The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (35 page)

 

When I last saw Shaw, he was back home in Colorado, recuperating from surgery. The injury had been worse than he feared. The tendon had all but exploded—“It looked like the end of a mop,” his surgeon, Peter J. Millett, told me—and the muscle had fully retracted inside his arm. To reattach it, they'd had to trim the tendon down, drill a hole through the radius bone, then pull it through and secure it with a titanium button. “He said my tendons were three times the size of normal,” Shaw said. “They had to use a hip retractor.” Still, if he was lucky, the repaired biceps would be even stronger than before and more sturdily attached. “I heard the sutures they used are like the strongest industrial space-age stuff they could find,” Shaw said. I thought of a line that Terry Todd had quoted at the Arnold, from
A Farewell to Arms:
“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

Shaw's left arm was in a removable cast, and he said that his skin felt rubbery and numb, but he insisted on driving me around anyway. “There's never a right time to get hurt,” he said, as we circled past the old basketball courts at his high school, the fields where he used to bale hay for his uncle. “This was supposed to be the performance that people would talk about for years. That's probably what makes it harder to swallow.” He shook his head. “What's crazy is, if it had happened on the third rep of that first event, instead of the first, I still would have won.” Even with the injury, Shaw had come within seven seconds of victory—perhaps his greatest feat, though it earned him only fourth place overall. In Fort Lupton, the city council had recently hung a banner across Main Street, declaring it
HOME OF THE WORLD'S STRONGEST MAN
. But the wind had blown the banner down, and it was nowhere to be seen.

Shaw hoped to be back in top form by late summer—time enough to get ready for the World's Strongest Man, in September. In the meantime, he had nothing to do but wait for his body to heal. Late in the afternoon, he pulled into a Toys “R” Us to buy a present for his nephew Caiden, who had just turned one. “This isn't exactly my specialty,” he said. “When my niece had her birthday, I bought her a battery-powered Jeep. Turned out she couldn't even ride it.” He spent the first few minutes in the electronics section, looking at toys marked for kids age four to nine—“I'd like to buy him a robot or something,” he said—then finally settled on a car with a built-in cannon that shot rubber balls.

By the time we arrived at his parents' house, the party was in full swing. Relatives were circled in chairs around the living room, while toddlers romped across the carpet in the middle. Shaw sat on the couch, holding himself as still as possible as the kids crawled all over him. He looked happier than I'd seen him in a while. “When Caiden was born, Brian was too intimidated to hold him,” his sister, Julie, told me. “He was six pounds 10 ounces and 19½ inches. Curled up in a ball, he was the same size as Brian's shoe.” She sighed. “I pray my son won't take after him. Finding clothes is so hard. But I'm sure Caiden will want to bring Brian in for show-and-tell—holy cow! he's like a superhero!—and he'll want to rough around with him. I'll be, like, ‘Brian, you just sit there. Don't give him a high five. You'll knock him out.'”

BARRY BEARAK

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

Gila Hot Springs, New Mexico

 

M
ICAH TRUE WENT
off alone on a Tuesday morning to run through the rugged trails of the Gila Wilderness, and now it was already Saturday and he had not been seen again.

The search for him, once hopeful, was turning desperate. Weather stoked the fear. The missing man was wearing only shorts, a T-shirt, and running shoes. It was late March. Daytimes were warm, but the cold scythed through the spruce forest in the depth of night, the temperatures cutting into the 20s.

For three days, rescue teams had fanned out for 50 yards on each side of the marked trails. Riders on horseback ventured through the gnarly brush, pushing past the felled branches of pinyon-juniper and ponderosa pine. An airplane and a helicopter circled in the sky, their pilots squinting above the ridges, woodlands, river canyons, and meadows.

“We're in the middle of nowhere, and this guy could be anywhere,” Tom Bemis, the rescue coordinator appointed by the state police, said gloomily. He was sitting in a command center, marking lines on a map that covered 200,000 acres. Some 150 trained volunteers were at his disposal, and dozens of others were there too, arrived from all over the country, eager and anxious, asking to enlist in the search.

“Coming out of the woodwork,” Bemis said wryly.

