Dana and Sarah Films present A Film By
Dana Richardson and Sarah Zentz Go stand at the crossroads
and look around. Ask for directions
to the ancient paths, where the good way is;
and walk in it. The Copper Canyons are
the deepest canyons on the
continent. Copper Canyons, Mexico They're like four Grand Canyons
crammed together. You really feel an ancient
presence
when you're there. It's the phenomenal geography
of these canyons that has helped preserve
the ancient culture of the Tarahumara. The Tarahumara
are subsistence farmers. They're renowned
for their incredible long-distance running endurance. Gringos and mestizos
call them Tarahumara, but they actually prefer
their indigenous name of Rarámuri. Rarámuri means "light-footed," and that's an apt name
to describe who they are. They are lightning fast on their
feet. Obviously as runners,
they can cover long distances and are super fast, but they're also literally
light-footed
in their strike. They land on their forefoot and
midfoot
and glide across the trails. The Tarahumara
are naturally healthy people, and primarily it's because of
their diet and their lifestyle. They don't have cancer,
diabetes, hypertension, because they don't live
sedentary lifestyles. They walk
and run everywhere. They don't have vehicles. They don't sit very often. They are on their feet moving
or working in their fields every
day. That's why they don't have to
train
for ultra marathons because every day
is a training session. So they're natural weightlifters
and natural endurance athletes just by the way
they live their life. And they also eat
a healthy, nutritious diet that they grow
and prepare themselves. So those are the cornerstones of
health. It's not pharmaceuticals,
it's not medicines, it's not healthcare, it's, you know,
it's diet and exercise. Their simple lifestyles
and their simple diets have worked for them
for centuries. GOSHEN
Places of Refuge for the Running
People Roseangela
Rarámuri When the conquistadors
first arrived in the Americas, you know, the Aztecs
and the Mayans engaged and fought back
and were decimated, but the Rarámuri disappeared
into the Copper Canyons. It's been famous
for centuries as sort of a wilderness
of last resort. It's where drug traffickers and
rebels
have always gone to hide, because it's usually hard
to find your way back out again. And that's where
the Tarahumara live. And ever since
the conquistadors arrived, they have found this to be
a safe refuge where no one would bother them. Getting down into the canyons
itself
is indeed a terrific project, and it really requires
all-terrain vehicles, or, you know, a bush pilot
who will fly you in. So it ends up being
very, very remote. And it's no accident that
that is the part of Mexico where the traditions of
indigenous people
have been preserved: their food traditions,
their cultural traditions, their language,
their way of travel. They sometimes travel
hundreds of miles on foot within the canyons. The Tarahumara are incredibly
proud
of their culture. They have a really strong sense
of its value, both in terms
of keeping them healthy and also maintaining their
identity. And it's really to their credit
that they've persisted in living deep, deep within
the canyons in this-- what might appear
to an outsider to be a really difficult
lifestyle. It's a really hard life. The infant mortality rate
is very high. They don't have antibiotics,
they don't have medical
assistance. It's not to say that the
Tarahumara
have this idyllic life where they're living on fluffy
clouds
and playing the harp all day. They live a tough
subsistence lifestyle. The downside
are the day-to-day perils. The upside, however, is it's a
minimum
of self-inflicted damage; that at least you're living the
way
you're supposed to live as opposed to rotting out from something
that is purely preventable. We talk a lot about
disease hot spots, and that's a term
that in epidemiology, in the study of diseases,
we use a lot is the idea that there's
hot spots for disease. So I became curious in something
that we don't study very much, which is this idea
of cold spots, which are places where in fact we have very low rates
of given diseases. And my desire was to go to cold
spots
around the world and figure out what they're
doing
to keep the rates down of colon cancer or depression
or breast cancer. And I ended up finding
dozens and dozens of cold spots around the world. I ended up traveling to Cameroon
in West Africa and looking at that as a cold
spot
for colon cancer. Iceland actually is a cold spot, interestingly enough,
for depression. Japan is a cold spot for breast
and prostate cancer. Crete is a cold spot
for heart disease. And to Copper Canyon in Mexico,
is a cold spot for diabetes. Tarahumara living in a
traditional way
within Copper Canyon, the researchers
at the University of Oregon found virtually no diabetes
within that group. So I started to become really
curious
about the way that we've eaten for thousands of years, and the eating traditions
that have been passed down generation to generation, because it made sense that these were the diets
that were preserved because they used foods
that went together, that were in season, and that also made us feel good,
that made us feel healthy. When you actually spend time
down there
within Copper Canyon and look at how each
of their homesteads are set up, and they're very remote,
these homesteads, but you actually look
at the vegetation that's growing around
one of their homes, some of it which is wild
and some of it which is
cultivated, you realize that in fact these
plants
have incredible medicinal
qualities. And researchers
from the University of Mexico went down and picked
about 200 indigenous plants that grow in that area and found that they, believe it
or not,
had sugar-- blood sugar lowering properties, so had a hypoglycemic effect. The Tarahumara
are actually surrounded by this pharmacy
that's keeping them healthy. The Tarahumara
are primarily vegetarians. They primarily eat
corn and beans for a majority
of their calories. Probably 90 percent of their
diet
is corn and beans. They eat seasonally. In addition to their corn and
beans
that they grow in the fields, they're wild harvesting a lot
of fruits and nuts and
vegetables that grow wild in the canyons. So even in this very rugged,
remote canyon, they eat dozens
of different plants and have a very nutritious,
varied diet. The Tarahumara are eating lots of very, very unrefined
grains, just as they come out
of the earth. They have access to
a lot of high phenolic healthy
foods, garden fresh foods
that they grow. So they've kind of turned the food pyramid on its head. And really the bottom of their
food pyramid
is things like spices, and then obviously using
whole grains and beans. And the meat is really used as a
