Christopher McDougall

Christopher McDougall is an American journalist whose Born to Run explores the science of barefoot running through the story of Mexico's Tarahumara people, transforming sports writing.

Christopher McDougall was a war correspondent for the Associated Press before turning to writing about sports and human performance. Born to Run, published in 2009, began as a personal investigation: McDougall kept injuring himself running and wanted to understand why. The answer led him to the Tarahumara, an indigenous people of Mexico’s Copper Canyon who run extraordinary distances in sandals with no apparent injury, and to an eccentric community of ultrarunners attempting to learn from them. The book turned into a cultural phenomenon, contributing directly to the barefoot running movement and inspiring a generation of endurance athletes.

Born to Run is a genuinely unusual sports book: part adventure narrative, part popular science, part meditation on human evolutionary history and what the body is capable of. McDougall is a lively writer who can build suspense in a way that few sports journalists manage, and the characters — particularly the mysterious ultrarunner known as Caballo Blanco — are vivid and memorable. The book’s central scientific argument, that modern running shoes contribute to injury, is presented with more certainty than the evidence strictly supports, and the barefoot running trend it helped ignite has since been assessed more cautiously by sports scientists.

Those caveats aside, Born to Run works beautifully as narrative nonfiction. It captures something genuine about why humans run and what running means, and it remains one of the best introductions to ultrarunning for readers who know nothing about the sport.