How to run like Tarahumara

If you’re a disciple of distance running, then you will already know of the Tarahumara.

Christopher McDougall famously described them in his book Born to Run in 2009, as a “near-mythical tribe of Stone Age super athletes,” who live high in the canyons of northwestern Mexico and run incredible distances over vertiginous terrain without breaking a sweat.

These indigenous people refer to themselves as the “Rarámuri,” or “those who run fast.” Entrenched in their culture is a tradition of running - sometimes literally hundreds of miles - with apparent ease, either barefoot or in rudimentary homemade sandals. For the Tarahumara, running is a way of life, vital to hunting, trade and communication in the remote Copper Canyon mountain region in which they live.

Born to Run helped catapult the remote tribe of about 40,000 to mainstream notoriety, just over ten years ago, with its stories of the Tarahumara showing up to iconic American races such as the Leadville 100, shunning the free running shoes they were offered in favour of flat sandals, and beating professional athletes.

Many continue to marvel at the Tarahumara’s apparent God-given gift to run for days, seemingly immune to fatigue or injury. In November 2019, British ultramarathon organisers staged a 250km running race through the Copper Canyon, inviting both Tarahumara and professional ultra runners to take on the challenge. The winner? Tarahumara local Miguel Lara of course, by a considerable margin.

There are many popular myths and misconceptions surrounding the source of their abilities, some of which an assembled team of anthropologists and a world-leading Harvard cardiologist have recently sought to address in a paper published in the 2020 edition of Current Anthropology titled “Running in Tarahumara (Rarámuri) Culture: Persistence Hunting, Footracing, Dancing, Work, and the Fallacy of the Athletic Savage”.

“Tarahumara runners are just as challenged as Western ultramarathoners,” write the authors. There is, they argue, no secret ingredient - no pre-industrial diet, genetics, or inability to feel pain - that makes running 100 miles easy for the Tarahumara. Their ability, they argue, “derives from hard work, physically active lifestyles, determination, and the spiritual and social values they place on endurance running.”

For the Tarahumara running is considered both an art form and a form of prayer. They run well because it matters to them and their environment requires them to. In other words, they aren’t perhaps, as the book title suggests, born to run. They learn to.

And, thankfully, there is much we can learn from them. Along with the Tarahumara, Born to Run introduced the world in 2009 to Harvard anthropologist and evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman, whose research on the evolutionary origins of running led him to hypothesise that modern humans would be better off running either barefoot or with minimally supportive shoes. It gave rise to perhaps the book's greatest legacy. With Lieberman’s theory and McDougall’s tales of the Tarahumara - barefoot running boomed, and the minimalist running movement was born.

The theory goes that heavily cushioned running shoes allow us to fall into a “heel-first”, unnatural, inefficient running gait. The Tarahumara run better partly thanks to the fact they make their own flat sandals or run barefoot. With no cushioned sole to soak up the impact, they are forced to run on their toes, the way we have evolved to do it. And, according to Lieberman, we are far better, more highly evolved endurance runners than we humans give ourselves credit for.

As bipeds, limited to two legs, Lieberman argues humans should have gone extinct long before they discovered tools in the last 10,000 years or so: four-legged creatures are just naturally faster. But on the open savanna, our skin and sweat glands would enable us to regulate our body temperature during physical exertion, whereas other animals would always eventually need to stop and pant to cool themselves down.

The rise of the modern, padded, running shoe it seems only got in the way of our human ability to run great distances. Since Born to Run, minimalist shoes, with little or no heel padding, much like the flat sandals of the Tarahumara, have become extremely popular. And it is not just the billion-dollar shoe market that has been upended by this remote tribe. Modern curved treadmills have emerged as an intelligent approach to improving running style with a more natural footstrike - and without the need to risk a barefoot meeting broken glass as you pound the pavement.

“The Tarahumara treat running as something to be learned slowly and perfected over a lifetime,” Mcdougall concludes. Perhaps the biggest lesson is that simplicity is the key to unlocking your own running Nirvana. As Mcdougall writes, the more you can strip away the unnecessary aids and allow your natural, instinctive human running ability to shine “the closer you’ll be to running like the Tarahumara.”