Part 4 - post #6

Caballo was stronger, healthier, and faster than he’d ever been in his life. His plan for a race between Americans and the Tarahumara is to use his toughness. The weather gets really cold at night, too cold for a skinny guy from California. The quote “as a test, he tried running a trail through the mountains that takes three days on horse back; he did it in seven hours.” (p. 79 Christopher McDougall) He also invited one runner who is with the right spirit, real champions. His name is Scott Jurek.

Scott Jurek is known as one of the ultra runner in the country and he has peculiar habits. At the start of every race, he always let out a bloodcurdling shriek, and after he won, he’d roll in the dirt like a hyperactive hound. Then he’d get up, brush himself off, and vanish back to Seattle until it was time for his war cry to echo through the dark. Until D-2 weeks, no one did not know what Scott was up to, so word of his plans only began to spread a little more than a month before the race.

When the American runners convened in El Paso before traveling to Mexico, the author had no idea if he was leading a platoon or hucking solo. I checked into the airport Hilton, made arrangements for a ride across the border at five the next morning, then doubled back to the airport. The runners were pretty much waste their time.

Jenn “Mookie” Shelton and Billy “Bonehead” Barnett, a pair of twenty-one-year-old hotshots who’d been electrifying the East Coast ultra circuit. Jenn and Billy had only started running two years before, but Billy was already winning some of the thoughest 50ks on the East Coast, while “The young and beautiful Jenn Shelton,” as the ultrarace blogger Joey Anderson called her, had just clocked one of the fastest 100-mile times in the country.

Barefoot Ted seemed to be the Bruce Wayne of barefoot running, the wealthy heir of a California amusement-park fortune. Barefoot Ted believed we could abolish foot injuries by throwing away our Nikes, and he was willing to prove it on himself.