The Urique villagers had grown up in awe of the Tarahumara, but this tall gringo with the flashyorange shoes was unlike anyone they’d ever seen. It was eerie watching Scott run side by side withArnulfo; even though Scott had never and Arnulfo had never seen theoutside world, somehow these two men separated by two thousand years of culture had developedthe same running style. They’d approached their art from opposite ends of history, and metprecisely in the middle. I first saw it up on Batopilas mountain, after we’d finally gotten to the top and the trail flattened asit circled the peak. Arnulfo took advantage of the plateau to open it up. Scott locked in beside him. As the trail curled into the setting sun, the two of them vanished into the glare. For a few moments,I couldn’t tell them apart—they were two fiery silhouettes moving with identical rhythm andgrace. “Got it!” Luis said, dropping back to show me the image in his digital camera. He’d sprinted aheadand wheeled around just in time to capture everything I’d come to understand about running overthe past two years. It wasn’t Arnulfo’s and Scott’s matching form so much as their matchingsmiles; they were both grinning with sheer muscular pleasure, like dolphins rocketing through thewaves. “This one is going to make me cry when I get back home,” Luis said. “It’s like gettingBabe Ruth and Mickey Mantle in the same shot.” If Arnulfo had an advantage, it wouldn’t be styleor spirit. But I had another reason to put my money on Scott. During the last, hardest miles of the hike toUrique, he kept hanging back with me and I’d wondered why. He’d come all this way to see thebest runners in the world, so why was he wasting his time with one of the worst? Didn’t he resentme for holding everyone up? Seven hours of descending that mountain eventually gave me myanswer: