously. It splices three blockbuster formulae: take the provocative questions and paradoxical answers of Malcolm Gladwell, toss in punchy! magazine prose, then cap it with Dan Brown attention-grabbing. This is a little like mixing Coke, Sprite, and orange Crush to develop the perfect soda. But as far as genetic abominations go, Born to Run isn’t bad. It fulfills all requirements of its genre, the sociological bestseller, and reads so quickly that you don’t have time to truly despise the prose.

Books like this live and die by their hook. Born to Run has a pretty good one: How is it that a reclusive tribe of Indians with shoe tire sandals can beat the First World’s greatest runners in a race? The Tarahumara Indians reside in the Copper Canyons of northern Mexico and can run like hell. McDougall reports feats of superhuman endurance, 345 mile runs undertaken just because, ultra-marathons treated as everyday activity. With a marathoner trapped inside his big, rickety body, McDougall makes a pilgrimage to the Copper Canyons to unlock the secret of running, and in doing so, the secret of our very humanity. You can see the blueprint of a bestseller. We read to learn, and with books like this, we like to learn about ourselves. Common knowledge won’t do it, either: secrets are preferred. Even better, this is the wisdom of the ancients. McDougall smartly universalizes his thesis by plugging into our hunger for self-improvement, which, as the Bible proves, can move more books than even teen vampires. Running, according to McDougall, is a fundamental human activity, exercise encoded in our genes. He points out that the Tarahumara do not suffer the ills of the sedentary modern world:

In Tarahumara Land, there was no crime, war, or theft. There was no corruption, obesity, drug addiction, greed, wife-beating, child abuse, heart disease, high blood pressure, or carbon emissions. They didn’t get diabetes, or depressed, or even old: fifty-year-olds could outrun teenagers, and eighty-year-old great-granddads could hike marathon distances up mountainsides. Their cancer rates were barely detectable.

Let’s play self-help bingo! You won’t get sick. You won’t get old. You won’t get sad. All you have to do is run. McDougall so fervently believes in running-as-panacea that he even tosses in low carbon emissions, though that may have more to do with the Tarahumara’s third-world poverty rather than a zest for jogging.

The book works best when it sticks with the more tangible secrets of proper running technique and equipment. They comprise just a few chapters, but offer a convincing argument against the high-tech Nike shoes and heel-toe running most of us are familiar with. McDougall sees Nike as responsible for most runner’s injuries; thick soles which shield us from impact also muffle biofeedback, allowing our bodies to operate in structurally unsound fashion. Barefoot running, as practiced by the Tarahumara over rocky terrain, means you won’t discover aching knees the moment the run’s over – you’ll just wrench something right then and there. Expensive running shoes can mitigate brutal impact, but proper running circumvents it. If you’ve ever thought about it, you’ll notice that sprinters’ heels do not touch the ground. Which is why something like a high heel race is possible. Run barefoot down the street and I promise you won’t land on your heel, which is not designed to absorb that kind of shock. Born to Run suggests landing higher up on the foot. Which seems a little goofy, taking advice on how to run: we see running as so basic an activity as to make any training in technique a waste of time. McDougall’s coach, Eric Orton, responds to that:

“…Ask most people and they’ll say, ‘People just run the way they run.’ That’s ridiculous. Does everyone just swim the way they swim?” For every other sport, lessons are fundamental; you don’t go out and start slashing away with a golf club or sliding down a mountain on skis until someone takes you through the steps and teaches you proper form. If not, inefficiency is guaranteed and injury is inevitable.

Any skepticism about Born to Run’s claims are of course easy to test; my first run sans heels shaved half a minute off my best mile time. My Achilles were sore for about a week after, but I’m willing to credit that to amateur mistakes and atrophy. In the runs since, my Achilles have been improving along with my times. It’s all suspiciously easy, but I’ll take it: anything to get off the plateau. A month ago I was absolutely killing myself for a nine minute mile. On pure effort I was outrunning Bannister, but my body wasn’t keeping up. Now nine minutes feels, appropriately, like a mild pace.

Born to Run works as a manual, then. And McDougall’s passion for the subject and the characters make the book a convincing and energizing read. But zealots don’t write well. McDougall’s running coach counsels him to run “Easy, Light, Smooth.” His editor must have been shouting, “Forced, Slangy, Punchy!” It’s X-Games writing, a conflation of strong writing with sizzle, attitude, writing that pops. For instance:

Ann Trason. The thirty-three-year-old community-college science teacher from California. If you said you could spot her in a crowd, you were either her husband or a liar. Ann was sort of short, sort of slender, sort of schlumpy, sort of invisible behind her mousy-brown bangs—sort of what you’d expect, basically, in a community-college science teacher. Until someone fired a gun.

If you’ve seen Ken, with those steel-toed boots on his size 13 stompers and that mug as craggy as the rock he blasted for a living, you figure out pretty quick you don’t put a hand near his face unless you’re dead drunk or dead serious.

McDougall courts the reader’s attention like a bar buddy on his fourth Rolling Rock. There’s lots of aggressive yous and crackling binaries: “either her husband or a liar,” “dead drunk or dead serious.” The diction is cacophonous, each word clamoring with the others for attention.

with those steel-toed boots on his size 13 stompers and that mug as craggy as the rock he blasted for a living

Punchy writers like McDougall only throw haymakers, never jabs. This is the legacy of Dan Brown and the airport thrillers. You can see one in that quote about Ann Trason:

sort of what you’d expect, basically, in a community-college science teacher. Until someone fired a gun.

My favorite leads off Chapter 20. McDougall writes:

Nine months later, I found myself back on the Mexican border with a ticking clock and zero margin for error.

That sentiment might be appropriate for John McClane, maybe. But McDougall isn’t talking about saving a school of children from the vengeful machinations of Hans Gruber’s younger brother: he’s talking about organizing a race. Writing like this insults the reader’s intelligence. It’s constantly trying to goose you, assuming you can’t breathe through your nose and focus on the text without copy befitting the trailer to a Steven Seagal movie. In contrast to his running philosophy, McDougall constantly lands heavy, and frequently goes overboard. If you’re not sure if a book has over the top prose, check the similes. Here are two of my favorites.

Imagining a man’s voice:

probably like Yogi Bear ordering burritos at Taco Bell.

Or:

Your feet are like a minnow bucket full of sensory neurons…

Then look for absurd and unnecessary locutions made in the name of Mountain Dew writing. He talks about blasting up hills, jamming ‘er [sic] into gear. Eating a mid-race snack becomes “get[ting] a few more calories down her neck.”

Since you can read the book in the time it takes to run a marathon, these missteps are more charming than irritating. Recommending a book usually comes down to winnowing out that particular thing within the text – be it a sensibility, emotion, idea – that will connect with a certain kind of person. With Born to Run, I recommend it based on physiology. If you have bad knees and wish you could run more, look it up.