Running with Sherman Read online

  I sat on the grass, watching Lawrence fill his belly and then get started on his full docket of daily shenanigans. He got a running start and began butting heads with big old Buddy, the lovable gelding ram we’d raised from the time he was a bottle-fed baby. Buddy tolerated Lawrence for a while and then put an end to his nonsense, bulling Lawrence back to the fence and sending him scampering off for someone smaller to mess with. About forty yards away, he spotted the perfect target: Chili Dog, our other billy goat, was grazing quietly, clueless that behind him, a trouble-seeking missile was locking in. Lawrence began ambling off in his direction—and marching along behind him, slow but determined, came Sherman.

  That made up my mind. Okay, I thought. Time to give this a try.

  I hustled to the truck and set off for the feed store. Tanya was coming by later to check up on her patient. If I really hurried, I might have just enough time to put this scheme to a test before she saw what I was up to.

  * * *

  —

  Tanya rolled up early in the afternoon. “Hiya, Sherman,” she hollered, her voice ringing with affection as she climbed out of the truck. “How are you, little man?” To me, her tone was a little more grave. “He’s going to need a sheath cleaning right away.”

  “No, he didn’t come with one,” I said, figuring that must be some kind of horse blanket. “All he had was that crappy halter.”

  “I guarantee you, he’s got a sheath,” Tanya said. “I’m looking at it right now. It’s his penis.”

  “We’ve got to clean his penis?”

  “Not we. You. This is a ‘you’ operation. You better learn now because if he lives, you’ll be doing it every three or four months.”

  “Seriously?” I’d devoured horse books as a kid, and nowhere in the Misty of Chincoteague saga was there any mention of Grandpa Clarence fiddling around with any of the colts’ junk. Tanya was dead serious, though: because Sherman was neutered, his dormant penis was susceptible to waxy buildup that could cause serious issues. The only way to get the job done is to ease your fingers into the donkey’s abdomen, pull down the retracted penis, and swab it carefully with warm, soapy water while trying not to get kicked into outer space.

  “Last thing, you stick a finger in the hole—” Tanya continued.

  “Of what? The penis?”

  “Right up in there. You’ve got to pull out the wax ball. That’s the ‘bean.’ The bean is a killer. Totally wrecks his bladder.” Apparently if Sherman had a new life ahead, so would I: every three months, I’d be reminding myself to file quarterly taxes and degrease my donkey’s downspout.

  Now that she was finished terrorizing me, Tanya was ready for her patient. “Let’s get a look at you, Shermie,” Tanya called as we came through the gate.

  Sherman’s ears flicked up. I don’t know if he remembered his name, but oh, boy, did he remember Tanya. He didn’t lift his head, but his ears stayed on high alert as he pivoted and suddenly, for the first time, seemed very interested in the sheep. He trudged toward them and kept going, plowing into the middle of the herd. Lawrence spotted his new buddy on the move and ran over, shoving in until they were both surrounded by sheep. It wasn’t much of a hiding spot, but I was impressed with Sherman for trying.

  “Look at him walking!” Tanya said, not a bit offended. “And he’s got a friend! Dude, this is amazing.”

  She followed Sherman into the scrum. She reached out to pet Sherman’s mane, but his head bobbed and she got only air. She tried and missed again, as Sherman backed deeper into the herd. As an exercise in sheer irritation, it was a joy to behold; Sherman taking evasive maneuvers was like watching Jackie Chan slip punches. Whatever that Crazy Clipper Woman had in mind for today, Sherman was having none of it.

  “Someone remembered he’s a donkey,” Tanya said. “I love it.”

  We finally got hold of Sherman’s halter, then pushed pesky Lawrence out of the way. Tanya took a syringe of antibiotics from her jacket pocket, bit the cap off with her teeth, and pinched a fold of Sherman’s hide back near his haunch. With one swift move, she injected him so deftly that Sherman didn’t seem to even feel the needle. Tanya dug into her other pocket and pulled out a tube of deworming paste to treat Sherman’s intestinal parasites. “He’s going to like this. It tastes like fresh apples,” Tanya said. “So let’s use it as a distraction.” Tanya instructed me to open the tube and let Sherman take a big whiff of Golden Delicious goodness before squirting a dab between his teeth. Tanya kept her eye on him, and the second Sherman began stretching his mouth toward the paste, she pounced: she eased in a rectal thermometer and, in a masterpiece of pain-free nursing, managed to take Sherman’s temperature before he noticed what was going on.

