The men who live forever (September 2007) by Christopher McDougall
The men who live forever
In the hills of Mexico, a tribe of American Indians outruns death and disease. Discover how the rest of us can catch up
The whole experiment will live or die on cartilage. If I can’t find a way to ramp up my running kilometres without being levelled by injuries, then this race is over long before the starting line. So I call Eric Orton, an ultrasport coach who specialises in the long stuff, like the Ultraman (a double Ironman) and the Desert RATS (Race Across the Sands) six-day foot-race. Orton is fascinated by the Tarahumara’s legendary endurance and grills me for details of my trip. He then echoes Blanco’s advice: lose the shoes.
He’s run out of water, and is so thirsty, he’s filled his bottle with hot urine to drink
Orton is part of a growing movement of Free Your Feet rebels who believe it’s not running that causes injuries, but running form and economy of training. One of the more vocal – and surprising – members of this group is Dr Gerard Hartmann, an exercise physiologist who works with the world’s greatest marathon runners. He believes the vast majority of running-related foot injuries are a result of too much foam-injected pampering. Running shoes have become so cushioned and motion-limiting that they allow our foot muscles to atrophy and our tendons to shorten and stiffen. Without strength and flexibility, injuries are inevitable.
“The deconditioned musculature of the foot is the greatest issue leading to injury,” Hartmann explains. “If I give you a collar to wear around your neck, in six weeks you will find that your muscles have atrophied by 40 to 60 percent. That’s why this emphasis on cushioning and motion control makes no sense.”
Top American runner, Alan Webb, had been hobbled by foot injuries early in his career, but after he started barefoot exercises his injuries disappeared and his shoe size shrank, from a size 12 to a size 9. “My foot muscles became so strong, they pulled my arches up,” says Webb. “Wearing too much shoe prevents you from tapping into the natural gait you have when landing on the ground.”
Perhaps this was what I had witnessed while trying to keep up with Alejandro. Watching him run, I was surprised to find that instead of the long, galloping stride I’d expected, he never stretched out his legs at all. He kept his knees bent and the balls of his feet padding down, directly under his body, as if he were riding an invisible unicycle.
“Exactly!” says Ken Mierke, an exercise physiologist and the creator of the Evolution Running technique, which is modelled on barefoot running. “That’s why they don’t get hurt.” Mierke believes there is a perfect, Tarahumara-like foot strike that can guarantee you will run longer and faster, while drastically reducing your chances of injury. The key is to stay off your heels and to use your legs as piston-like shock absorbers.
“You wouldn’t jump off a ladder and land on your heels, right?” Mierke asks. “The same goes for running. If you land on your heel, your leg is straight and the impact smashes into one joint after the other. But if you land on the balls of your feet with the leg bent, it absorbs shock using elastic tissues instead of bone.”
Orton recommends using unconscious instinct and visualisation to achieve proper form. “Imagine your kid is running into the street and you have to sprint after her barefoot,” he says. That’s the visual. “You’d automatically lock into perfect form – you’d be up on the balls of your feet, with your back erect, head steady, arms high, elbows driving and feet touching down quickly on the balls of your feet and kicking back towards your butt.”
To build the strength and balance needed to maintain that form over long distances, Orton recommends the heel, hips and hills principle: wear the most neutral, low-heeled running shoe that feels comfortable; keep your hips dead under your shoulders and dead above your feet; and use big hills to iron out the rest of the wrinkles. “You can’t run uphill powerfully with poor biomechanics,” says Orton. “It just doesn’t work. If you try landing on your heel with a straight leg, you’ll tip over backwards.”
For a technique that’s supposed to be natural, I find barefoot-style running awkward. Orton eases me into it by keeping the distance light for the first few weeks, assigning me hills and speed work plus some coreconditioning exercises to make my lower back support my weight instead of my quads.
By the second month, he’s sending me off on two-hour weekend runs and adding a long run in the middle of the week. Barely eight weeks into his programme, I’m already running more kilometres per week – at a much faster pace – than I ever have in my life. I keep waiting for all the old ghosts of the past to come roaring out – the screaming Achilles, the ripped hamstring, the footmuscle inflammation. I start carrying my cellphone on the longer runs, convinced that any day now, I’ll end up a limping mess at the side of the road.
Whenever I feel a twinge, I run through my diagnostics: back straight? Check. Knees bent and driving forwards? Check. Feet landing under the hips? Ah, there’s your problem, rockhead. Once I make the adjustment, the hot spot eases and disappears. By the time Orton bumps me up to five-hour runs, the ghosts and the cellphone are forgotten.
