They were so ignorant, they didn't even realize they were supposed to be burned out, overtained, and injured. Instead, they were fast.

I'm only about a third of the way done with Born to Run, but I am totally into it. My running geek is fascinated by learning more about the Leadville 100, the Adams State coach, and all kinds of other people, places, and things, I'm casually familiar with. McDougall knows how to tell a story, and he has an unending stream of them woven into this book.

More than geeked, though, I'm stirred. It makes me feel everything I love about running. Most serious runners time themselves with a watch, keep track of every mile in a log book, and turn it into a science. I stopped carrying a watch long ago, hate using a log book, and usually only have a vague route in mind when I take off--I just like to listen to my body and feel the moment and run what sounds fun. I've never been into massive distances and I hike much more often than I run anymore, but I've experienced a bit of what's described below.

After seeing how free and vigorous the nation's top collegiate runners looked at a meet, I decided I wanted that experience. I started running with my dad's high school cross country team for fun and a couple years later walked onto the team at Emporia when I transferred there. I was never our top runner, but I did end up as co-captain. The competitive drive eventually burned me out because it sapped the experience of fun, but I've had awesome runner's highs where I could just float all day along the road. It really is a great, joyful experience. I can't get there anymore with my current body, but hiking and other physical activities are still a joy that head in that direction.

I've selected some quotes from the section of the book I just finished in an attempt to capture it:

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What the Leadville Trail 100 boils down to: nearly four full marathons, half of them in the dark, with twin twenty-six-hundred-foot climbs smack in the middle. Leadville's starting line is twice as high as the altitude where planes pressurize their cabins, and from there you only go up. . . .

Leadville racers routinely fall off bluffs, break ankles, suffer over-exposure, get weird heart arrhythmias and altitude sickness. . . .

One Leadville legend is Marshall Ulrich, an affable dog-food tycoon who perked up his times by having his toenails surgically removed. "They kept falling off anyway," Marshal said. . . .

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One Saturday, Ann got up early and ran twenty miles. She relaxed over breakfast, then headed back out for twenty more. She had some plumbing chores around the house, so after finishing run No. 2, she hauled out her toolbox and got to work. By the end of the day, she was pretty pleased with herself; she'd run forty miles and taken care of a messy job on her own. So as a reward, she treated herself to another fifteen miles.

Fifty-five miles in one day. Her friends had to wonder, and worry. . . . she liked to tell them that running huge miles in the mountains was "very romantic."

Gotcha. Grueling, grimy, muddy, bloody, lonely trail-running equals moonlight and champagne.

But yeah, Ann insisted, running was romantic; and no, of course her friends didn't get it because they'd never broken through. For them, running was a miserable two miles motivated solely by size 6 jeans: get on the scale, get depressed, get your headphones on, and get it over with. But you can't muscle your way through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it, like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.

Relax enough, and your body becomes so familiar with the cradle-rocking rhythm that you almost forget that you're moving. And once you break through to that soft, half-levitating flow, that's when the moonlight and champagne show up: "You have to be in tune with your body, and know when you can push it and when to back off," Ann would explain. You have to listen closely to the sound of your own breathing; be aware of how much sweat is beading on your back; make sure to treat yourself to cool water and a salty snack and ask yourself, honestly and often, exactly how you feel. What could be more sensual than paying exquisite attention to your own body? Sensual counted as romantic, right?

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Besides his Ph.D. and two master's degrees, Vigil's pursuit of the lost art of distance running had taken him deep into the Russian outback, high into the mountains of Peru, and far across Kenya's Rift Valley highlands. He'd wanted to learn why Russian sprinters are forbidden to run a single step in training until they can jump off a twenty-foot ladder in their bare feet, and how sixty-year-old goatherds at Machu Picchu can possibly scale the Andes on a starvation diet of yogurt and herbs, and how Japanese runners trained by Suzuki-san and Koide-san could mysteriously alchemize slow walking into fast marathons. He'd tracked down the old masters and picked their brains, vacuuming up their secrets before they disappeared into the grave. His head was a Library of Congress of running lore, much of it vanished from every place on the planet except his memory.