  “Little hot,” she decided, and reached into yet another pocket of her mobile-pharmacy outerwear for a tube of Banamine, an analgesic paste that should bring down Sherman’s fever and help ease any muscular pain that could contract his intestines. “That should make him feel a lot better,” she said. “It’s like donkey Tylenol.” Overall, Tanya was cautiously optimistic. It could be weeks before we’d know if Sherman’s gut was in order and his bloodstream was free of infection, Tanya guessed. But the big thing was his feet, and they were now looking hopeful.

  “He’s moving well,” Tanya said. “A lot better than I expected.”

  “Yeah, but he won’t set foot on anything hard,” I said. “He won’t even step on gravel in the driveway.”

  “Now why would you want him to?” she asked, her tone expressing everything she wasn’t saying out loud: I leave my sick patient alone with you for one night, and already you’re screwing things up?

  “I had this idea,” I began, not enjoying the way the word “idea” made Tanya’s skeptical eyebrow shoot up even higher. “Everything you said yesterday about despair, I took seriously. And here’s what I came up with…”

  5

  Miners, Muckers, and Mean Mother—

  Ten years earlier, I’d gone to Leadville, Colorado, an old mining town high in the Rockies, in search of ghosts.

  I was there to find out what really happened back in the 1990s when a strange band of men in skirts and sandals suddenly appeared to compete in Leadville’s famous 100-mile footrace—and just as abruptly disappeared. They were Tarahumara Indians, members of a reclusive tribe who live in the depths of Mexico’s remote Copper Canyon. For centuries, all kinds of tall tales had drifted out of the canyons about the extraordinary running ability of the Tarahumara. Few outsiders had ever seen them in action, but those who did claimed that the Tarahumara were near-superhuman athletes who could scamper from peak to peak faster than a horse and knock off ten marathons in a row (yes, that’s more than 260 miles) without stopping.

  The Tarahumara almost never emerge from the canyons to compete, so when about a dozen of them showed up in Leadville in 1993, they created a sensation. Despite their reputation, it was hard not to feel sorry for these shy, uncertain guys as they approached the starting line, wearing huaraches they’d made the day before from junkyard tires—until the gun blasted and they proceeded to kick the living daylights out of hundreds of younger, better-equipped runners. A fifty-five-year-old Tarahumara farmer finished first, followed close behind by seven other Tarahumara villagers in the top ten. The next year, the villagers returned and crushed Leadville for the second time. And then they were gone, never to return.

  So what happened? The mystery of the Tarahumara that brought me to Leadville soon launched me on the crazy adventure that I describe in my book Born to Run. I’d gone to Leadville braced to butt heads with tough old miners who didn’t appreciate reporters sniffing around with a lot of nosy questions, and it took about four minutes for those miners to show me that what I didn’t know about Leadville was a lot. My first morning in town, I sat face-to-face for two hours with Ken Chlouber, the pit chief who created the Leadville 100 as a way to save his town after the mine closed.
Ken answered every question I threw at him until he got tired of sitting around. “Hey, let’s go snowshoeing,” he suggested.

  Soon after, we were tromping through knee-high drifts, climbing into the Rockies so I could see for myself where the Tarahumara had triumphed. Ken was nearly seventy years old but charged up the mountain with such savage power that I was almost too winded to ask him to slow down. Spots were spinning in front of my eyes, and I was sucking air like a drowning swimmer. Leadville is a mile closer to the sun than Mile High Denver, making it the highest city in the continental United States. The air is so thin that first-time visitors often get headaches as soon as they step out of their car.

