But despite my suspicion that I'd just been Castaneda'ed, one odd incident helped spur me to stay on the hunt. Angel had let us spend the night in the only room he had free, a tiny mud-brick hut used as the school's infirmary. The next morning, he kindly invited us to join him for a breakfast of beans and hand-patted corn tortillas before we set off. It was a frosty morning, and as we sat outside, warming our hands around the steaming bowls, a torrent of kids came swarming past us out of the schoolhouse. Rather than having the cold kids suffer in their seats, the teacher cut them loose to warm up Tarahumara-style - meaning I'd lucked into a chance to witness a rardjipari, the Tarahumara running game.
Angel pulled himself to his feet and divided the kids into two teams, girls and boys together. He then produced two wooden balls, each about the size of a baseball, and flipped one to a player on each team. He held up six fingers; they'd be running six laps from the schoolhouse to the river, a total distance of about four miles. The two boys dropped the balls into the dust and arched one of their feet, so the ball was balanced on top of their toes. Slowly, they coiled themselves down into a crouch and ...
Vayan! Go!
The balls whistled past us, flip-kicked off the boys' feet like they'd been fired out of a bazooka, and the kids went stampeding after them down the trail. The teams looked pretty evenly matched, but my pesos were on the gang led by Marcelino, a twelve-year-old who looked like the Human Torch; his bright red shirt flowed behind him like flames and his white skirt whipped his legs like a trail of smoke. The Torch caught up with his team's ball while it was still rolling. He wedged it expertly against the front of his toes and zinged it down the trail with barely a hitch in his stride.
Marcelino's running was so amazing, it was hard to take it all in at once. His feet were jitterbugging like crazy between the rocks, but everything above his legs was tranquil, almost immobile. Seeing him from the waist up, you'd think he was gliding along on skates. With his chin high and his black hair streaming off his forehead, he looked as if he'd burst straight out of the Steve Prefontaine poster on the bedroom wall of every high school track star in America. I felt as if I'd discovered the Future of American Running, living five hundred years in the past. A kid that talented and handsome was born to have his face on a cereal box.
"Si, de acuerdo," Angel said. Yes, I hear you. "It's in his blood. His father is a great champion."
Marcelino's father, Manuel Luna, could beat just about anyone at an all-night rardjipari, the grown-ups' version of the game I was watching. The real rarajipari was the heart and soul of Tarahumara culture, Angel explained; everything that made the Tarahumara unique was on display during the heat of a rardjipari.
First, two villages would get together and spend the night making bets and pounding tesgiiino, a homemade corn beer that could blister paint. Come sunup, the villages' two teams would face off, with somewhere between three and eight runners on each side. The runners would race back and forth over a long strip of trail, advancing their ball like soccer players on a fast break. The race could go on for twenty-four hours, even forty-eight, whatever had been agreed to the night before, but the runners could never zone out or relax into an easy rhythm; with the ball ricocheting around and up to thirty-two fast-moving legs on all sides, the runners had to be constantly on their toes as they surged, veered, and zigzagged.
"We say the rardjipari is the game of life," Angel said. "You never know how hard it will be. You never know when it will end. You can't control it. You can only adjust."
And, he added, no one gets through it on their own. Even a superstar like Manuel Luna couldn't win without a village behind him. Friends and family fueled the racers with cups of pinole. Come nightfall, the villagers spark up sticks of acate, sap-rich pine branches, and the runners race through the dark by torchlight. To endure a challenge like that, you had to possess all the Tarahumara virtues - strength, patience, cooperation, dedication, and persistence. Most of all, you had to love to run.
"That one's going to be as good as his father," Angel said, nodding toward Marcelino. "If I let him, he'd go like that all day."
Once Marcelino reached the river, he wheeled around and drilled the ball to a little six-year-old who'd lost one sandal and was struggling with his belt. For a few glorious moments, Little One-Shoe was leading his team and loving it, hopping on one bare foot while grappling to keep his skirt from falling off. That's when I began to glimpse the real genius of the rarajipari. Because of gnarly trails and back-and-forth laps, the game is endlessly and instantly self-handicapping; the ball ricocheted around as if it were coming off a pinball paddle, allowing the slower kids to catch up whenever Marcelino had to root it out of a crevice. The playing field levels the playing field, so everyone is challenged and no one is left out.
The boys and girls were all hurtling up and down the hilly trail, but no one really seemed to care who won; there was no arguing, no showboating, and, most noticeably, no coaching. Angel and the schoolteacher were watching happily and with intense interest, but not yelling advice. They weren't even cheering. The kids accelerated when they felt frisky, downshifted when they didn't, and caught an occasional breather under a shady tree when they overdid it and started sucking wind.
But unlike most of the other players, Marcelino never seemed to slow. He was tireless, flowing uphill as lightly as he coasted down, his legs scissoring in a surprisingly short, mincing stride that somehow still looked smooth, not choppy. He was on the tall side for a Tarahumara boy, and had the same thrill-of-the-game grin that always used to creep across Michael Jordan's face as the clock was ticking down. On his team's final lap, Marcelino fired a bank shot off a big rock to the left, calculated the ricochet, and was in position to receive his own pass, picking the ball up on the fly and covering fifty yards in a matter of seconds over a trail as rocky as a riverbed.
Angel banged on an iron bar with the back of a hatchet. Game over. The kids begin filing back inside the schoolhouse, the older ones carrying wood for the school's open fireplace. Few returned our greeting; many had only heard their first words of Spanish the day they started school. Marcelino, however, stepped out of line and came over. Angel had told him what we were up to.
"Que vayan bien," Marcelino said. Good luck with your trip.
"Caballo Blanco es muy norawa de mi papa. "
Norawa? I'd never heard the word before. "What's he mean?" I asked Salvador. "Caballo is a legend his dad knows? Some kind of story he tells?"
"No," Salvador said. "Norawa means amigo."
"Caballo Blanco is good friends with your dad?" I asked.
"Si." Marcelino nodded, before disappearing inside the schoolhouse. "He's a really good guy."
Christopher McDougal "Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen" (2009)
