The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (37 page)

What was McDougall doing with the profits from the book, True wanted to know. And what about Ted McDonald, Barefoot Ted, another memorable character from
Born to Run?
He had started a company that made minimalist sandals modeled after the huaraches worn by the Rarámuri.

“Running is not supposed to be about getting people to buy stuff,” True wrote in an email to friends. “Running should be free, man, and the Rarámuri are being used to sell lots of stuff. What do they get out of it?”

Barefoot Ted often found True irritating. “I give back every year to the Copper Canyon, but Caballo equated any business with evil,” he said. “He did great things down there, but you ended up loving him and not quite liking him. I told McDougall, you've brought into being a new Frankenstein.”

That is hardly a prevailing view, but True could indeed be prickly and sharp-elbowed as well as warmhearted. His mantra for running was: easy, light, and smooth. But off the trails he was an easily frazzled man living a newly frazzling life. The “whole notoriety thing,” as he called it, was useful for raising funds, but he was afraid of looking like a sellout at the same time.

To him, honesty was everything. He worried: Am I pretending to be something I'm not? Am I unfairly benefiting from someone else's book?

But he continued with the public speaking gigs, usually at running stores.

Scott Leese, another of True's cyberpals, was an “executive coach” in California who “specialized in the rapid transformation of people.” He, too, was smitten with the Caballo Blanco portrayed in the book and wanted him to reach a wider audience. Last year, Leese became his reticent friend's agent, “though Micah hated that word because it really screamed establishment.”

Leese's new client was often a headache. He despised anything corporate. He refused to consider endorsements. But finally, last summer, he agreed to attend an event hosted by Saucony, the shoe company, going on a trail run with some of its retailers and speaking at a dinner in Utah.

Then, in the fall, True consented to a trip to Sweden, Denmark, and Britain. In England, he spoke in small theaters or halls in London, York, Chester, Bristol, and Birmingham. Admission cost £10, about $16.

All the while, the runner found reasons to bellyache. “Very high maintenance,” Leese said. But when the trip ended, True regarded it as a success. The audiences appreciated him, and he wanted to do more public speaking. He was close to a multi-appearance deal with Saucony.

Micah True was making his peace with the “notoriety thing.”

 

Not long after Ray Molina and his friends came out of Little Creek, they saw three of the Mas Locos, the so-called crazy ones, which loosely includes anybody who has traveled into the Copper Canyons to run the big race.

“We found Micah,” Molina shouted.

“What?”

“We found him. He's in the creek and he's dead.”

They stood together for a few moments, awash in melancholy.

Two of the ultrarunners volunteered to go to the creek and watch over the body. One was Simon Donato, 35, a geologist from Calgary, Alberta. The other was Tim Puetz, 33, who had been a captain in the Army infantry in Afghanistan.
Never leave a comrade behind, dead or alive
, he was thinking. What if the body washed down the creek? This required “eyes on.”

While posted in Logar Province in Afghanistan, Puetz read
Born to Run
in two sittings, and it changed his life. He used to awaken at 4:00
A.M
. and jog for a few hours along a two-mile circuit around the perimeter of his outpost. He would often think of that amazing guy in the book, Caballo Blanco, who “seemed to live without limits and go wherever life led him.” When it was time to leave the military, he emailed True, asking permission to run in the ultramarathon.

“You don't need permission, just come,” True wrote back.

Puetz (pronounced Pits) had met Donato at the 2010 race. To them, Mas Locos felt like a brotherhood. And now there they were, scrambling up the trail to safeguard Caballo's body. They were wearing only running gear, but Molina and his friends had given them fleece jackets, a nylon cover, two flashlights, a cigarette lighter, and a couple of granola bars.

Puetz and Donato hit the water. They wanted to move quickly through the creek but were also afraid of overshooting the corpse in the waning light. Then they finally saw him, lying peacefully on his back, like a man who had stopped to relax.

They built a fire on the bank across the creek, using pine cones for kindling. Despite the flames, the chill insinuated itself through the drifting night air.

Later, they shared a granola bar and slid under the cover, sitting with their backs to True and the creek and the canyon wall behind it. They preferred to face the steep forest slope. If a bear or a mountain lion came darting out of the darkness, it would most likely come through those trees.