spice,
because it's precious, and when you think about it,
animal protein flavor, the smallest amount
can go a really long way. The key to it really is this
idea
of using the three sisters, or the<i> tres hermanas</i> ,
as the backbone of the cooking; so the squash and the beans
and the indigenous corn, which is, by the way,
really different from our corn. It really is the traditional Zea
mays, the little gnarled kernels of
corn that the kernels themselves
have--
are much, much higher in a whole assortment of
nutrients,
including B vitamins, and also lower in sugar,
by the way. Much lower in sugar. The heritage corn
that the Tarahumara eat, and other indigenous cultures
eat, which has not been
genetically modified, which is not, you know,
plumped up with pesticides, is super high in this nutrient
called phenols, which, again, I was unaware of
until
I started looking to Tarahumara
culture. But the benefit of phenols
is it's a natural antioxidant and it's also a natural
anti-inflammatory. If you're taking corn
and trying to turn it into something that is a mash that you can use
to actually make a tortilla
with, or what they call the<i> nixtamal,</i> you're not going to get
something
that's highly refined or highly
processed with this<i> metate</i> , with this carved out stone
and then a smaller stone. And as a result,
the food that you're going to
get at the end of the day is going to be
a pretty unprocessed, pretty high fiber,
pretty whole grain, pretty slow release food. These tortillas are--first of
all,
they're incredibly filling-- one of them is enough for a
meal-- but they're also
much more complex in flavor, partly because of the
traditional types of corn
that are used. But they're much more nutty. They really feel almost like
they have more spice in them, whereas no spices are added. It's just the flavors
is really quite complex. And when you look at
the amount of nutrients in them, they have a lot more of B
vitamins,
a lot more protein. They grind the limestone
and they boil it with some of the corn
that they harvest. The heat and the limestone
release niacin. The limestone also has
a lot of calcium, so they get a lot of calcium
and niacin. Some protein,
because corn has protein, and a lot of
very complex carbohydrates
through that. So they grind the boiled
mixture. The Tarahumara tortilla
takes a lot of work. You grind it down to<i> masa</i> ,
you mix it with water. You then hand pat it. You put it on a grill, which you
have
to watch and supervise, because if you ever try and do
it yourself,
I guarantee you, you will screw it up
for at least 30 years before you finally get it right. But that amount of work itself
is time intensive, it's energy intensive, so it creates a culture
of food appreciation. You don't waste. And secondly, the fact that you
are actually burning calories in order to harvest calories. One of the wars we have in our
body is between a body that thrives
on burning energy and a brain which is
constantly scheming to conserve energy at all costs. Because for most of our
existence, we never knew
when we would need that energy for an emergency. We've taken that
energy conservation mentality and we've turned it
to our foods as well. So everything
is easily accessible. It's right there in the
refrigerator,
it's right in the freezer, it's just a phone call away. We never have to actually burn
energy in order to take in energy. The Tarahumara typically will
have
a big jug of<i> pinole,</i> which is kind of like a watery
gruel
made out of ground corn. But when you watch
what the Tarahumara do when they're creating
that big jug of<i> pinole,</i> it's a lot of work, you know? They're--two thirds of the
energy
that they're going to get from
the<i> pinole,</i> they go into making the<i> pinole</i> ,
which is harvesting the corn, peeling the corn, roasting the
corn,
grating the corn off, putting it in a<i> metate</i>
and turning it into powder, then mixing it with water. So essentially what they're
doing all day long
is sipping medicine. It's just all day,
it's both calorically
beneficial, but it's also
an anti-inflammatory and a cancer-fighting agent. And that's it, they're just
taking it
by the cupful, so they're running 50 miles
up and down canyons in
blistering heat with maybe
six ounces of water and a tiny little bag
of ground corn. And that was all they needed. It's actually basically
all anybody needs. Chia's become this super food
here in the States. It's just something that grows
well
in the canyons that they do
grow, and that they do use for energy
before races and also before big festivals. You know, their Semana Santa
dances,
for example, last for days, and they're kind of
their own endurance event. So they have special foods like
chia
that they go to to sustain them through
these long, long events. Chia was one of the main crops
of the Aztecs. They had corn, beans,
chia, and amaranth. But an interesting thing is
their warriors, they would survive on that
on their campaigns by just carrying chia
and eat that. And that's what
the Tarahumara Indians, they find that
and carry it on their runs, and we're finding a lot of
runners today
are excited to eat chia because, for example,
in marathons they say they've had more energy
toward the end. So one of the things
that chia does is it soaks up water
fantastically well. It's only the size
of a little poppy seed, but it will plump up to nine
times
its own size soaking in water. So you put it into
a little flask of water, and you're basically taking
little canteens
into your own belly which will slowly release
liquid and nutrition during your entire endurance
event. There's really four main aspects
of chia in terms of human health. There's the omega-3 fatty acid. It's the highest plant source
of omega-3 fatty acids. It's a great source
of natural antioxidants. It's also a great source of
fiber, and that's both soluble
and insoluble fiber. And then protein. It's a high protein source,
over 20 percent, and it's a high quality protein. Many proteins can be low in some of the amino acids, but this is a complete with a rating of over 100. So right now, the two leading
costs,
if you will, in the medical
system are obesity and diabetes,
which are both connected of
course. And chia can help with obesity
because that soluble fiber
absorbs-- it's in your stomach, you feel
full,
so you want to eat less. That helps then the diabetics as
well. For every person who's diagnosed
with Type 2 diabetes, there's probably four or five
people
waiting in the wings who are prediabetic. And the question is
why are we seeing this epidemic? Obviously a lot of the, you
know, the highly processed foods
that we get in our daily lives. A lot of the stress maybe
that we're exposed to. A lot of the sedentary
lifestyle. A lot of the...
