I used to think I couldn’t run at all. At school I was always last to be picked for sport. When I was 12 I watched my dad run a half marathon, and I remember thinking I could never do that.
For a long time I behaved as if I was right. Years later I was a 250 pound sick couch potato. On my first ever training run I couldn’t even complete a mile.
So it’s a bit funny that Born to Run is one of the books I blame for becoming an ultra runner.
I didn’t go from the sofa to the mountains in one go. I found the courage to enter my first race, a quarter marathon. After that came a 10-mile race, then a half, building up to my first marathon. And at the end of that marathon I was thinking, right, what next?
That’s when I was reading Born to Run.
The tribe who run because they can
Christopher McDougall starts with a simple question: why does his foot hurt? He’s a keen runner who keeps getting injured, and the doctors tell him running is the problem. He isn’t satisfied with that. So he goes looking for the Tarahumara, a tribe in the Copper Canyons of Mexico. They run huge distances over brutal ground in thin sandals, and seem to love every minute of it.
The book builds to a race in the canyons between the Tarahumara and some of the best ultra runners in the world. Along the way McDougall makes the case that humans are built to run long distances. He reckons modern cushioned trainers might be doing us more harm than good.
That’s what got me. People who run simply because they can, and the idea of running barefoot. It intrigued me so much that I started to wonder how far I could actually go.
“You don’t stop running because you get old. You get old because you stop running.”
How far it turned out to be
The answer, as it happens, was a long way. My first ultra was a race called the 100 mile run, over four days. It turned out to be 107 miles, with around thirteen and a half thousand feet of climbing, off-road. I was not happy to discover the extra seven. I wasn’t going to stop at 100, though.
The furthest I’ve run in a single day was 100 kilometres, although I think it was slightly over. Ultras nearly always turn out longer than they claim. Either they measure it wrong or I get a little lost on the course. I’ll let you decide which.
The bit I don’t tell very often is what happened after that first ultra. A hurricane hit that weekend, and running in wet shoes left my feet as blisters on blisters. The day after, I ended up in hospital, a bit dehydrated, and the doctors were worried my heart rate was too low. Then a consultant turned up with a clipboard. “Mr. Martin, I think we owe you an apology.” Someone who can run over 100 miles in a few days, he said, has the resting pulse of an athlete.
The kid who was always last to be picked had just been called an athlete by a doctor. Lying on that bed, that word meant more to me than the medal.
I wrote about dreaming big in Done Beats Perfect. The realistic goal when I started running would have been something like a 5k. If I’d aimed for that, I might have stopped there. Books like this one made the bigger goal feel possible, and it changed what I thought my body could do.
You don’t need to want an ultra to get something from Born to Run. It’s a cracking story, for a start, full of characters you couldn’t make up. There’s Caballo Blanco, the mysterious American living in the canyons who sets the whole race up. There’s Scott Jurek, one of the greatest ultra runners of his time. There’s a cast of oddballs who’d follow a stranger into the wilderness for the chance of a good run. But mostly it’s a book about what human beings are capable of when we stop believing the limits we’ve been handed. That applies to the school kid who was last to be picked as much as anyone.
There are two more running books next to it in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me. Between them they’re a big part of how I got to 107 miles.
If you want to know what your body is really capable of, read Born to Run. And if you’ve spent years telling yourself you’re not a runner, I know exactly how that feels.
