Born to Run

I've been reading a lot lately, which means I've been scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to read.  I devoted nearly a year of my life to the Wheel of Time, and I finished that a few months ago.  So, it came down to me instructing Shannon to just find me something interesting at the library on a recent trip there with the girls.  Shannon generally does a pretty good job of this, and she brought home a stack of books, including one that I'd been avoiding for a few years.

"Born to Run - A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" was written by Christopher McDougall in 2009, and you've probably heard of it.  It's probably the single most significant driving force behind the barefoot/minimalist running movement that has grown over the last decade.  The graph below shows the number of google searches over the last half dozen years for "barefoot running" "tarahumara" and "minimalist running".  The terms all show a nice surge through 2009, with the highest blue spike in August.  "Born to Run" spent the first of it's 15 non-consecutive weeks on the New York Times best sellers list on June 7th.  You can mouse-over for specific dates info.

[I think it's interesting to see that "barefoot running" shows seasonal variation, with high searches in the spring and summer.  "Tarahumara" shows a peak with the release of the book, and a general decline afterwards; though it is still above pre-book levels.  "Minimalist running" however, has a much more constant increase over time, and doesn't seem to have been influenced much by the book.  Another note: Utah is 1st, 2nd and 1st, respectively, in searching for these terms.]

Anyway, it's clear that somewhere in the 2009/2010 time frame, barefoot or minimalist running became a bit of a fad.  Minimalist running shoe sales went from $450,000 in 2006 to $59,000,000 in 2012 (wikipedia).  I like to run, but I don't like fads.  (Or at least, I like to imagine that I don't like fads, which is probably what just about everyone tells themselves.)  Whatever it was about this book that was driving the whole world to kick off their shoes, eat chia, decry traditional training practices, villainize Nike and vow to become an ultramarathoner, it sounded suspicious to me.

As I've documented, in 2012 I played around with running barefoot a little bit, got some minimalist shoes and then haven't run in a standard shoe since.  I'm about 300 miles in to my KSOs, which are showing some wear, and I've generally enjoyed them.  I've run exactly one race in them, a 10k, which I had never run before, so I honestly can't say much for the specific results.  I've not sustained a significant running injury in them, but, I never had a significant running injury in traditional shoes, despite many more miles and a marathon in them.  [Well, I probably had a mild to moderate case of shin splints back in 2000 or 2001.]

But this was supposed to be a book review.  So here goes.  I finally read the book, because I figured I had enough of my own opinion that I could read it without being swayed unduly by all the witch-doctory-ness that had captivated the rest of the country.  The book is very entertaining.  McDougall writes for various magazines (Men's Health, Runner's World, Outside Men's Journal, Esquire, etc.) and was a oft-injured recreational runner.  He got started down a story about the Tarahumara, which grabbed his interest and lead to the book.

The Tarahumara are native americans(?) (native mexicans?) who live in the mountains of northern Mexico (southwest of the city of Chihuahua).  They're poor farmers, who live about how you'd expect poor native farmers to live, without running water, electricity or much else.  Oh, and they're basically the best distance runners in the world.  They're pretty content to keep to themselves, but when people have managed to get them out to run in races like a 100 mile race through the mountains of Colorado, they'd win.

The first half of the book focuses almost entirely on the history and stories of the Tarahumara as well as some significant American ultramarathons and ultramarathoners.  I kept waiting for it to get to the part that ignited a running revolution.  It eventually got there, but not as forcefully as I'd expected.  (Though, perhaps my expectations made it seem less forceful.)  The author gets into theories on evolution and to what extent humans are designed for distance running.

The book is very entertaining, and tells a terrific story of some amazing races.  It's not going to drastically change anything I do, but maybe that's just because I'm stubborn.  ;)  Oh, and it did get me out the door for 8.75 miles yesterday, my longest run in over 2 years.