loss of cohesive family units, which believe it or not is
probably one of the biggest predictors
of being healthy and having a long life is just
having
that kind of social support. It turns out that for most
people, eating alone is not so good
for your health, and when we focus more
on the preparation of a meal and the celebration of the meal, saying a prayer or saying grace
or saying thanks, and then really tasting the food and celebrating that meal
with other people, it turns out that all of that
translates
into eating less and probably making
better food choices as well. These are ways of eating
that are built into traditional
cultures, and as we've all become
more solitary in everything that we do, we've lost a lot
of these external cues that keep us healthy and that specifically are around
our eating patterns that maintain
a healthy eating pattern. When you examine these diets,
they're brilliant, and one great example
is if you look at this traditional pairing
in Tarahumara diets of the corn, specifically these
handmade corn tortillas that
they make, and the beans,
it's really, really interesting, because normally for someone who has insulin resistance
or is a diabetic, we would counsel them to not eat
a lot of carbohydrates, and specifically things like
corn, because it tends
to be high glycemic. It tends to cause a spike
in blood sugar. But what nutritionists have
found when they studied
these traditional diets is the combinations of foods
actually mitigate that and lower the spike. So mixing the corn with the
beans,
for example, brings down the glycemic index
of the corn and makes it so that as a result
of being mixed with the beans, it doesn't give you
such a spike in blood sugar. You really have to look
at how the foods combine and the health effect
that they have together. I did know about
the nutritional value of corn and beans
that they were using and how old it was
from the analysis we did. And also, the amino acid
composition
of the two together and how adequate
that was for protein, for vegetarian diet protein. When you start to look at super-performing endurance
athletes
throughout history, more often than not
they're vegetarians. Scott Jurek, vegan. Rich Roll, vegetarian. So you just have to find these
guys
who do extraordinarily well, as do the Tarahumara.
So basically that's it. I think you can find
all of the nutrients you need in a purely vegetarian diet. I was trying to qualify
for the Boston Marathon, and I was on this--I was five
years
into the journey or so, and I was--had taken off 80 minutes or something
off my first marathon to get down towards
Boston qualifying time, and then I got this urge to
become
vegetarian for ethical reasons. I thought giving up meat meant basically giving up
on the Boston Marathon. I thought that, you know,
can't get enough protein, can't get enough calories. It wasn't a fitness change. That wasn't why
I went vegetarian. I thought it was just kind of
a--
maybe a long-term health
benefit, but did not expect the running
to get better. And then amazingly,
it did right away. The myth that you need to have
a meat-heavy diet to excel in
athletics I think is unfounded, and I think there are many
examples
here in the United States, but some of the best examples
are the Tarahumara themselves who eat a primarily
plant-based diet and can outrun
any of us gringos, and have been doing it
for decades. Nutritionists have come down
and researched the Tarahumara
diet and found it to be complete
in all amino acids and all necessary vitamins,
minerals, and nutrients. So they get a complete diet from the relatively limited
number
of crops they grow. They don't need meat. They do eat it
whenever they have access to it. They sometimes will slaughter
their goats. Some of them have chickens. Occasionally around festivals,
they will have an ox to
slaughter. But primarily, they rely on
beans
for their source of protein, and corn, bean, squash,
the three sisters. The Tarahumara diet is not
deficient
by Western standards, and it was the research
with the Tarahumaras that helped our standards
improve. We did a baseline study first, looking at their diet
and the physical activity. It was high carbohydrate diet,
obviously, but it had, you know,
good ten, fifteen percent
protein, which is good. And it had very little fat. It was less than 20 percent fat. So it was mostly carbohydrate, complex carbohydrates,
not sugars. And not enough fat
to really accumulate. So the carbohydrates were used
because they're very active. We didn't find
any risk factors at the time. In fact, we didn't see
any men or women that were overweight or obese. I think the Tarahumaras
who still live in the mountains are still a little bit less at
risk because they maintain
a more traditional diet, but as they become
more acculturated and come down
to the urban areas, they'll have the same risks
of anybody else. How you eat has way more
importance
on body weight than how you
move, because obesity
is a hormone-driven disease. The Native Americans
and the Eskimos, as soon as they got
the white man's diet, you know, we've totally changed,
you know, all of their health parameters, you know, with that intervention
of
let's bring in the foods of
commerce. And we've seen historically
what's that--
around the world now, you look what's happened to
different societies that were
well, and in one generation,
they look completely different and they're on ten medicines for all the different
metabolic diseases, which are really all tied
together. One meal could change our genes. We could eat a meal,
and if it's healthy, it could switch off the genes that might turn on heart
disease,
for example. And there's always studies
that, you know, link heart disease
or breast cancer or Alzheimer's or even obesity
to a gene. Well, yeah,
those genes do exist, but the question is
are they switched on and active, or are they turned off
and inactive? And depending on what we eat,
in a single meal, we can switch those genes
on and off. How do we reduce our odds
of chronic diseases? It is all about lifestyle, because lifestyle could
take care of almost every
condition. We can prevent
these lifestyle illnesses and you can reverse them, too, but it's not
one quick intervention. So to be able to create
a healthy metabolism again, we have to change our diet,
you know, and everyone's going to be
a little bit different, and you got to start moving
again. There's being healthy
and there's being fit, and they're two different
things. And to be the best runner, you want to combine
fitness and health, and then you won't be injured,
you won't die of a heart attack, and you'll run better. So when we see somebody
with a heart attack, when we see someone
with cancer, when we see some disease process
creep into the picture, it's because the health
has not done the job. We're not healthy enough
to prevent or stall those chronic diseases. What contributes to that health? The diet, stress management, clean air, clean water. You know,
avoiding chemicals in foods. So many, so many of those
things. You know, one of
the big revelations for me was discovering that humans are
really good athletes by nature. I think we tend to think of
ourselves
as these cerebral beings that are primarily bodies
designed
just to carry a brain around, and actually it's
the other way around, that our brain is there to get
these bodies in motion, and that we are
movement creatures. What has happened
unfortunately is... we spent much
of our intellectual energy finding ways
to conserve energy, to, like, not move. You know, to create cars and
remote controls