His research paid off sensationally. At his alma mater, Adams State College in Alamosa, Colorado, Vigil took over the dying cross-country program and engineered it into an absolute terror. Adams state harriers won twenty-six national titles in thirty-three years, including . . . the only shutout ever achieved at a national championship. . . . [He] was named College National Coach of the Year a record fourteen times. . . .

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How come nearly all the women finish Leadville and fewer than half the men do? Every year, more than 90 percent of the female runners come home with a buckle, while 50 percent of the men come up with an excuse. . . .

No woman ranked among the top fifty in the world in the mile . . . A woman might sneak into the top twenty in a marathon . . . But in ultras, women were taking home the hardware. Why, Vigil wondered, did the gap between male and female champions get smaller as the race got longer--shouldn't it be the other way around?

Ultrarunning seemed to be an alternate universe where none of planet Earth's rules applied: women were stronger than men; old men were stronger than youngsters; Stone Age guys in sandals were stronger than everybody. And the mileage! The sheer stress on their legs were off the charts. Running one hundred miles a week was supposed to be a straight shot to a stress injury, yet the ultrafreaks were doing one hundred miles in a day. Some of them were doing double that every week in training and still not getting hurt. Was ultrarunning self-selective, Vigil wondered--did it attract only runners with unbreakable bodies? Or had ultrarunners discovered the secret to megamileage? . . .

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[Emil] Zatopek was a bald, self-coached thirty-year-old apartment-dweller from a decrepit Eastern European backwater when he arrived for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. Since the Czech team was so thin, Zatopek had his choice of distance events, so he chose them all. He lined up for the 5,000 meters, and won with a new Olympic record. He then lined up for the 10,000 meters, and won his second gold with another new record. He'd never run a marathon before, but what the hell; with two golds already around his neck, he had nothing to lose, so why not finish the job and give it a bash?

Zatopek's inexperience quickly became obvious. It was a hot day, so England's Jim Peters, then the world-record holder, decided to use the heat to make Zatopek suffer. By the ten-mile mark, Peters was already ten minutes under his own world-record pace and pulling away from the field. Zatopek wasn't sure if anyone could really sustain such a blistering pace. "Excuse me," he said, pulling alongside Peters. "This is my first marathon. Are we going too fast?"

"No," Peters replied. "Too slow." If Zatopek was dumb enough to ask, he was dumb enough to deserve any answer he got.

Zatopek was surprised. "You say too slow," he asked again. "Are you sure the pace is too slow?"

"Yes," Peters said. Then he got a surprise of his own.

"Okay. Thanks." Zatopek took Peters at his word, and took off.

When he burst out of the tunnel and into the stadium, he was met with a roar: not only from the fans, but from athletes of every nation who thronged the track to cheer him in. Zatopek snapped the tape with his third Olympic record, but when his teammates charged over to congratulate him, they were too late: the Jamaican sprinters had already hoisted him on their shoulders and were parading him around the infield. . . . Zatopek found a way to run so that when he won, even other teams were delighted. . . .

"His enthusiasm, his friendliness, his love of life, shone through every movement," an overcome Ron Clarke said later. "There is not, and never was, a greater man than Emil Zatopek."

So here's what Coach Vigil was trying to figure out: was Zatopek a great man who happened to run, or a great man because he ran? Vigil couldn't quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running. . . .

He'd made his bones by finding connections where everyone else saw coincidence, and the more he examined the compassion link, the more intriguing it became. Was it just by chance that the pantheon of dedicated runners also included Abraham Lincoln ("He could beat all the other boys in a footrace") and Nelson Mandela (a college cross-country standout who, even in prison, continued to run seven miles a day in place in his cell)? Maybe Ron Clarke wasn't being poetic in his description of Zatopek--maybe his expert eye was clinically precise: His love of life shone through every movement.

Yes! Love of life! Exactly! That's what got Vigil's heart thumping when he saw Juan and Martimano scramble happy-go-luckily up that dirt hill. He'd found his Natural Born Runner. he'd found an entire tribe of Natural Born Runners, and from what he'd seen so far, they were just as joyful and magnificent as he'd hoped.

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Because that was the cool part--Ann had been right there with them, which meant whatever the Tarahumara were doing, the rest of us could learn!