![]() ![]() The Tarahumara (pronounced Spanish-style, taramara by swallowing the “hu”) didn’t work out, or stretch, or protect their feet. Their curious appearance matched their mysterious legend-that they defy every known rule of physical conditioning and still speed along for hundreds of miles. ![]() They were Tarahumara Indians from the Copper Canyons region of northwestern Mexico. They weren’t stretching or warming up or showing the faintest sign that they were about to start one of the most grueling ultramarathons in the world. The Leadville ultra, you could say, is closer to mountaineering than marathoning.īut there, next to the carefully pulse-monitored and Polar-Fleeced top seeds at the 1993 starting line, were a half-dozen middle-aged guys in togas, smoking butts and shooting the breeze, deciding whether they should wear some new Rockport cross-trainers they’d been given earlier or the sandals they’d made out of old tires scavenged from a nearby junkyard. You don’t train for Leadville with intervals and striders you train the way a prison gang handles a rock pile, by constantly banging out lots of slow, steady miles and building the kind of thin-air endurance that lets you grind along at 15 minutes a mile all day long and then continue into the night. Leadville forces racers to run and climb 100 high-altitude miles over the scrabbly trails and snowy peaks of the Colorado Rockies. ![]() ![]() UNTIL THAT STRANGE SCENE IN 1993, no one had ever taken the Leadville Trail 100 ultramarathon lightly. ![]()
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