  “Worth it, though, right?” Ken said. I lifted my drooping head and took in the herd of elk grazing down below, the glitter from the snaking Arkansas River, the breathtaking beauty of the powdery spruce forest soaring toward the peak above.

  “Yeah, it’s really—” I began, but Ken was suddenly struck by inspiration.

  “You’ve got to come back this summer!” he blurted. “For Boom Day. First time I saw Boom Day, I knew I was here to stay.”

  Ken had grown up on a farm in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and wandered into Leadville as he drifted from job to job. The mines paid pretty well, but what hooked him for good was the morning in August when he woke up to find a stampede of animals thundering down Leadville’s main street. A herd of donkeys was galloping wildly while a gang of Ken’s fellow miners followed close behind, running their hearts out and holding on as best they could to the donkeys’ halter ropes. The mob rounded the corner and was gone, charging up the dirt road for the thirteen-mile climb to Mosquito Pass.

  Ken had just gotten his first glimpse of burro racing, and he wouldn’t need a second. (In case you were wondering, “burro” is just the Spanish word for “donkey.” Much like “pop” versus “soda,” whichever term you use depends on whether you’re east, west, or on top of the Rockies.)

  Pack burro racing was a throwback to the Gold Rush days, Ken was told, back when prospectors would hit pay dirt, heave their gear onto their burros, and hightail it to town to file their claims. By 1915, the old prospectors had disappeared from the mountains, but the burros remained. Mining had gone deep underground, shifting from precious metals to industrial minerals, and those compact, steady-tempered burros, which wouldn’t go berserk at the blast of a dynamite cap, were still needed to haul the heavy ore wagons to the surface. The miners who worked beside them in the darkness bonded with the burros and treated them like personal pets. On weekends, they’d bring their kids to the big corrals outside of town to feed apples to their buddies over the fence. Eventually, they said to hell with the fence and began busting the burros out, taking them on day hikes into the mountains.

  You can see where this is going, right? There is no way you can combine a bunch of suddenly freed animals with a gang of “miners, muckers, and mean motherjumpers,” as Ken Chlouber affectionately calls them, without it turning into some kind of redneck rodeo. By the 1940s, miners were racing one another over the trails and right into downtown Leadville. It got to the point where it was weird to walk into the Silver Dollar Saloon on a Saturday and not find a donkey standing at the bar alongside a thirsty two-legged teammate.

  Over time, the distances got longer, the miners got faster, and the bets got bigger until, in 1949, an epic challenge was thrown down: Anyone foolish enough to try was invited to a twenty-three-mile, all-comers burro race stretching from the Silver Dollar, up and over a 13,500-foot mountain, and back down the far side to the Prunes memorial in Fairplay, erected in honor of a donkey who wandered around Fairplay for years as the town’s shared pet. Get to Prunes first, and you walk away with $500. Assuming you still can.

  * * *

  —

  Edna Miller was awed by the race, a little less by the racers. She watched the miners straggle into Fairplay, some so exhausted they couldn’t speak, and figured those boys weren’t doing anything a woman couldn’t handle. Especially if it meant a $500 payday.

  Hold on now, Edna demanded of the miners and muckers. Why can’t women run?

  The miners and muckers looked at one another and shrugged. Who said they can’t?

  Well, how about the International Olympic Committee, the Amateur Athletic Union, and the American Medical Association? For decades after 1949, physicians were still spouting the theory that too much exertion would make a woman’s uterus and ovaries shake loose. Or explode: As recently as 2010, the president of the International Ski Federation was explaining that ski jumping was “not appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view” because, of course, it was well known that the uterus could “burst” upon landing. Naturally, the ladies couldn’t be trusted to take care of their own organs, so men stepped in. Until 1980, women were banned from any Olympic track event longer than 800 meters: not a 10K, not a 5K, but a 0.8K—less than half a mile. Meanwhile, in Boston, Running While Female was literally a crime: any woman who dared attempt the Boston Marathon in the 1960s was subject to arrest by the cops or, if your dad was in charge, a beating. “If that girl were my daughter, I would spank her,” race director Will Cloney famously snarled after Kathrine Switzer finagled her way onto the course in 1967.