and cell phones, things which allow us
to never leave the house. The down side of that is
you take a body that is perfectly equipped
for movement and you stick it
in the garage, and you put it up
on cinder blocks, and what happens is
it starts to rot. And that is what I believe
has allowed the Tarahumara to be so sensationally healthy. The fact that, you know,
heart disease, cancers,
diabetes, all of the top killers
in Western culture are invisible
in the Copper Canyon. And I think, primarily,
for two reasons, because they live
every day as if it's an endurance contest. If you knew that
in a couple of hours you're gonna be running
a marathon, well, you wouldn't sit down
to fettuccini alfredo, you wouldn't have prime rib. You would eat a small,
condensed, calorically dense meal,
and that would be it, and you wouldn't
stuff yourself. And then the rest of the day
you'd be in motion. You'd be drinking lots of water, you'd be breathing deeply, and that's how the Tarahumara
live. Well, the diet itself
helps them stay lean, but it's the actual exercise
that they do, the walking, and the running,
and the races that keeps them so fit. And they go up and down
those mountains all the time, sometimes barefoot,
sometimes with the sandals that they make. I think that's what
really keeps them fit. The Tarahumara are really
a role model for my patients. I love to talk about
the way that they live as an example for how
you don't have to join a gym or be an Olympic athlete
or have these--you know, be in "team in training" in order to stay healthy. I mean, most of what
we can do to stay fit is to have, what I call,
"non-sit" time. Which is really
everything you do when you're not
sitting in a chair like this. Everything from gardening, to commuting by walking,
to cooking... That is something
when you look at the Tarahumara, I'm sure if you were
to put a pedometer on them they'd clock in at least
10,000 steps a day, which is, you know, our goal, and probably way, way more. Unlike sedentary Americans
who tend to... stay in one place
for eight hours a day, the Tarahumara
are constantly in motion, sometimes running,
sometimes walking, sometimes lifting and carrying, sometimes dragging
handmade plows through the
ground, or harvesting corn, but they're always in motion, always using their bodies, and that's why they're
naturally fit. They don't have to train
like we have to train. We sit in offices
and drive cars and go to the grocery store,
and all that kind of stuff, and they don't do that. They--just to walk
from here a mile is a challenge
'cause it's very rocky terrain, and there are very
few flat places. And a lot of them go up and down
the canyons all the time. It maybe takes them
five hours to go down, and maybe six or seven
to come up. And they do it all the time. Even 80, 90-year-old people do
it. Little kids do it. They do it all their lives. And a lot of the time
they're carrying cargo. And a lot of them
have to go a long way just to get their water,
they carry this, and there's nothing heavier
than water. Roberto
Rarámuri Elder They're always conditioning and they're always working
with their farms. They're--almost all of them
are some of the best farmers in the world. And, for instance,
they plow with these heavy wooden plows, and at the end of the day
ask them if they're tired, "Eh,<i> poquito</i> ," a little, but
not much. And they really aren't. Bonafacio
Rarámuri And then they do their-- their<i> rarájipari,</i>
their traditional race, a lot. And some places they run
almost every weekend, have a race. So because of that
and then... thinking about their diet, basically a diet of only
corn and beans, and some vegetables,
almost no meat whatsoever... they have just this
super ability to, when they run,
they run long distance. They're not fast. They're not known
for being fast, their thing is endurance. There's actually only one
natural attribute that we have which allows us to compete
in the wilderness, and that is our ability
to run long distances on a hot day. We vent heat
extraordinarily well. We vent heat by perspiration. Almost every other mammal
on the planet vents heat primarily
by respiration. It can either get in oxygen or it can vent heat, but it can't do both
at the same time. So, you take a horse
on a hot day, that horse will start
to lather and sweat and pant. You go running with your dog, on a cold day
your dog will destroy you, on a warm day that dog's
gonna go a half mile and look for a shady tree
to lie underneath. Humans can run
hours and hours and hours on a hot day with very little
water
without overheating. So, there's that one strange little attribute, the ability to vent heat
on hot days, which coordinated
with our other natural
attributes, the fact that our body
is full of nice springy tendons like a kangaroo. The fact that we have
an erect carriage, which allows both
springy recoil and also the ability
to survey the landscape. The fact that when heat comes
down, sun comes down from above, it's not covering
our entire back as it would for
an elongated animal, but the heat is only
centralized, which again, allows it to be
vented. So, we've basically created
an organism which is perfectly designed
to run long distances on hard, hot, rocky terrain on a hot day. So, what the Tarahumara have
done is taken both the psychological
rewards of running and the physical
predisposition of running, and they've combined it
into a lifestyle. It's a lifestyle based
on two things: both necessity and recreation. The necessity is going out
and covering long distances to either communicate
with another village, to get necessities,
to run animals into heat
exhaustion, as they did traditionally. They would go after
a deer on a hot day and just run, run, run
'til the deer plopped over, and then you bring home
a thousand pounds of easily accessible meat. The recreational aspect
of distance running for the
Tarahumara is taking that ancestral
necessity and turning it into fun and
games. The game they play,
like the<i> rarájipari,</i> which is a traditional
ball running game that the Tarahumara do. The Tarahumara never, like,
line up like we do for, like, the Boston Marathon, have like 5,000 people, and someone shoots a gun,
everybody runs off by
themselves. The Tarahumara,
when they compete, they only compete in teams. One of the most
exciting events of the year for
me is when the Tarahumara
gather together for their traditional ball race. In Spanish it's called<i>
"carrera de bola,"</i> "race of the ball," and then in Rarámuri
it's called<i> rarájipari.</i> And it's a race where 2 teams, there's 2 teams
that can be anywhere from two people per team
to 20 people per team. They cut a wooden ball, it's about the size
of a baseball. And in the bottom
of the canyons, they use a tree
called<i> guácima,</i> and the men the day before will go up in the woods
looking for this tree with their machetes, and they'll cut down
a piece of a limb about that long... ...and they'll spend
three or four hours just carving out
these balls. And they also,
in some parts of the canyons, they also run with a<i> palo,</i>
a stick, it's like soccer. They're not allowed
to touch the ball with their
hands. And they take the stick and they put it on
the very top of their toes. And it's not really a kick, it's more like a fling,
they fling it. And some of them
can fling it a long, long ways. The goal of the game
is to kick that ball along from teammate
to teammate over the running course,
the race course, back and forth
by flicking that ball from teammate to teammate. A recreation of what