Last year, a 32-year-old physiotherapist named Scott Jurek pulled off a stunt that was, by conventional thinking, just this side of impossible. First, he won the Western States 100, the most prestigious and hotly contested ultramarathon in the world. Then, two weeks later, he broke the record for the Badwater Ultramarathon in California, racing nearly 220km from Death Valley to Mount Whitney in just over 24 straight hours in temperatures upwards of 45°C.
By the standards of Olympic marathoners, who take at least four months between races, there is no way Jurek’s wasted muscles should have been able to rebuild that fast. But they did – and without a speck of animal protein to help. Since he went vegan eight years ago, Jurek has won Western States an astounding seven years in a row.
“I used to eat fast food three times a week,” says Jurek. “I went vegan before I won Western States the first time and was worried that I’d be too weak. But I found that I actually felt better because I was eating foods with more high-quality nutrients in them.”
If any runner in the world shares the Tarahumara’s ultra-running ability, it’s Jurek. He believes it’s no coincidence that he also shares their approach to eating: by basing his diet on fruit, vegetables and wholegrains, Jurek says, he’s deriving maximum nutrition from the lowest possible number of kilojoules, so his body isn’t forced to carry or process any useless bulk. And because carbohydrates clear the stomach faster than protein, it’s easier to jam a lot of workout time into his day, since he doesn’t have to sit around waiting for a rare steak to settle.
It actually isn’t surprising that Jurek hasn’t suffered muscle loss or recovery problems, since vegetables, grains and legumes – of the right kind and in the right quantities – contain all the amino acids necessary to build muscle from scratch. “Plant sources can be as powerful as meat sources,” says nutritionist Nancy Clark, author of Nancy Clark’s Sports Nutrition Guidebook, pointing out that a little wheatgerm can provide all the zinc and iron you need. (Zinc and iron are crucial for moving oxygen from your lungs to your muscles and for keeping your immune system strong.)
“Do you think horses and elephants worry about not having any animal protein in their diets?” says Dr Ruth Heidrich, a six-time Ironman triathlete and a vegan for the past 24 years. “Elephants are bigger than you, stronger than you and they’ll probably outlive you, too.”
Heidrich may be pushing the point with her interspecies comparisons, but she’s onto something when she touts the benefits of the Tarahumara diet. While everyone knows the protective powers of fruit and vegetables, according to a number of recent studies, wholegrains are also edible medicine.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota, for instance, reviewed 17 studies and found that consuming wholegrains on a regular basis can reduce the risk of diabetes and heart disease by as much as 40 percent. Likewise, a University of Utah study showed that going wholegrain can lower the odds of rectal cancer by 31 percent. It’s also worth noting that when Cornell University researchers analysed wheat, oats, maize and rice, it was maize, the main ingredient of pinole, that had the highest content of phenols, powerful disease-fighting plant chemicals.
I buy the notion that pinole is stoneground magic dust, but can’t I get enough of the benefits without going whole hog? I really only need part of the hog. Unlike vegans, I don’t mind eating things with faces. In fact, I’ll even eat the faces, if they’re minced up and stuffed into Vienna sausages. But whatever compromise I settle on, it’s critical I make some kind of change to my diet: balancing my body weight with my core muscles makes an eight-kilometre run feel like an afternoon of atomic crunches – and Orton’s hill workouts had me puking the previous night’s goulash.
“Have you ever had salad for breakfast?” asks Heidrich.
“Not sober.”
“You should try it,” she urges. Because a monster salad is loaded with nutrient-rich carbs and low in fat, I could stuff myself in the morning and not feel hungry – or queasy – when it came to workout time. Plus, greens are packed with water, so they’re great for rehydrating after a night’s sleep. And what better way to down your five vegetables a day than forking them all down at once?
Next morning, I give it a stab. I wander around the kitchen with a mixing bowl, throwing in my daughter’s half-eaten apple, some kidney beans of questionable vintage, a bunch of raw spinach and a ton of broccoli, which I chop into splinters, hoping to make it look more like coleslaw. Heidrich fancies up her salads with molasses, but I figure I’ve earned the fat and sugar, so I scale up, dousing mine with poppy-seed dressing.
After two bites, I’m a convert. A breakfast of salad, I’m happy to find, is also a sweettopping delivery system, much like pancakes with syrup. It’s far more refreshing than frozen waffles and, best of all, I can cram myself till my eyes are green and still shoot out the door for a workout an hour later.
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