Not only did Micah True have loyal friends, but he also had a devoted following. At age 58, he was a mythic figure, known by the nickname Caballo Blanco, or White Horse. He was a famous ultrarunner, competing in races two, three, or four times as long as marathons. The day he vanished, he said he was going on a 12-mile jaunt, for him as routine as a lap around a high school track.

But True's mythic renown owed less to his ability to run than to his capacity to inspire. He was a free spirit who survived on cornmeal, beans, and wild dreams, aloof to the allure of money and possessions. He lived in the remote Copper Canyons of northern Mexico to be near the reclusive Tarahumara Indians, reputed to be the greatest natural runners in the world.

His story was exuberantly molded into legend in the 2009 best-seller
Born to Run
by Christopher McDougall. Caballo Blanco, however private and self-effacing, was suddenly delivered to the world as a prophet, “the lone wanderer of the High Sierras.” To many, he represented the road not taken, a purer path, away from career, away from capitalism, away from the clock.

McDougall, himself a runner, was one of the dozens who had hurried to southwestern New Mexico to join the search, as had the actor Peter Sarsgaard, who was about to direct a movie based on the book. In just a few days, the Gila Wilderness had become a lodestone to a who's who of ultramarathoners, athletes with loose limbs, lanky bodies, and now a shared sense of dread.

“We're thinking he could be lying out there hurt, unable to get help,” said the ultrarunner Luis Escobar, who had driven all night from California.

Several of these athletes were impatient with the authorities' methodical search. The main footpaths had been scoured, but they wanted to venture onto the smaller elk trails and into the pockets and crannies of the cliffs.

Bemis, the rescue coordinator, was mildly annoyed: “This is a wilderness, not a walk in the park, and some of them might get lost. Then we'll be looking for them too.”

Among the most restless was Ray Molina, who led mountain bike tours through the Copper Canyons and was one of True's closest friends.

Random Ray, some people called him. A nonstop talker, he was also a pack rat, collecting old bicycles, antique toys, manikins, and bleached bones. Skeletal remains jounced about in his car.

Molina, 44, had not learned of the disappearance until Friday. He rushed to the Gila in his beat-up 1979 Mercedes with two friends, Jessica Haines and Dean Bannon. They were agreeable to joining the organized search. But by 10:00 on Saturday morning, they were among a handful yet to be assigned to a team.

The hell with this, Molina concluded. He and his friends lightened their backpacks of unnecessary gear and went off on their own, simply walking a short distance down the access road, crossing the Gila River, and scurrying into the nearest arroyo.

This strategy, while not entirely random, was hardly well conceived. They were assisted only by a folded-up map and their own instincts and whims.

They rambled and they ran and they climbed. They called out, “Caballo!”

 

The name Micah True was a confection, the first part plucked from the Bible, the second an homage to True Dog, a beloved mutt. Michael Randall Hickman was his given name, and he was raised in northern California, the second of four children. His father was a Marine gunnery sergeant who later became a deputy sheriff and an insurance salesman.

The elder Hickmans were conservative Roman Catholics, but Mike's devotions were to the counterculture of the late '60s and early '70s. His blond hair hung past his shoulders. Marijuana fluted through his head. So did mysticism. His reading appetites ranged from Hemingway to French philosophy.

He wandered the country, “just to make things happen,” he recalled later. His looks were fetching. One friend described him as “a lean Greek god in beachcomber garb.” Hickman lived for 10 months in a cave in Hawaii, shaking papayas from trees on Maui and running along island trails. He fell in love with a rich girl, he said, “whose eyes sparkled blue like the sky.” When she dumped him, it scuffed his heart.

To keep himself in pocket money, Hickman often chose unusual labor for a peaceable soul: prizefighting. A middleweight, he called himself the Gypsy Cowboy. His record in the ring, according to
boxrec.com
, was 9-11. He was knocked out nine times, although some of those defeats were dives taken for an easy payday, he said. Whoever the opponent, he tried to restrain his fists, inflicting “only the physical damage to get the job done, no more.”

