Born to Run by Christopher McDougall

[rating=3] ‘Born to Run’ is about “A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen”, according to the cover.

I’ve never been into sports – I don’t like watching them on TV, I don’t read the Sports columns in the newspaper, and I don’t play any.
But I do run. I ran my first 5km race in 2001, at age 23. Since then, I’ve run over 20 chip-timed races, including four half-marathons. I’m no legend, I’m not even vaguely fast, but I relish the feeling of my body moving and breathing and speeding along.

This book interested me for several reasons: I had just finished Haruki Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”, which was a personal memoir of a man who got addicted to running when he started writing. I was curious to see a view of running as sport and science, and had heard rumours that this book dealt with the big controversy of shoes vs. barefoot, so I took it out of my local library.

The first half of the book was a bit of a slog, given my motivations. A series of rich character sketches and blow-by-blow rundowns of ultramarathons, it seemed to forsake science for legend, and it reeked of the locker room. It read like an old fashioned “ripping yarn” by H. Rider Haggard, with ancient tribes and hidden knowledge, and cliffhangers scattered about as though in homage to Dan Brown or the Celestine Prophecy. Chia is the answer! Drink corn beer, it’s magic!

“When it comes to running shoes, all that glitters isn’t gold.”

As soon as I reached what many people would likely pass over as the “dry, boring stuff” in chapters 23 to 25, I got excited. This is where Chris McDougall gets down to the business of talking about barefoot running and the associations between injury and running shoes.

“Covering your feet with cushioned shoes is like turning off your smoke alarms.” – Barefoot Ted

McDougall pulls out studies and statistics, but divests himself of the responsibility of owning the theory by making it something that crazy “Barefoot Ted” has been pursuing. I suspected this might be a ploy to avoid divorcing himself permanently from the athletic gear companies that provide the financial support for the magazines he sometimes writes for, but he does come down on Nike pretty hard, so maybe not.

“The barefoot walker receives a continuous stream of information about the ground and about his own relationship to it, while a shod foot sleeps inside an unchanging environment.” – Dr. Paul Brand, US Public Health Service

McDougall lays out his findings as three “painful truths”: 1) the best shoes are the worst, 2) feet like a good beating, 3) human beings are designed to run without shoes. This posits the clear conclusion that we should all ditch our new Asics, and either keep on running in those ratty 10-year-old Nikes, or buy a pair of Vibram Five Fingers.

“If there’s any magic bullet to make human beings healthy, it’s to run.” – Dr. Daniel Lieberman, Harvard

In discussing the various training methods of world-famous runners and their coaches, he also stirs the pot of omnivorous diet vs. veganism. The final conclusion is never firmly drawn, but a lot of positive things are said about a diet consisting mostly of seeds, nuts and grains.

Chapter 27 is where Chris finally starts telling the bulk of his own story. We hear occasional snippets about his chronic injuries at the start of the book, and there’s a moment of hope when he meets Caballo Blanco and does some successful runs in Creel, but it takes the wisdom of coach Eric Orton and his “going tribal” methodology to correct McDougall’s stride to the point where he can enjoy the sport he’s just written 200+ pages about without suffering intense pain. This is covered somewhat vaguely with a short training montage, but hill running, weight loss and flat shoes seem to play a big part in his recovery.

And then we hit the really nerdy bits at the end of the book, where chapter 28 talks about the mystery of human evolution and whether or not homo sapiens are walking or running creatures. This piece on persistence hunting, which is literally running after an animal like a deer or gazelle until it collapses from heat exhaustion and then you eat it, was made more interesting because I watched the author’s TED talk and an amazing David Attenborough video about hunters in the Kalahari that shows what McDougall describes.

Finally, there’s the big race at the end where the author gets to go for a jog with the Tarahumara, the secretive run masters he’s made famous with his fanboy gushings in magazines and now a novel. I won’t give away the ending – you’ll have to read the book to find out if he collapses and dies a hot, copper canyon death or makes it to the finish line.

To conclude, an interesting read, and very motivating for those of us who choose to continue our species’ long-term love affair with running. Alas, I fear I may never expunge from my brain the vision of a cheetah on a treadmill with a rectal thermometer up its ass. Boo! But at least I learned that flapjacks need boiled rice, bananas, cornmeal and goat milk to achieve authentic Mexican greatness. Win!

3 of 5 stars / bookshelves: read, 287 pages, Publisher: Knopf (2009)
Read from October 30 to November 14, 2011 .

NaNoWriMo: Day One

It seems absurd to want to join in a month-long frenzy of novel writing when I have already subjected myself to the pain and anguish of a year-long frenzy of novel writing, but we writers are crazy folk. Frankly, I will take whatever motivation is readily available to help put words to screen.

