At the starting line of the Leadville 100 in the summer of 1993, a fifty-five-year-old man stood among the fittest endurance athletes alive, and he was wearing sandals cut from a car tire. He had never trained in a gym. He carried no gels, no energy chews, no watch beeping splits at his wrist. A hundred miles of Colorado high country lay ahead of him, most of it above ten thousand feet. His name was Victoriano Churro, and by the time the sun set on the second day he had beaten them all.
To the crowd at the finish, he looked like an impossibility. To the people he came from, he looked like a Tuesday.
The people who were born to run
Churro was Rarámuri, one of the Tarahumara who live in the folded gorges of the Copper Canyon in northwestern Mexico. The name they call themselves is often translated as something close to "the running people," and it is not a metaphor. In a landscape of near-vertical trails and canyon walls that fall thousands of feet, running is not exercise. It is how you get from one house to the next, how you carry a message, how you court, how you pray.
The old stories describe a hunting method that sounds mythical and is not: a runner picks a deer and simply follows it, on foot, hour after hour, sometimes across a day or more, until the animal can no longer flee and drops. Children grow up chasing a wooden ball across the same brutal terrain that would end most trained ultrarunners in an afternoon. Their journey into the wider world's imagination came later, through Christopher McDougall's 2009 book Born to Run, which turned a quiet canyon people into a global argument about what the human body was built to do.
What they run on
The most startling part is what fuels it. The traditional Rarámuri diet is almost austere in its simplicity: corn, in tortillas and in a thin ground-corn drink; beans; squash; wild greens gathered from the hillsides; and chia, the tiny seeds eaten by the spoonful. It is overwhelmingly plant-based, close to the land, and free of nearly everything a modern supermarket sells. No powders. No supplements engineered in a lab. No coach.
And for generations, the people who ate this way carried remarkably little of the disease that fills clinics in the industrialized world. Researchers and physicians who have looked at traditional Rarámuri communities have described low rates of the obesity, high blood pressure, and heart disease that we treat as ordinary. The bodies were not built by a special food. They were built by an old pattern of eating, kept intact for a very long time.
Then the road arrived
Roads change things. As pavement pushed deeper into the canyons and towns grew closer, the food that came in first was the food that travels well and never spoils: soda, white flour, refined sugar, packaged snacks. It is cheap, it is sweet, and it asks nothing of the land. In the communities where it took hold, the picture that public-health researchers have long recognized elsewhere began to appear here too. Weight climbed. Blood sugar climbed. The very conditions the Rarámuri had been largely spared arrived alongside the wrappers.
The cruel symmetry is hard to miss. Nothing about the mountains changed. The trails were as steep as ever, the distances as long. What changed was on the plate. And where the old food went, so did the old vitality, while the families who kept eating the traditional way kept running, some of them still lacing on huaraches and covering ground in their sixties. Same legs. Same canyons. Different food.
This is not really a story about a canyon
It is easy to read all of this as a postcard from somewhere far away, a curiosity about a remote people in extraordinary sandals. It isn't. The same road reached your grandparents. Somewhere in the last few generations, real food gave way to something built in a factory to sit on a shelf, and it happened so gradually that no one in your family would have been able to name the day it turned. You inherited the result. So did your children.
The Rarámuri did not thrive because of a secret ingredient. They thrived because, for a long time, nothing came between them and whole food. That is not a lost superpower reserved for a canyon in Mexico. It is a pattern, and patterns can be chosen again. The hope in this story is that the fix was never exotic. It was corn and beans and greens and seeds, food you could recognize, eaten by people who could still run.
Why we built Rise
This is history, not a prescription, and yet the same lesson keeps repeating across every tradition we study. Real food, kept whole, eaten close to its source. That is the entire idea behind Rise. Our Grass-Fed Beef Organ Complex is liver, heart, kidney, spleen, pancreas and bone marrow from grass-fed cattle, freeze-dried into capsules: the most prized foods of nearly every healthy tradition, and nothing else. If it earns a place in your kitchen, the 2-Pack bundle keeps you stocked.
The running people ate nose-to-tail, connective tissue and all. Our Grass-Fed Gelatin Powder is that same collagen-rich nourishment for joints and tendons, in a single spoonful, with nothing added. No secret. Just the old pattern, made easy to keep.
Sources & further reading
The studies and historical records behind this piece:
- Connor WE, Cerqueira MT, Connor RW, et al. “The plasma lipids, lipoproteins, and diet of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1978.
- McMurray RG, Cerqueira MT, Connor WE, et al. “Changes in lipid and lipoprotein levels and body weight in Tarahumara Indians after consumption of an affluent diet.” New England Journal of Medicine, 1991.