  But in Leadville, the hardrock miners saw things a little differently.

  “Out West, we’ve always known that women were cut from the same leather as men,” said Curtis Imrie, the legendary burro whisperer and three-time world champion who was happy to talk about the many times he’d been smoked by women like Barb Dolan and Karen Thorpe. “Burro racing has none of that nonsense you have back East about ‘protecting’ women.”

  In 1951, the miners and muckers not only welcomed Edna Miller to the starting line but encouraged her to bring some pals. Within four years, women were all over the mountain, making up a quarter of the entire burro-racing field. Looking back, it’s kind of insane that in Boston, grouchy old men with cigars and overcoats would keep declaring until 1972 that women were too dainty to run their marathon, while in Colorado, the “ladies” had been tearing up a far more grueling challenge for twenty years. Boston likes to boast that it’s America’s oldest marathon, but that’s true for only some Americans. For the other half of the population, the ones who were outlawed for decades from even entering, it’s as if the race didn’t exist.

  So for all Americans, men and women alike, our oldest marathon is the one that’s always been open to everyone. It’s not going to cost you a fortune, and you don’t have to qualify. All you have to do is show up, borrow a donkey, and get ready for battle.

  * * *

  —

  “First-timers either love it and never stop, or disappear and never return,” Ken Chlouber told me. “You’ll either be cured or addicted.”

  Within a month of seeing his first race, Ken had rented a bit of pasture and bought Mork, a burro so big it could look Ken dead in the eye and, as Ken soon discovered, kick him right in the chest. Ken would leave the mines at daybreak after working all night and go straight off to train with his new partner, only to limp home an hour later, bruised and confused. Nothing about these creatures made any sense. Ken had grown up in the saddle as a competitive bull rider, so getting the burro under control was supposed to be the easy part. Running was supposed to be the pain; Ken hated moving under his own power at any speed faster than a saunter. But with Mork, all that was flipped around. On good days, Ken found he loved trotting through the pine forest with another creature, both of them working hard and panting together in perfect sync.

  But on the bad days…

  “If you and that burro aren’t of the same opinion about where you’re going and how fast, it can drag you up the side of a cliff or through a boulder field,” Ken warned me. “And there ain’t nothing you can do but hold on and holler.”

  Ken was committed, though. Once he started racing, he couldn’t stop. Over the next forty years, Ken and Leadv
ille would both endure a series of tragedies, triumphs, and transformations. Ken first arrived as a stranger, a struggling furniture salesman trying to support a wife and a new baby, and went on to become a rock-blasting crew boss, then an unemployed miner, and, finally, a local legend who saved his adopted home. After the Climax Mine shut down, taking nearly every job in town with it, Leadville was close to death. That’s when Ken came up with the genius idea of staging a 100-mile footrace. Leadville was reborn as an off-brand Aspen with a vibrant adventure-sport economy, and Ken was on his way to the capital as a congressman and state senator. But no matter how much things changed, one thing never varied: Every year, the burros of Leadville took their place at the starting line, and every single year, Ken Chlouber was right there with them. Even when he had to saw the cast off the leg he’d broken in one race so he could run in the next one.

  When I came back to Leadville that August (yeah, he talked me into it), I shook Ken’s hand and found myself gripping bandages and a splint. “Left half of me on the rocks last week,” Ken said with a shrug. He’d been running a twenty-nine-mile race in nearby Fairplay when his burro got overexcited and barreled over him, tumbling the two of them down the trail. Ken broke three fingers and hamburgered his legs, but he still got to his feet, chased down his burro, and continued on to the finish line. He was sixty-eight years old.

  Despite his crushed hand, Ken couldn’t wait to get me out with him on the Leadville course. We headed down Harrison Avenue, Leadville’s main thoroughfare, to a parking lot behind the bank where Ken had left his stock trailer. We still had a good hour till the starting gun, but already tension was in the air. Burros were pacing and twisting nervously in place, held tight by racers trying to keep them clear of the spectators who were already crowding the curb.