They figured to take turns all night, one man feeding the fire while the other slept. But then, near midnight, they heard whistles, and there was Ray Molina with several others. They had brought warm blankets and food.

In the morning, the corpse was put in a body bag, then maneuvered onto a light metal frame. It was carried through the dense, snaggy brush of the forest until the woods intersected a trail. Three pack animals were there waiting, and one of them immediately caught Puetz's eye. It was a light-shaded palomino with a cream-colored mane.

“Are you kidding me?” he said. “They sent a white horse.”

 

The 2012 Copper Canyon Ultra Marathon, held March 4, was the biggest yet. More than 350 Rarámuri ran the tortuous course. Some were as old as 70, some barely in their teens. Many women ran in their traditional long skirts, the bright material swinging back and forth.

About 100 other Mexicans competed, as well as 80 foreigners. Three runners broke the course record. The winner was a Rarámuri. A runner from the Czech Republic came in second.

In the days before, True was on a pendulum of mood swings, happy with being the host and anxious about the responsibility. Was there enough water? What about medical support? The Rarámuri were arriving 20 and 30 at a time in cattle trucks. They needed food and places to sleep.

But not all the arrangements fell on True's shoulders anymore. In many ways, the event was outpacing him. Public officials considered the race a signature municipal event that merited their co-management. Politicians made the welcoming speeches. Goldcorp, the big mining company, had been enlisted by the municipality of Urique as a sponsor.

At times, True wished it were again just him running through the mountains with a handful of the Rarámuri. But mostly he was elated. These were tough times; a drought was in its second year, and the runners in the ultramarathon were rewarded with a voucher for 110 pounds of corn for every 10 miles they completed.

The race was the best of True's good deeds. He described himself in the third person, all at once modest and grandiose: “Caballo Blanco is no hero. Not a great anything. Just a Horse of a little different color dancing to the beat of a peaceful drum and wanting to help make a little difference in some lives.”

The day after the race, he contentedly sat at a table by the municipal building handing out the valuable vouchers. The line stretched so long it took two hours to finish the paperwork. He and his charity gave away $40,000 in food.

On March 6, True left the canyons in his 25-year-old Nissan truck, driving with his dog, Guadajuko, and his girlfriend, Maria Walton, 50. They had been a couple for about two years. She too had found him on Facebook.

A divorcée with three grown children, Walton was the general manager of a large restaurant in Phoenix. She was as reliably even-tempered as True was mercurial. The Mas Locos generally agreed: Maria was an infusion of love and serenity into Caballo's life. He called her by the spirit name La Mariposa, the butterfly.

True spent two weeks in Phoenix, then drove east with the dog to the Gila Wilderness in southwestern New Mexico, one of his favorite retreats. His friends Dean and Jane Bruemmer own a small lodge there. He sometimes stayed with them, although other times he camped out. Either way, in the mornings he used their wireless Internet connection. He remained compulsive about reading his email.

“Life was going good for Micah; actually, life was going great,” Jane Bruemmer said. She had been unsure how well he was handling his sudden starburst of fame. “He didn't seek it or need it, but he was using it now to fund his favorite cause,” she said. “He had an agent.” She found that so astonishing she needed to repeat it with more inflection: “Micah True had an agent!”

Born to Run
was being made into a movie. The business deal did not involve True, and for a while he thought:
Here it comes again
.
The film will bring as much upheaval into my life as the book
. Sarsgaard—the director and co-author of the script—had warned him that no one watches a two-hour movie about himself and comes away thinking,
That's me up there
.

True thought things had also taken an amusing karmic twist. McDougall, not him, was going to be the movie's main character, and after reading a draft of the script, the book's author, in an email to True, called it “ridiculous” and said his “high expectations for the movie had plummeted.”

True took satisfaction in that. Now McDougall would find out how it felt to be defined by someone else. In an email sent to Sarsgaard on March 26, he wrote, “As we know, I would have much liked to at least proofread, fact-check, and/or co-write what” McDougall said about him in the book. “Soooooo . . . . . . . It is hard to feel toooo sorry for him.”