Neill Woelk, a former sportswriter, remembers seeing him—his name now Micah True—in 1982, winning a fight on an undercard in Denver's Rainbow Theater.

The boxer was nearing 30 at the time. “He didn't look anything like a fighter, but he might be one of the best pure athletes I ever saw,” Woelk said, adding, “He didn't have arms; he had cables.”

By then, True had moved to Boulder, Colorado, at the base of the eastern slope of the Rockies. The city listed hard to the left. Sometimes with sarcasm, sometimes with affection, it was referred to as the People's Republic of Boulder. At the same time, it was becoming the nation's high-altitude capital for high-endurance training.

To earn a living, the prizefighter was now a self-employed furniture mover, hauling people's belongings in a rattletrap pickup. He lived without electricity in a spare one-room cabin off Magnolia Road. He shared an outhouse.

Running had become his overwhelming passion, maybe even his addiction. He was a mountain runner, a different breed from folks who showed up by the thousands to run a breezy 10K. He preferred races with fewer people and wide-open terrain, less concerned with his times than the surrounding scenery.

He would get up early to run, then do a moving job, then run again. He was logging about 170 miles a week. Dan Bowers was a frequent companion. He recalled, “After we'd run, we'd eat a big meal, enough to bust a rib, and then Micah would look at me and say, ‘You want to do another 10?'”

True's pattern was to remain in Boulder for six months, then, with winter coming, head south to the Guatemalan highlands, running the lush trails around Lake Atitlán. Villagers grew used to the sight of the loping gringo. He was a six-footer with a long mane and big teeth. Children surrounded him when he stopped to buy bananas and tortillas. They named him El Caballo Blanco.

The White Horse was winning ultraraces in those days, like the 50-miler between Cheyenne and Laramie on the back roads of Wyoming. He was serious about competition, interested in re-engineering his body to get more out of his lungs and legs, pushing the boundaries of stamina.

Injuries began to slow him as he closed in on 40, but he eventually viewed these annoyances as a liberation. He started to care less about piling on the megamileage and more about finding challenging trails. Running was an exploration, inside and out, endorphins feeding his cerebral bliss.

He did still run the occasional race. In 1993, he entered one of his favorites, the Leadville Trail 100, a punishing 100-mile push through the icy streams and boulder-clogged slopes of the Rockies. The very up-and-down of it was a killer, the altitude as high as 12,600 feet. Runners generally needed 18 to 30 hours to finish.

That year, a promoter brought along a handful of peasants from Chihuahua, Mexico. They were short. Some looked like grandfathers. They wore blousy shirts and loincloths to the starting line, and on their feet were sandals they themselves had just made from old tires fished from the Leadville dump.

When the race began, these odd interlopers immediately fell to the rear and stayed there for 40 miles. Then they started steadily moving up, passing others, barely winded by the arduous climbs. The first two of them finished about an hour ahead of anyone else. The winner was 55 years old.

These were the Tarahumara.

 

True's disappearance might have been something to shrug off at first. He sometimes liked to get lost in the wild, allowing only curiosity to steer his feet, bushwhacking his way through dense terrain. Geronimo, the Apache warrior, had used the Gila as a refuge, and he was one of True's boyhood heroes.

But the runner knew the geography here too well to get hopelessly turned around, and besides, he had left behind his beloved sidekick Guadajuko, a stray he had rescued from a Mexican river. At times, True retreated from humans, even from civilization itself. But he would never abandon his dog.

Ray Molina understood True's penchants and habits. “There's a good chance he's nowhere near a trail,” Molina said. He and his two friends looked elsewhere, climbing a ridge toward the Gila high country. The ascent was time-consuming, very steep in parts, the footing unreliable.

Hours later, all they had for their efforts was frustration. They wanted to avoid the beaten path but kept finding the tracks of other searchers and even met up with a few, including two on horseback and another pair with dogs.

Studying his map, Molina was intrigued by a squiggly blue line indicating a stream called Little Creek. He was in the sway of two hunches. One was that an injured man might head for water. The other was that this meandering creek emptied out of the canyon only a mile or so from the lodge where True had been staying. His friend might have used this stream as a shortcut.