BORN TO RUN - Christopher McDougall

I got to reading Born to Run because it is highly recommended, and a considerable number of reviews available online call it a must-read. I agree with them to the point that this book could inspire people to take up running, and to even turn towards a healthier diet- with chia seeds and such mentioned at a number of places. However, how amazing a book do I really think it is? It was not satisfying trying to read it as a novel because it seems like a patchwork of several magazine pieces glued together. And I could not consider it a journalistic account due to its excessive claims, misleading statistics and analyses, logical inconsistencies and plain odd errors. Having said that, though, the book has a fun core of semi-mystical lost knowledge and its tone, written as someone who is continually discovering ancient legends, made the book enjoyable.

The author, Christopher McDougall, is an American magazine correspondent and he writes about the Running tribe of Tarahumara in Mexico. Through the book, he goes from the Harvard lab to the far-off Leadville race to the copper canyons in Mexico. He attempts to give the details of the evolution of humans with respect to our running techniques and an insight into the shoe industry that comes up with new running models every year in the name of safe running.

The problems in the book start with expectations. I took it up as a well-researched journalistic exercise, but very soon into the text, I realized it is a fictional account. To begin with, it is written in an omniscient manner. McDougall not only explains in detail the events to which he was privy, but he also explains similarly, events from the past where he clearly wasn’t present. For instance, while writing about a past race, he says: Then she wiped her greasy mouth on her sports bra, burped up some Dew, and bounded off.

The exaggerations are a bit too much to take at times. Somewhere in the middle, he says about qualifying for the Boston Marathon that "...99.9 percent of all runners never will...". It’s a downright wrong figure, given that 20,000 runners run it every year, not qualify, which will be many times more. It felt patronizing to assume that readers would not understand what a percentage means.

There are several contradictions too. Initially, he says that the Tarahumara "barely eat any protein at all". It did sound a bit strange to read of an entire community that survives without minimal protein intake. But at that time, the book got the benefit of the doubt, because of the fantastic reviews I had read about it. It comes as a bit of a surprise then to be told later on in the book that "the traditional Tarahumara diet exceeds the United Nations’ recommended daily intake [for protein] by more than 50 percent."

Turning to the scientific research that McDougall is fond of reporting, it becomes a bit difficult to accept it on the face of it. A case-in-point: "...no matter how much you run, your odds of getting hurt are the same." I could cite research here that states the contradictory, but one doesn’t need to go there- reductio ad absurdum can be validity enough.

There are also cases of rather absurd analyses by McDougall. He quotes a study that states that "Wearers of expensive running shoes...are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes..." He logically extrapolates it to "What a cruel joke: for double the price, you get double the pain." One would think that commonsensical knowledge points out the fact that maybe the buyers of more expensive shoes are those runners who run and train more aggressively.

Maybe the dubious anthropological details, the nutrition and hydration anomalies, and the excessive hyperboles come from the fact that the American author feels that Mexico is a mystical land and the reader cannot really go there or read about it from a different source, forget there being a Mexican reader of the book. But to be fair, it is written in a manner we get a lot of news anyway today- sensationalized for effect.

The book is a fictional account, an adventure of sorts based on actual locales and by using real names of persons. You would love it if you like the style. Just take everything with a big pinch of salt.