Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

Ratings Explanation

Language: A steady stream of swear words and profanity including 13 F-words and another 3 F-words in Spanish.

Violence: Brief description of drug cartels and their torturing and killing tactics. It is related that a Tarahumara teenage boy is beaten to death, probably by members of a drug cartel.

Sexual Content: Jenn runs down the beach completely naked to win a bet.

Adult Themes: Jenn and Billy party, alot. They drink like fish, pass out, throw up and make complete fools of themselves. One night while drunk, Jenn loses most of  her clothing with no recollection of how it happened.  It is stated that in Juarez, Mexico hundreds of young women have been raped, murdered and dumped in the desert. Brief mention of a well-known lesbian and her affairs with Madonna and Angelina Jolie. A Tarahumara party is described including heavy drinking, wives in the bushes with other men, and grown women wrestling naked.

Synopsis

Christopher McDougall is a full-time writer and part-time runner. Frustrated with his injury prone body, he goes in search of a method to run without pain, focusing on the Tarahumara, a tribe of incredible distance runners who live in one of the most secluded parts of Mexico. The Tarahumara are famous for their ultra-endurance and their ability to run and remain injury free. Anxious to learn their secrets, McDougall travels to the deadly Copper Canyons, an area of the borderlands fraught with sheer cliffs, soaring temperatures, deadly snakes and to top it off, gun toting drug lords protecting their illegal grows.

McDougall hopes to gain insight into the Tarahumara through Caballo Blanco, an American known to live in proximity to the elusive tribe, but, like them, really hard to track down. When they finally do come face-to-face, Caballo enlists McDougall’s help to pull off a race that will pit North America’s elite ultramarathoners against the fabled Tarahumara.

Born to Run tells the inspiring and exciting stories of some of the world’s most (and least) famous ultra runners and the history behind their success, but much of the book focuses on what we think we know about running and why everything we think we know is wrong. From shoes to form to nutrition to evolution, this book explores our running history and what we should be doing differently in order to become the runner that is in each of us.

Inspiring! I am not much of a runner, but Born to Run has made me want to love running. I was fascinated with the different stories, failures and successes of past and present runners. Scott Jurek’s story is particularly interesting. He is a current ultra runner who almost always wins, but who also waits at the finish line cheering until the last runner crosses the finish line. Another favorite was Emil Zatopek, a Czech soldier who ran in the 1952 Olympics. The Czech team was so small that he could pick his events, so he picked all of them. Because he had never run a marathon, and because he was at the Olympics anyway, he competed in the marathon as well, asked advice from an English runner along the way, and won the gold medal! Emil was known for his compassion and genuine love for running and people. When the Soviets invaded Prague in 1968, he was given the choice to be a sports ambassador for them or to spend the rest of his life “cleaning toilets in a uranium mine. Zatopek chose the toilets. And just like that, one of the most beloved athletes in the world disappeared.” The Tarahumara and their history and culture was also interesting. Searching for their secrets and methods led McDougall to state, “That is the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running.”

Aside from the language I recommend this book wholeheartedly. It is not written for young adults, but I think anyone, runner or not, would benefit from reading Born to Run. Recommended for 18+ because of language, but you have to be the judge of that, of course.