it's like to run in a hunting pack, that someone takes the lead, other people trail behind, the lead constantly changes
from person to person. The ball is the prey, the team is the hunting pack. And what they're
doing in this game is turning necessity
into fun and recreation, which again,
reinforces that skill so that when you need it, it's
ready. Beforehand, they will agree
to how many laps they're gonna run, like,
they're gonna run 25 laps at 5 miles each,
it would be 125 miles. And so, they have two teams, and they start by
rolling each team's ball, and they run after it, and they run what we would call
"laps." In the race there's really
not a finish line, they basically just run,
the two teams, until there's nobody standing, until there's just like
one person standing on the other team. And so, it can last 50 miles, or it can last 200 miles. So, it's a very elaborate event. And I've been involved
in sports all my life, and I've never seen
an event so beautiful, and the people with such
real authentic enthusiasm to make it happen. Really, what is most
important to them is running the<i> rarájipari,</i>
running the ball-kicking races. That's the fabric
of their culture. Those are the running races that are most important to them. It's especially important
to them for various things: one, is they believe the ball represents the Earth,
the world, and that they are required, as a dictate from their God, that in order to keep
the whole world moving, keep it moving
on its axis, that they must kick the ball. And that the ball is--
by kicking the ball they're keeping the Earth
in movement. And they believe
that if they don't do that, the world will end. So, they believe
their duty in life is to keep, literally,
keep the Earth moving on its axis. And another very important
aspect of it, to them, is they bet on the races. Each team will--
there will be a designated
person to take bets from one team, and somebody else
to take bets from the other team. And if they have money,
they bet money, but more traditionally
they bet clothing, like the women
bet their skirts that they make, or huaraches,
their sandals, or a mirror or whatever. Goats, chickens, cows, I've seen them bet
all kinds of stuff. So, for them,
that was always a part of their economy. That was a way
that they could make some money
or win a cow, or something like that. So, that was part
of their motivation. And the other part is, this has been a part
of their tradition for so long that to be one of
the great runners gives you a lot of prestige in your community. Arnulfo Quimare is the legendary
great ultra distance runner among the Tarahumara. Arnulfo had won
the Guachochi Ultramarathon several years in a row,
and he descended from a family
of ultrarunning champions. You know, his cousins,
his brother, his brother-in-law, they were all famous
in the canyons. And soon as you see him,
you recognize you're in the presence
of a champion. He's a very handsome guy, he has this great presence
about him. Before there was no marathon but we ran with nothing
but a wooden ball, the course. It is not a race to party. It is a celebration race with God and the command of God. That is what makes a race. I like running the ball races
and marathons, looking for festivals, in order to live. And, of course, the women
also have their race, which is called<i> ariweta,</i> and they make a ring
about that big out of yucca plant. It has a really stiff stem. And they also make
the sticks, and they toss the ring
and chase after it, and toss it. And their races,
the last<i> ariweta</i> I saw lasted 42 kilometers, which is the length
of a marathon. You see some
older women running it, but it's more the teenagers. And most all the young girls
are usually the ones that have to go out
with the goats each day. So they--and they literally
have to run after the goats and go across the hills,
and the whole thing, so they're super conditioned. Their muscles are like rock-- 12, 13, 14-year-old girls. And they can work
all day long, they can run,
they can pling the<i> ariweta,</i> and so it's really
an exciting race, too. Plus, the women wear
the beautiful, colorful
clothing. So, to see them running
is really a magnificent sight. It's fascinating watching
the Tarahumara run, because it--you know,
all society is gonna move a little bit different, and the Tarahumara
aren't racing, they're running. They've developed
an efficient gate to cover hundreds
and hundreds of miles. So, they're gonna look
a little different than an East African runner
running at four minutes a mile, because that's not
what they've been trained to do. But the principles of efficiency
all cross. So, one thing that you see
foundationally, which we've talked about,
they've got perfect posture. You know, head position is
perfect, back perfect, they're not bent forward,
they're not leaned back, perfect posture,
helps them transmit forces correctly, no shear force through
the spine or the pelvis. Yeah, then you notice
their rhythm, they all have the same
springy rhythm. Our bodies have a natural
elastic tendon recoil frequency. And so, they're running springy. They're using energy,
but they're getting some back, so that's a good thing. The other thing
that you'll notice if you slow them down,
you can kinda catch the angles, is their foot never
lands in front of the knee, because that creates
a breaking moment. So, they're always
bringing their foot down closer to their center. No one runs
with their foot right underneath them,
because it land-- your foot lands
in front of you a little bit to store that energy. Boom, then you get
off the ground. But just watch their
lower extremities and how it hits the ground. So, I mean, I really think
the Tarahumara are probably doing
what natural running is. You know, they're not doing
high-intensity interval training and shooting for personal
records
in marathons. You know, they're out
just running as part of their lifestyle. And so, running is part
of our natural lifestyle, walking is part
of our natural lifestyle, eating real food
is part of our natural
lifestyle. So, to me, natural running
means just running in the way our bodies
are designed to run, with your body in a position
that is correct. But the Tarahumara
naturally have good running form
because they've been running in the canyons for centuries, and they start running
at a young age. They're on their feet,
moving daily. And so, running
from place to place, from village to village, they land softly
on their forefoot and midfoot rather than on their heels. They lean forward slightly
when they run, it's a smooth, fluid,
gliding motion. Staying loose and fluid
and relaxed is just as important
as their hip alignment and their footfall. But they do have
nearly perfect running form. It looks just like
a kid would run. Children run differently. If you ever watch a child run, very small, light pitter-patter
steps, back's very straight,
head's up, most of us have sort of
slumped into different kind of postures
and longer strides. If you watch children run,
and really, children who have not had
a lot of shoes on their feet. So, if you go over to--
if you travel over to any developing part
of the world, you know, they run
in this beautiful, springy,
light style, and certainly, they don't
get overuse injuries, because if something hurts,
they slow down. They self-regulate. Same as in your bare feet. It's really hard to hurt
yourself bare feet,
in my opinion, if you have a brain, you know, because the brain will say,
"Ouch, don't do that" and you back off. And, "Okay, that's enough
dose for today." But so, kids, until you
