I’ve been in bed most of this week.  I was felled by a sinus infection and it decided that my bed was the safest, comfiest, snottiest place to rest my painful head.  I’m just pulling out now, but I’d like to share some some interesting discoveries:

I found something this week you might want to look into.  It’s called a "book" (pr. like "look").  A strange little thing, it HAS NO SCREEN!!!  And even weirder, NO KEYBOARD!  And yet, it is filled with words, just like the computer! Upon finding said relic, I looked for its power cord to plug it in… but there was nothing.  I called an IT geek friend  and… get this… turns out you turn the pages YOURSELF!   Which was sort of fun, frankly!

This book (pr. like "took", not "spook") is called Born To Run and it’s by a guy named Christopher McDougall.  Now I know most of you assume that I am an ultra-jock, and well, when it comes to driving around LA, I am.  But running has never really been my thing.  I did it for a while when I was acting school but I found that the 2 packs of cigarettes I smoked everyday (at the time)  got in the way.  It was especially hard to keep them lit on windy runs.  I had to pick… and I was desperately cool… (cough, cough).

I bought this book (pr. like "nook", not "frook") because it is about a tribe of people in Mexico  called the Tarahumara from deep in the Copper Canyon .  This is what they looked like in 1892: .  The Tarahumara like to run.  Like, a lot.  Sometimes a couple of marathons a day.  Or… four.  All through rocky, steep, canyons.  Wearing sandals made from rubber tires .  I learned about the Tarahumara originally when Alicia Silverstone and I were doing research for The Kind Diet .  Their diet contains very little animal food and their principle food is a form of corn called pinole .  Oh, and they also drink a lot.  I think Tarahumara means "PARTY!!!" in their language, but I might need to get another book (pr. like "cook" not "kerplook") to find that out for sure.

So this author, fascinated by the mystery of the Tarahumara, and a runner himself, goes to investigate.  He not only finds a community, but delves deep into the history of running, the counter-intuitive problems of running shoes , and whether humans are actually meant to run.  Like, maybe we ran down our prey way back in the day?  Just outran antelopes?   Get the book (pr. like "kindle", not "spindle") to find out. 

By the way, and I hope this doesn’t ruin the story for some of you, it all ends in a race that includes Scott Jurek, basically the best runner anyone in our generation has ever seen .  An Ultramarathoner who does things that seem… nay ARE… humanly impossible, Scott is a humble dude, who lives in Seattle and is (drumroll) VEGAN.  Seems going easy on the animal food works for running!

Well, that was my week.  I’m very interested in using more books (pr. like SHUT UP!) but now that I’m back on the computer… we’ll see.

P.S.  Let’s all donate to first responders in Haiti.   

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 2:40 am and is filed under Blog, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.