True spent much of that night writing messages, but he was up early the next day. Dean Bruemmer made him blueberry pancakes. True said he was going on a 12-mile run but leaving Guadajuko behind. The dog had sore paws from their jaunt the day before.

Caballo Blanco left the lodge at about 10:00
A.M
. He was seen along State Highway 15. The sun was a hot yellow beam when he entered the wilderness.

 

Micah True's corpse, encased in a body bag and draped over a brown mule, was taken through the forest and out to the main trailhead in midafternoon on Sunday, April 1. Maria Walton ran up a slope to meet it, calling out, “I love you,” and kissing the end of the bundle that appeared to be the feet.

Just then, a heavy wind began to blow. Dirt spun in the air. A hearse had been parked in an adjacent lot since morning, and the driver, dressed in a coat and tie, looked away to shield his eyes.

The mule was slowly led to the vehicle, and the body bag was lifted through the open door at the rear. Walton insisted that Guadajuko be permitted a farewell, cradling the dog in her arms and taking him over. “We're going to see Daddy, your best buddy,” she said, sobbing.

Ray Molina, haggard and exhausted, hugged Walton and then leaned against his old Mercedes and talked about finding the corpse. “Micah was bloodied up, so I think he took a tumble and then a hypothermic night did him in,” he said.

Mike Barragree, an investigator for the state medical examiner's office, had gone with the team that reclaimed the body. He speculated that “some sort of cardiac event” was the likely cause of death, and that turned out to be correct: idiopathic cardiomyopathy, a heart ailment.

The search and recovery mission was finally over. The remembrances had already begun. The evening before, Walton and Scott Leese and many of the Mas Locos hung out at a campground that also had a few small cottages. The moon was a half-circle. The stars were abundant. Someone had thought to buy beer.

For them, this was a requiem for a dead friend. They ate tortillas and eggs and canned stew, heating the food on an old white stove and subduing their sorrow with laughter. They each had a favorite Caballo Blanco story to tell, or two or three. The past flooded into the present.

Above all, their friend wanted to be authentic, they said, and no one could doubt that he had been. This was no small thing.

His death was terribly sad, and yet there was also perfection about it.

Micah True died while running through a magnificent wilderness, and then many of his closest friends came together to search for him, stepping through the same alluring canyons and forests and streams, again and again calling out his name.

MARK SINGER

FROM THE NEW YORKER

 

I
N JULY
2010, Kyle Strode, a 46-year-old chemistry professor from Helena, Montana, ran the Missoula Marathon. Completing the 26.2-mile distance in two hours and 47 minutes, he placed fourth out of 1,322 finishers, and won the masters division, for entrants 40 and older. Strode is among the most accomplished masters marathoners in Montana, with a personal best of two hours and 32 minutes. When he toes a starting line in his home state, he knows who is among the class of the field, and he's particularly aware of other masters competitors. The Missoula course, which is mostly flat, passes through rangeland and forest, crosses two rivers, and in its final miles offers a tour of the city's tree-lined neighborhoods. Early in the race, Strode broke ahead of his usual rivals, and never saw them again. The second masters runner to cross the finish line, Mike Telling, from Dillon, Montana, trailed Strode by nearly four minutes. At the awards ceremony, however, they learned that Telling had actually placed third. The official runner-up was Kip Litton, age 48, of Clarkston, Michigan. Litton, who had been at the back of the pack when the race started, began his run two minutes after the gun was fired. He had apparently made up for lost time.

Since the early nineties, technology has made it possible to clock runners with precision and to track them at measured intervals, yielding point-to-point “split” times. Runners attach to their shoelace or racing bib a transponder tag that marks how much time has elapsed when a checkpoint is reached. Often, sensor-equipped checkpoint mats span the running lanes. USA Track & Field, the governing body for major running competitions, mandates that “gun,” rather than “chip,” times determine the official results in sanctioned races. But, as a practical matter, this rule generally applies solely to elite lead runners. In a field of thousands, it might take an entrant several minutes just to reach the starting line, so it seems only fair that the diligent middle- or back-of-the-packers' order of finish is adjusted to reflect the chip time. In Missoula, the marathon's organizers made this allowance.