That Loving Feeling:
Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run Best Seller and the Quest for Love
by Melissa Field
We’ve all been there: trapped in conversation with the negative non-runner, being drilled with the usual questions—Don’t you get bored out there? Doesn’t it hurt? Don’t you think it’s bad for you?
Sigh. Yawn.
And then the worst comment of all always seems to rear its ugly head:
I could never run. I hate running.
Eeek!
Excuse them, for they know not what they think they hate.
Yes, we all have our moments with running—moments when we’re tired, hungry, and maybe, even a little bored. But if you run consistently, through the seasons, through the best and worse days of your life, other moments follow. Moments you cannot explain, moments of pure bliss.
That’s the feeling Christopher McDougall wanted and couldn’t find. As a writer for Men’s Health, Runner’s World, and Outside, he was one of us—a lover of the outdoors and exercise. But he just couldn’t find it. He’d had it before, but somewhere along the way, he had lost that loving feeling for, well, running.
McDougall, like many of us, suffered through injuries, aches, and pains. These setbacks left him struggling to run even 3 slow miles. He could have conceded and turned to another sport, but instead he turned to the Tarahumara, a running tribe in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. He turned to them because, despite his injuries and struggles, he held onto one steadfast belief: we are born to run.
Bruce Springsteen may have told us this in 1975, but the remote Tarahumara tribe doesn’t know about Bruce Springsteen, and they certainly don’t know about our running boom—the magazines, road races, clothes, shoes, and icons. They just love running. They run for days and at distances equivalent to our ultra marathons. They run these distances without trouble because they run for fun. They run for love.
McDougall’s book, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, is beautifully written, funny, and suspenseful. It is a story about what happens when you love something enough to believe in it, when you love something enough to fight for it.
McDougall’s book tackles and explores many misconceptions and truths we have about running, but he repeatedly focuses on the most important truth of all: character. For this, McDougall interviewed Joe Vigil, Deena Kastor’s coach. Vigil coached Kastor long before she was a running champ. In fact, he coached her when few others believed in her. When Vigil set out to create a training plan for Kastor, he added something that, on the surface, seemed to have little to do with running.
To be great, he told Deena, she needed to “practice abundance by giving back, improve personal relationships, and show integrity in {her} value system” because “Coach Vigil believed you had to become a strong person before you could become a strong runner.”
Call this fluffy but Kastor soon went from obscurity to Olympic medalist and, as Vigil mentions, on her list of her records and accomplishments stands Humanitarian Athlete of the Year. The Tarahumara follow this same truth, and so did the great runner, Emil Zatopek. Ron Clark once said of Zatopek, “There is not, and never was, a greater man.” He added, “His enthusiasm, his friendliness, his love of life, shown through every movement.” And so, McDougall argues, there must be some connection between “the capacity to love and the capacity to love running.” Both are natural, and both meet, in some sense, the very core of our basic needs as humans.
So what happen to McDougall’s aches and pains? By learning about what makes running natural, and by learning to how to relax and have fun, McDougall successfully ran 50 miles in the canyons with the several ultra marathoners and the Tarahumara. Yes, he bounced back from a slow 3 mile run to a 50-mile trail run.
McDougall had to lose that euphoric feeling to find out what loving running is actually all about. So what do you say to all those negative non-runners?
Well, sometimes, you just can’t explain love until you’ve actually been in love.