start adding the shoe, all run in this beautiful
springy pattern. You never see them throw
their foot out in front of them. It's a very balanced form
and one reason, obviously, is their amount of running
that they do and their physical activity,
but the other reason is their footwear
forces them to have good form. They don't have the luxury
of having big, bulky shoes to insulate their feet
from rocks and roots. They have to feel the trail
with their feet and their toes and their using the muscles
and tendons and nerves in their foot to sense the trail and that's what our bodies
were meant to do, that's what our feet
were meant to do. Their huaraches, which are
basically just used tire treads strapped to their feet
with goat leather, provide some degree
of slight protection from sharp rocks,
but beyond that, it's their feet still sensing the trail
and feeling where they need to
go and how they need to land
and that's how our bodies are meant to perform. They're meant to react
and rebound from the terrain
that they're travelling. One of the keys
to the Tarahumara's success is they are not running well, despite the fact
that they have these sandals, they are running well
because they have these sandals. The fact is they've come up
with this time-tested
technology. Again, you go back
through history, the Roman centurions could've
worn all kinds of different foot
apparel. The gladiators, Greek warriors, Greek long-distance messengers, they weren't wearing
these strap-up sandals because that's
the only thing they had. No, they're wearing them for a
reason,
it was by choice. They could've designed
all kinds of other shoes. If you can build a pyramid,
you can build a pair of shoes. Yet, throughout history,
they've all chosen the same very flat,
very light, very flexible, very toe freeing footwear. Again, you see it throughout
history,
it's the same design over and over
and over again. Something that, like Jesus wore,
Arnulfo Quimare is still wearing 3,000 years later. So, I think what happened
is they basically have taken the last word in running
technology,
which is something which gives you protection,
but without correction. There's no arch support,
there's no cushioning, there's no median wedges,
none of that stuff, and it allows your foot to flex
and bend and move as much as it wants
and what's fascinating is when you start to wear
a pair of very thin, flexy
sandals on the ground, you do notice
your foot moves all over the
place. When you step on a rock,
your foot just, sort of,
flinches away. It rolls over, it pulls back. When you're in a shoe,
you're just always driving right through that stuff. The difficulty is is that
you may not feel the impact, but it's not vanishing. The impact is still there,
the shockwaves are still there, you're just not feeling them
on impact, but they're still travelling up
through your body, but with a light, flexible
huarache sole, you basically neutralize that
by moving away from it or flexing into it. This is an actual
Tarahumara sandal. This looks like a foot,
bends where your foot bends. It doesn't have
a heel to toe drop. The body's designed
to be flat on the ground, that affects our posture
and it's not a soft interface, so this one has
pretty thick tire rubber. Now, the runners,
from what I hear and I've seen of their shoes, they're going to thin this out a
lot,
they're going to probably take the weight off of this shoe
quite a bit by having a thinner, thinner
tire. But, again, it has all the
features
of an ideal shoe. Our bodies respond,
meaning we get messages to stabilize certain joints,
so we want stability when we run,
it's called neuromuscular, and your brain has to get a
message
to wherever it is, your hip, your knee,
to do something because you're on the ground now and that happens really quick if you don't have a big
marshmallow
under your foot. There's a delay there. So, a delay there
causes a delay of stability, so you see
much more movement in the joint. But you can see this shoe
does not bend, it doesn't twist, it doesn't do any of that
because somewhere along the way, we kind of said,
"Well, our foot should be
supported." Well, maybe that's not true,
let's rethink it. When somebody
takes off their shoes, they run totally different. They run in a natural way
and they don't even think about
it, meaning, specifically,
that they hit the front of their
foot rather than the heel, which they
do
when they're in their shoe. They hit the heel
because the information up and down from the feet
to the brain is distorted, so the brain isn't sure
what you're doing and you end up hitting back
on your heel more. That's why there's so many
injuries
from shoes. The natural movement of the
human foot,
of the human body, is barefoot, so we get back
to our natural running state and when you're in
a natural running state, you're injured a whole lot less
than when you're wearing shoes. You know, the modern running
shoe,
the cushioned running shoe, was only invented
in the late 1970s and so, prior to that,
these things did not exist and yet, we're told every day,
"You cannot run without them." Well, what's everyone else
been doing? And then, what I discovered,
what made me even more inflamed is that not only were they
not preventing injuries, they were causing the injuries,
these are the problem and they're foisted on you
as the solution. When I got back
from the Copper Canyon from our first trip down there,
I was still of the belief that, well, what they do
in their sandals is fine, but our feet are different,
we're different, technology has really advanced,
and so, I just got to find the right shoe and then,
I can approximate what they do but wearing my shoes. So, I started looking
into running shoe research to figure out, "Okay,
well, what is the best shoe and what are the design features
that are the best?" And it's this
Emperor's New Clothes thing. You start digging into research,
you realize there is none. There is no research. Then you start looking
at what a shoe actually does and it provides two things,
it provides arch support and cushioning. So you look at the arch. Well, that's a design function
and the arch is one of the most important
architectural innovations in human history and it's based
on one really key thing, which is the keystone
in the center of the arch. The way an arch works
is as pressure comes down from above,
all the pieces lock in tighter and tighter
on the keystone. When you put more pressure
on the arch, it gets stronger. If you push up
from underneath the arch, it gets weaker,
it pushes the stones out and it separates. What we've created
with the modern running shoe is pressure from underneath
the arch pushing up. Your arch of your foot
is just like an arch in a Roman viaduct. It is this spidery web
of bones, ligaments, and tendon creating an arch
and as you push down from above, as your foot flattens,
all those bones tighten and provide you support. Now, you push up from above
and what you've done, you've turned this thing flaccid
an limp, you've made it weaker. Now, the bones
and tendons and muscles are not tightening up anymore,
making it weaker and weaker and weaker. People who have flat feet
often come from the fact that those arches
had been underutilized for years and what happened,
it just collapses. So, again, we create the arch
support,
which weakens the arch. We create the cushioning,
which weakens all the muscles and the tendons
and the ligaments of the leg,
why? Because now, you no longer
actually have to flex your leg in order to create cushioning. You can just slump down
