Tarahumara men in Chihuahua, Mexico, 1892.
Photo by Carl S. Lumholtz.

Currently I'm a little bored, and I'm looking for something unusual to do -- something so fascinating that I won't just drop it and watch something on television. I'm thinking about taking up spiritual running, as soon as I can form an opinion of what that actually is. Chi running recently became popular and I was briefly excited by that, but it didn't hold much that was new to me because I've practiced Tai Chi Chuan for quite a long time. Applying those principles to running and walking is a normal outgrowth of practice. Most people find it surprising that we do basic things like running and walking incorrectly, but it's fundamental to Tai Chi. Changing those basic things changes everything we do. I'd like to see more changes of that type, especially in my running.

I've been a runner for a long time, since the 70's. There were times when I'd run 15 miles a night, four or five times a week; and there were years when I'd run an occasional mile just to see if I still could. I ran a half-marathon a few years ago and found it to be a miserable experience. I currently am in a training program for a full marathon and unsure if I'll ever actually do it, but since I'll feel like a shrimp if I don't I expect that I will -- even if it means dragging myself across the finish line on my elbows. I'm also interested in the mental and spiritual aspects of running, which is actually one of the simplest shamanic ordeals and mind-altering experiences a person can do. Runners who push their personal limits often encounter supernatural entities, and a few hallucinations as well. Like me, the runners who have this experience find it easy enough to sort out the meaningful apparitions from the pointless. If it's a useful contact, you get useful and sometimes life-saving information. Otherwise, it's just interesting to watch.

Born to Run: A Hidden
Tribe, Superathletes,
and the Greatest Race
the World Has Never Seen

Three styles of spiritual running currently have my attention. The first is practiced by the Tarahumara people of Northern Mexico. I took up their running style a few years ago because of foot injuries and have run in thin huarache sandals ever since. That completely altered my running technique, cured my foot problems and eliminated most of my running aches and pains. Adjusting to a barefoot-running technique also slowed me up for a couple of years while I learned to run with different muscle sets than before. Most people run with the front of the thigh providing the most power, but in barefoot running that focus shifts to the back of the thigh. I think I'm just now really getting the hang of it and I want to learn a little more from the Tarahumara if I can. Especially about fuel.

Here in the States, runners typically fuel with sports drinks and sports gels while on long runs, and although I've done this I'm not happy with it. It works, but I've got a feeling there's something better, and I see too many problems with sugar rushes and crashes. If you don't get the timing right, you're into a fatigue cycle that's hard to put right again. So instead of tinkering with the salty sweets I'm trying to find out what the Tarahumara eat.

Follow up:

The Tarahumara live in the Copper Canyon area of Mexico. Their culture depends on running for communication and transportation and members of those tribes frequently run the equivalent of two or three marathons daily. Just recently I saw a tv show about the Tarahumara which implied very unusual things, such as running distances of over 400 miles without eating. That seems to be largely dramatics. A little digging puts the abilities of the Tarahumara more in line with the rest of the species.

Running Wild:
An Extraordinary
Adventure from the
Spiritual World
of Running

Art Beauregard of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, wrote a term paper on the Tarahumara runners which has more realistic information. In Running Feet Art brings up the performance of Tarahumara runners in professional competitions. Although in their own culture these athletes hold records far in excess of anything accomplished in mainstream athletics, their runners don't seem to do very well in official competitions. Part of this is obviously a cultural issue, since in some events Tarahumara athletes became dehydrated and undernourished because in that culture no one accepts food and drink unless the owner offers it. Tables of water and sports drinks went unused because no one formally shared them with the Tarahumara. That does illustrate one important thing, that Tarahumara runners aren't immortal and do need water and nutrition along the way.

Setting aside the legends for a moment, it appears that the Tarahumara stoke up for a good run by drinking a lot of rustic corn beer, low in alcohol and high in complex carbohydrates. At stops along the route, runners eat potato soups, also a good source of simple carbs. The fuel appears to be mostly complex carbohydrate, not fat. The Tarahumara diet includes only a little meat and fat, with the bulk of the diet consisting of vegetables, tubers and corn as well as a wide variety of wild edible plants.

Compare that to a normal western diet, slanted heavily towards meat, fat, and processed carbohydrates, and there's no wonder there's a contrast in athletic performance. The general population of Tarahumara outdoes ours by light-years. But in ultra-marathon terms, the Tarahumara haven't done so well here. Their traditional foods aren't available at race events, and they've been hampered by simple things such as not knowing what course to run or not being informed ahead of time about terrain and distance. So far they haven't been given a chance to run mainstream races on their own terms. If you grow up on corn, sports drinks don't substitute well. When race stations start offering potato soup, the Tarahumara will do better. Learning to run on sports drinks and sweets is tricky.

I've been writing quite a few articles on nutrition lately and it's a very interesting subject, full of theories which seem to be at least partly right and also full of beliefs which don't work at all. People still believe you can eliminate a spare tire by doing sit-ups, for example. The truth is, exercising the part of the body holding the fat doesn't work any better than any other type of exercise. You have to burn more calories than you ingest, to lose that fat, and there's no way to control what area you burn up first.

One tricky part here is that exercise doesn't even burn fat if simple sugars are available. We save fat like it was the most important thing our bodies own. We burn carbohydrates first, and when we run out of carbohydrates we shift into fat-burning mode. That takes a lot of exercise and a moderate amount of time. An hour-long workout might do it. The price you pay for the fat-burning privilege is hitting the wall. When the sugar runs out, you crash. It's a fascinating procedure and people can get into serious medical trouble by not paying attention to blood sugar levels. Ultimately it's safer to fuel your body properly while exercising, and eliminate that fat by eating less than you burn.

So my first challenge is to come up with a Tarahumara style of trail food and see if I do better on that than on energy gels and sports drinks. Usually the simple things work best for me, and the simplest approach here happens to be complex carbs like the Tarahumara eat.

More soon about spiritual running styles of the Orient.