from runners world:

Until that strange scene in 1993, no one had ever taken the Leadville Trail 100 ultramarathon lightly. Leadville forces racers to run and climb 100 high-altitude miles over the scrabbly trails and snowy peaks of the Colorado Rockies. 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. The Leadville ultra, you could say, is closer to mountaineering than marathoning.

But 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. Most opted for the sandals. 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.

They were Tarahumara Indians from the Copper Canyons region of northwestern Mexico. Their curious appearance matched their mysterious legendthat they defy every known rule of physical conditioning and still speed along for hundreds of miles. The Tarahumara (pronounced Spanish-style, taramara by swallowing the "hu") didn't work out, or stretch, or protect their feet. They chain-smoked fierce black tobacco, ate a ton of carbs and barely any meat, and chugged so much cactus moonshine that they were either drunk or hungover an estimated one-third of each year (one day on their backs, that is, for every two on their feet). "Drunkenness is a matter of pride, not of shame," Dick and Mary Lutz wrote in their book The Running Indians. And yet, the Lutzes insist, "There is no doubt they are the best runners in the world."

Leadville was sure to test that claim. Once the starting gun sounded, around 4 a.m., a sea of taller heads quickly swallowed the Tarahumara runners, who faded into the middle of the pack behind the world's most scientifically trained ultrarunners. As the sun rose, though, and the course began climbing the sun rose, though, and the course began climbing toward the 12,640-foot peak at Hope Pass, the Tarahumara began easing forward, running so beautifully that one Leadville veteran was left mesmerized. "They seemed to move with the ground," Henry Dupre would later tell The New York Times. "Kind of like a cloud or a fog moving across the mountains."

At the first aid station, the Tarahumara who had decided to try the Rockports were now shucking them and pulling on the trash-picked sandals. By the turnaround point, sandaled feet were pattering hard behind the leaders. Not only were the Tarahumara gaining, but they also seemed to be getting stronger: They weren't picking off the faders, so much as picking up the pace. Reports from observers at mountaintop stations said the Tarahumara were even smiling as they passed. Joe Vigil, the legendary American track coach, happened to be at the Leadville 100 that year, and he couldn't believe what he was seeing. "Such a sense of joy," Vigil would later say. As the lead runners came to the finish, the Tarahumara had added reason to be happy. Breaking the tape, in a time of 20:03:33, was 55-year-old Victoriano Churro, a farmer and the oldest of the three Tarahumara. He was followed by Cerrildo Chacarito in second and Manuel Luna in fifth. The three Tarahumara were still bouncing along on their toes as they crossed the line. (read the rest of the article at runnersworld.com)

the tarahumara indians at mexonlie