In case you haven’t heard of it, NaNoWriMo is an annual (November) novel writing project that brings together professional and amateur writers from all over the world. “Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!” they proclaim on their site, as folks who feel they have a book in them try to squeeze, wrench, pry and jackhammer it out over the course of 720 grueling hours. That guy who cut his arm off after a mere 127 hours knows nothing of our suffering. No time for editing. No time to reach for a thesaurus. Just write, write, write.

My modus operandi does not often result in linear storytelling, so I shudder at the idea of trying to patch together dozens of disjointed scraps of scenery and dialogue into a publishable piece in just 30 brief days. However, I do like the immediacy and panic of the thing, and the sort of wartime “we’re all in the trenches” mood brought on by thousands of disenfranchised literary souls striving together to carve their letters into the shining firmament, etc. etc.

So, in honour of this month of extreme creative force, I will try to post some writing tidbits for the enjoyment of the public, in a serial fashion, just like early Charles Dickens only with fewer coal scuttles and absolutely no monetary compensation for my pains. Here is today’s short piece (about 600 words), brought forth by my excruciating afternoon encounter with a car alarm. Enjoy!

~~~
THE FOLLOWING IS MOSTLY FICTION, EXCEPT THE BIT WHERE I IMAGINE HITTING THE CAR, WHICH WAS BASED ON ACTUAL RAGE. I DID NOT COOK A TURKEY TODAY. ALSO, MY NAME IS NOT DREW.
~~~

The car alarm had been going off for two solid hours now, blaring away, a demonic metronome. Drew stood, teeth clenched, eyelids narrowed, and glared out the window at the street below. The offending Audi was flashing its hazards on and off, on and off. It reminded her of the annoying light show at a downtempo rave she’d attended during her unfortunate teen years. No menacing thief skulking nearby, no apologetic owner fiddling with the lock; no silence in sight.

She wanted to run outside and wreak havoc on the car with a blunt instrument. In her mind, she envisioned the baseball bat or broom handle or rolling pin smashing down on the hood, breaking through the windshield with a satisfying crunch, peppering the dashboard with shattered glass and all the while, hitting, hitting, the flailing rhythm of her devastating blows keeping perfect time with the incessant honking like a mad animal percussionist.

The pounding would continue until her makeshift weapon ploughed deep enough into the car’s circuitry to find and destroy the Central Honk Apparatus or whatever that damned evil source of noise was called. Then, bliss, as the honks hushed to a hoarse flatulent whisper, falling out of tune, and at length the three-thousand pound steel music box from Hell would wheeze its last foul breath.

It was probably for the best that she had a turkey slow-roasting at 325º, and water boiling on the stove, as overseeing the kitchen meant Drew could not follow through on her dark fantasies of vehicular annihilation. Snap! On went the oven light, a quick bend at the waist, and she peered upside-down into the greasy darkness. The bird was browning nicely, oozing clear juices into the pan where they bathed waiting carrots and parsnips, releasing a pungent smell of sage and pepper into the air.

Striving for holiday cheer, Drew took a calming breath as she straightened up, and exhaled into sudden, peaceful silence. The racket had finally stopped! She peered out the window, but the driver was nowhere in sight. Either the coward had used a remote-control keychain to deactivate the alarm, or else the kind manufacturing engineers at Audi had built a pity-timer into their anti-theft system.

Drew gathered a dishtowel into her hand, reached over the front burner, and lifted the heavy lid to check on the potatoes. Hot clouds of steam billowed forth, revealing dancing vegetables bouncing up and down in their salty, starchy tub. Done. Boiling water was sluiced off into the sink, and the resulting roar seemed to resolve itself into the resurrected rhythm of the car alarm.

“Lord, no!” Drew thought, “Please not again.”

She held herself rigidly still and listened, muscles tense with expectation, but the alarm was no more: it was only the ghost of the dreaded sound, haunting her. Sailors often feel waves under their legs long after leaving the sea for the steady shore; so did Drew’s ears now play ventriloquist’s tricks on her, projecting phantom sounds into her brain. Time to quit cooking and take a walk, perhaps.

Checking the turkey with a fork, she covered it with tin foil and let it rest. Nothing else needed urgent attention; broccoli could be steamed later, cheesecake was chilling in the freezer. Pulling off the apron her brother had given her last Christmas that read, “I like cats, too! Let’s exchange recipes,” she washed her hands, pulled on her black pea coat and purple mittens, and decided to treat herself to a seasonal latte. Something spiced or maple-flavoured, full of syrup and joy.