however you want. So, we've created this thing,
which, unfortunately, feels wonderful in the store,
like a sofa feels wonderful, but you really shouldn't spend
that much time in it because all of the muscles
in your feet have now been deactivated,
they're all getting a rest. The problem is when the rest
goes on too long. So, again, I was
the worst case scenario. I was the guy that was always
hurt,
that was way too big, and they were always prescribing
me
the Brooks Beast, which is the giant slab of
rubber and I'm wearing this thing
and it didn't work, I was always getting hurt. Now, I can go out the door,
I can run 15 miles barefoot on asphalt
without a problem and I'm the very guy,
the exact guy they said should not be running at all,
let alone barefoot, and yet, somehow, it's fine,
and I think the reason why is because you learn
to run differently. And so, that's why the
Tarahumara, one reason the Tarahumara
have such outstanding form is their footwear, their feet being forced
to touch the ground and interact with it,
and their awareness of their bodies and their feet
and how they align, and also, just running joyfully,
like kids run. They still look like little kids
running, dancing down the trail. They're having fun out there
and that's something I think we all can learn from. I think what, most importantly,
you see, which puts running in the right place for them
is they're smiling, they're smiling, they're having
fun. When I see someone
going down the street and they look like they're
stressed and they have
pain in their face, I don't think it's a good thing
and it's probably not
sustainable. I mean, it's kind of what you
put in
is what you put in, you know? If you put pain into your body, you're not going
to get good things back from it. So, they're smiling,
so right there, that tells me that they're in a good place. They're not in stress. They're parasympathetic, meaning, a lot
of modern exercisers are constantly
in sympathetic stress because they're told,
"You must work out hard," you
know? "No pain, no gain." "If it's easy, that's no good,
you want to make it hard, high intensity adrenaline
stress." All right, so that might make
you
more fit in about six weeks,
sure, but I don't really care
about that, you know? The Tarahumara are living well. I care about who's going to be
free of coronary disease
and metabolic syndrome and depression
and all these other, you know, burn out, adrenal fatigue,
everything you see now that, you know, is driving
the healthcare costs. So, reset the parasympathetic,
and I think if you learn nothing
else from the Tarahumara, it's have
fun. I started seeing such a joy in this totally nonmaterial
lifestyle and such an exuberance
to participate and I just saw such a spirit
of community, such a spirit of simplicity,
and, as a result, a really deep joy
that just exudes from them. They proved to me
that all the stuff we have is totally unnecessary
and actually detracts from life instead of making life easier
or more convenient. That's such a fallacy. They are living proof
that the direction other cultures in the world
have gone has been a really bad decision and that it's basically
destructive
to the human body as well as the human soul and
spirit and they are living proof
that nonmaterialism is the way
to abundance and joy. You know, one thing
that's interesting about the
Tarahumara is that today, they're looked
at this unique culture, but there's a pretty strong
amount of evidence that their culture was
universal,
that we're the ones who changed. Because when you look
at how humans existed for most of our ancestral life, we would've had to
have been hunter gatherers, we would've had to
have been communal and a sharing culture,
that we did not have the
resources to sort of grab things
and hold them for ourselves. All of our ancestors
would have lived exactly like the Rarámuri. We would've
been universal athletes, we would've been
nonmaterialistic, we would have lived
a very sustainable lifestyle. They live very much in the
present
and they don't wear watches or keep track of time
in the way that we do and so, when you have abundance,
you share it immediately. You don't try to store it for
later. And there's a word,<i> "kórima,"</i>
which is really important, both to eating and to
agriculture
and to everything they do. <i> Kórima,</i> it sounds like "karma"
and it means something similar. It's this selfless spirit of
giving
that's at the heart of their
culture and it expresses itself
most obviously in food and food sharing,
but in everything they do. You can very much tell,
even as an outsider, from the way that their
communities
are set up and the fact that they are able to persist, that there is a huge amount
of sharing and support that goes on
within Tarahumaran culture. I wouldn't even begin to fool
myself
into thinking that what we eat can come even close to replacing
the way we live interpersonally and how much human connection
keeps us healthy. In terms of really
understanding,
you know, what are the most important
things,
as humans, that keep us human and that keep us alive. Eating together, celebrating
together,
grieving together, learning together,
that, for me, is the real ticket to a healthy, healthy society
and the Tarahumara have figured that out. The difficulty with learning
about the Tarahumara is, in some ways,
it faces you with this kind
of difficult prospect of, "Oh, if I want to live like
them,
does that mean I can only wear sandals
and live in a canyon and eat mice and<i> pinole?"</i> I was faced
with this inescapable conclusion that the way
you cannot attack people and be angry and get cancer
and heart disease and being gentle,
nonviolence, long-living, community-based person
is to live like the Tarahumara. The Tarahumara have never
strayed
from the fact that, as humans, we are running people. When you make running
a daily part of your life, not to achieve a goal
or get a medal or to show off, but just to enjoy it, a couple
things
start to fall into place. Your diet
will naturally change. You'll rest better,
you'll sleep better. You will, every day,
have a safety escape valve for pent up pressures
and grudges and antagonisms. I once asked
a Tarahumara shaman, "What does it mean
to be a Tarahumara? What's the essence
of Tarahumara-ness?" Because I wanted to know it,
I wanted to embody it myself. But what he said, that was essential
to being a Tarahumara, he said, "You grow corn, you speak
the native language, and you run, you participate
in the running festivals." Those, to him,
were the key ingredients of what it meant
to be a true Tarahumara. So, the running festivals
are more than just competitions or contests between villages
or a way to wager on an exciting event, although it's definitely
all those things. But it's something very
spiritual
and profound to experience, even to witness, and that's what
they've been doing for
centuries, is running these
ball kicking races through their ancestral
canyon lands. But recently, as drought
and famine have taken hold, they haven't had the calories
to expend to do the ball kicking races. And so, some of those traditions
have disappeared from many of the communities. They just don't have the extra
food
or the time or the energy to run for hundreds of miles. We have organized footraces
in Urique for many years. I guess it was about two years
after the drought had really-- was really getting severe
that we noticed how hungry they were when they showed up. We also noticed
that when they ran, a lot of whom that could run
100 miles easily were dropping out of the race. So, after the race we talked
