Born to Run

The reason we race isn’t so much to beat each other, he understood, but to be with each other.

Know why people run marathons? he told Dr. Bramble. Because running is rooted in our collective imagination, and our imagination is rooted in running. Language, art, science; space shuttles, Starry Night, intravascular surgery; they all had their roots in our ability to run. Running was the superpower that made us human—which means it’s a superpower all humans possess.

Baby, this town rips the bones from your back;
It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap …

—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, “Born to Run”

If running shoes never existed, he was saying, more people would be running. If more people ran, fewer would be dying of degenerative heart disease, sudden cardiac arrest, hypertension, blocked arteries, diabetes, and most other deadly ailments of the Western world.

There was something terribly sad, yet terribly uplifting, about watching this prophet of the ancient art of distance running turning his back on everything except his dream, and heading back down to “the best place in the world to run.”

Only later would he discover that Zatopek wasn’t talking about the hug at all: in his suitcase, Clarke found Zatopek’s 1952 Olympic 10,000- meters gold medal. For Zatopek to give it to the man who’d replaced his name in the record books was extraordinarily noble; to give it away at precisely the moment in his life when he was losing everything else was an act of almost unimaginable compassion.

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation

He who loves his body more than
dominion over the empire
can be given custody of the empire.

—LAO TZU, Tao Te Ching

benign as bodhisattvas;

lechuguilla, a horrible homemade tequila brewed from rattlesnake corpses and cactus sap.