Born To Run

Hey everyone, I just read Christopher McDougall's book "Born To Run" over the weekend, and I loved it. Thought it was a really, really good mix of storytelling and journalism, and so I was curious what everyone here thought, too. One of the most entertaining pieces of book-length journalism I can remember, to be honest.

So, yeah. What'd everyone who read it think of it?

 

One of the book's stars, Micah True, died just last month. He was found in the Gilah Wilderness of New Mexico after missing for three days:

http://spikeduppsychedup.com/2012/04/09/micah-true-represented-the-heart-of-running/

This is a book I need to read but haven't, for some reason. Maybe on my plane trip to OC this weekend; seems appropriate since the plan is to run the OC half-marathon, and Born to Run is part of the reason natural running, which I've been trying to incorporate more and more, has become all the rage.

 

Didn't one of the main characters from this just die? Swore I saw that somewhere.

 

The author did in fact write a recent piece about True's death for Outside magazine (http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/running/trail-running/On-The-Trail-Of-The-White-Horse.html). I haven't read that, but will get to it. I liked the book overall, but thought he went way overboard in places: as anthropologist-investigator exploring what he presented as long lost evidence of endurance hunting techniques employed by Native American and African peoples; the bio-mechanical theory behind the resurgence of minimalist or "barefoot" running more recently; the worst was all the stuff he seemed to extrapolate on the Tarahumara people of Mexico's Copper Canyon based on what seemed to be a weekend he spent there with the likes of True, Scott Jurek and other ultra-runners.

 

I loved the book, thought it was wonderful, would recommend it to anyone, even if I felt like the writer was overselling in spots.

For example, I found the section on endurance hunting and the argument he builds from it—that man's capacity to run for hours, unlike other mammals that don't sweat, was the key to human survival during an earlier phase of evolution, before man began to invent weapons—to be a fascinating argument, even knowing that I didn't have enough background in evolutionary biology to evaluate it fully.