to them and realized it was because they were
so weak from not eating. In the real, the most serious
time
of the drought, I went to this place,
Pie de la Cuesta, and I didn't know this woman
before,
but I met her for the first
time. They say she's over 100 years
old. I asked her through an
interpreter,
"How have you survived? Is it because of<i> kórima</i> ?" their practice of sharing. And she said, to summarize,
she said that all of her life, they had depended on<i> kórima,</i>
but that the drought was so
severe that there was nothing to share
and she said it was the saddest time of-- saddest time of her life
in 100 years. They've endued many years
of drought that has led to
famine. The corn that they had saved
to plant the following season, out of desperation,
they've had to eat it during the lean
winter months. So, because of that,
they've lacked their native
seeds and so, they've had to turn
to genetically modified seeds from the Mexican government
or whatever they can get their hands on
just to have something to put in the ground
just to feed themselves and their families. So, it's become
a vicious cycle. Once the climate patterns
are disrupted, once they're in long periods
of drought, they have no choice,
but to turn to less desirable
options, importing even pesticides
and fertilizers for their fields just to get something to grow
because the soil fertility is
down because their animals have died
and so they can't enrich their
soil. So, climate change
has a huge impact on how the Tarahumara eat
and how they survive and it's not something
that's in the future, it's happening right now. It's already happened to them
and it continues to happen to
them and that's why many of them,
sadly, are fleeing the canyons with the hopes that maybe
they can beg on the streets and scratch up enough food
in the cities. But, quite often, most often,
that doesn't work out for them. So, their best hope is to keep
a foothold in the canyons where they've been living
for centuries and despite the changing
climate patterns, they can adjust
if they have access to the seeds and the water
that has sustained them. That's when we decided
to start developing seed banks. We started with the first one
at my place in Urique. Barefoot Seeds started
after I visited the canyons almost a decade ago
and realized that the Tarahumara were far more
than amazing runners, they were
phenomenal human beings, incredible farmers
who scratched a living out of barren, rocky canyon
soil. I was astonished
at how they had patched together enough sustenance and realized that as amazing
as they were as runners, they still needed some serious
help. Drought, famine, climate change was threatening
their traditional way of life. One of the most important groups
I reached out to was Native
Seeds and Native Seeds already had
a stockpile of heirloom
varieties of indigenous seeds
native to the Copper Canyons that they had been saving
over decades. That critical stockpile enabled
us
to get the seeds started down in the canyons
and Evan took it upon himself to really lead
and spearhead that effort. He went down to the canyons
several times, helped plant the seeds himself
and kept track of the different varieties
that we had planted. So, Native Seeds
and Evan were key in getting the seed bank
started. With these droughts,
there's been a loss of
diversity. So, whereas every single<i>
campesino</i> or<i> indígena</i> used to be maintaining
their own individual, unique seed variety
through hundreds of years of passing it down
generation to generation, these droughts have swallowed up a lot of these cultivars
due to crop failure. The loss of traditional
crop diversity affects indigenous communities, not only from the perspective
of their food security, but also their cultural
security. In many indigenous communities,
traditional crop varieties play key ceremonial roles
and that can't be replaced with other varieties. So, in cases
where those varieties are lost, those traditions
are often lost as well. What Barefoot Seeds is doing
and the seed banks are doing, primarily, is simply growing and storing seed
for the Tarahumara, so that in times of drought,
in times of famine, in times of crisis,
they will have some kind of food security. They won't have to eat
their seed supply to survive. They will have at least enough
seed
and food on hand for their communities
not to starve and that's step
one. Step two is to put in place
the infrastructure that they've had for centuries,
the self-sustaining aspects of agriculture,
the manure, the goats, the seed storage, the water,
the whole cycle, the perennials,
everything that has been part of a typical Tarahumara rancho
that has disappeared in recent years
because of drought and famine and drug trafficking
and everything else threatening
the Tarahumara way of life. So, really, our goal is simply
to restore what the Tarahumara have already established
in the canyons and give them a fighting chance. They're subsistence farmers. The Tarahumara
are better defined as<i> campesinos</i> or<i> indígenas.</i> Agriculture is just one part
of a much larger integral system that is their lives,
that is the life of a human being
on planet Earth. They grow food,
they are midwives, they are medicine people. They are hunters,
they are fishers. They know how to interact
with the land. They build their homes. When you live out,
especially in isolation, is that the entirety
of your subsistence, whether it be your food
or your shelter or your clothing,
you have to maintain a skill set for every single one
of those aspects of your life because there is no other way
to obtain those things. So, what they've been able
to maintain is that, is the traditional life
and the traditional skill sets and skill sets that we're seeing
disappear so rapidly. There's so much to be learned
from the Tarahumara and from traditional culture
in general. I can't overemphasize that. But, in the end, it's the
Tarahumara
that has more to offer the world than the world has
to offer the Tarahumara. Antonio
Rarámuri The Tarahumara are deeply rooted
to their place and they're at home
wherever they go in the canyons. They are walking and running in the footsteps
of their ancestors, of many, many generations
and that's something that few of us ever experience
or get to know, that kind of deep connection
to place. Even amid famine and drought and drug lords stealing
their lands and timber mafias
killing their leaders, they're still happy,
they're deeply saddened by the losses
that they're experiencing. Don't get me wrong,
I mean, they are people with real emotions
who have very real problems, but, at their core,
they haven't lost their sense of joy
at being alive in this moment,
in this very difficult moment. They are still filled
with gratitude somehow at just being alive
in their homelands. They have this poised,
calm presence always and I think that's one thing
that really draws me to them is that sense of peace
that kind of permeates their personalities
and their culture. They're happy doing
what they've done for centuries, growing food,
running through the canyons with their communities
and celebrating the festivals and speaking their native
language. I think as long as they're given
the land and the opportunities to do so, they'll stick
to their healthy, healthy path. Take part in preserving
the native seeds and running traditions
of the Tarahumara tribe! Visit:
www.goshenfilm.com. A special thanks to
all of the families featured in this film from Rawarachi,
Copper Canyon, Mexico. A big thanks to our guide
and translator Margarito.
