An ultramarathon through heart of Navajo country
Ultramarathon born from despair, continues with hope
Asliver moon dangled overhead. Cedar and piñon logs had burned to embers in the desert chill, blue corn mush had been spooned out and a Navajo medicine man had waved an eagle feather fan and offered blessings to the dawn.
About 150 runners began to slog through miles of sand toward the darkened mouth of the canyon. Here and there, and then as one, they raised their arms and loosened howls at the turquoise dawn. “Wooo! Woooooooooo!” Crows, startled, careened across a cloudless sky.
The Canyon de Chelly Ultra, a 34-mile-long trail race had commenced, women and men running in beauty. I had driven hours across the mountains to see it. The ultramarathon extends deep into Canyon de Chelly, the sacred heart of Navajo. Runners will pass the rock formations known as Sleeping Duck and Speaking Rock and the towering red sandstone obelisk that is home to Spider Woman, who Navajos believe wove the map of the universe.
Runners will clamber up a treacherous path, using hands no less than feet, to the canyon rim before turning and running back. They will lope through red river washes and beneath natural arbors of birch and Russian Olive, willow and cottonwoods turned autumnal gold. They will see wild horses and black bear and if they are lucky a bobcat or an eagle. Mountain lions will watch them.
Ultramarathons are stitched of a different fabric than many long runs, and that is true of this race more than most. It draws brilliant distance runners with far away eyes, fleet-footed apparitions that disappear quickly into the early morning shadows.
It attracts many more, too: A Navajo school bus mechanic and a gentle-eyed midwife who works at nearby Chinle (who, come to think of it, was an apparition herself, as she finished second among the women); a 56-year-old com-
mercial pilot from Idaho who spotted this canyon as she flew 30,000 feet overhead and a middle-aged policeman from Chicago who talks about how much this beauty has moved him. There was a veterinarian from Marin County and the editor of The Gunnison Country Times in Colorado (“Our motto is ‘All the News We Know About’ ”).
A ponytailed college senior, Delta Higdon, who is a Navajo, had been a high school track star in nearby Chinle. She has sprained her ankle and it was sore enough that the prospect of walking, much less running, 34 miles worried her.
Her mother, Gladys, prepared a remedy, with corn pollen and many herbs. On the morning of the race, Higdon took off her jacket and sprinted off in the predawn.
“Life is too short,” she told me, taking off. “I want to do what Navajos love and that is to run.”
A quarter century ago, I trailed my wife, Evelyn Intondi, to this land, whose area is greater than the sum of New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. She worked as a midwife for the Indian health service and I cared for our two young sons in our trailer. The land and its people slipped under our skin. We listened as medicine men sang songs, and we attended Indian rodeos and shopped for groceries where Navajo was the only language spoken. (Most Navajo under 40 now speak what they call “Navoglish.”)
We walked beneath ponderosa pines and I ran up Blue Canyon each morning, only to get dusted by high school crosscountry runners getting a little exercise.
As it happened, I knew Shaun Martin, a Navajo and the athletic director at nearby Chinle High. He is a formidable ultramarathon runner and the creator of this race.
This event has acquired a redemptive grace for him, and he invited me to visit. How could I say no?
Running is woven into Navajo culture. Their running tradition goes back more than 1,000 years, to the time when they wended their way south from the Northwest Territories to the high desert and buttes of the Four Corners. When a girl undergoes a puberty ceremony, the kinaalda, she sleeps on the dirt floor of a traditional Hogan, which represents a mother’s womb. When the rays of the sun strike the east-facing door, the girl must take a long run.
Martin gathered the runners in the campground the evening before the ultramarathon. He recounted the origin story of this race.
It was born of despair. Martin, 5-foot11, lean and angular, is from the western edge of the Navajo Nation. He married a woman from Chinle — a 4-hour drive to
the east — and settled here and coached the high school track team into a power. Poverty casts a long shadow, as do the ravages of booze and dope; Martin was one of four close childhood friends and the only one to have pulled free of that terrible gravity.
He watched carefully over his Navajo teenagers, their nutrition, their academics, their emotional state, as they won races and grabbed coveted college scholarships.
Jealousy and politics at the school laid him low; his team was starved of funds and he resigned. The team disintegrated. An athletic director mocked him: “All you can do is coach.” So Martin stepped into the classroom as a physical education teacher and became the first native to win National Rural Teacher of the Year. Yet sorrow at losing his runners had nested within him.
One day during monsoon season in 2012 he took a long run up Canyon de Chelly. A female rain began to fall, soft and light. (Navajo is a matriarchal society and they say a male rain falls hard and fast and often destructively.) Her water filled him with energy.
“As I was coming down canyon, I spooked a pack of wild horses,” he recalled. “They had been in the trees and began to run ahead of me in the wash.”
The adult horses closed ranks around the colts as they cantered along. “I was jamming, closing on ’em and then I threw a move on the pack. I caught it.”
The adult horses let Martin enter their circle. For a while he and the pack ran as one, his shoulders rubbing against sweaty flanks. At the canyon mouth the horses pulled up as if to toe an invisible line.
He turned and looked at them. “They were lined up shoulder to shoulder, their nostrils flaring, their ears pointed at me.”
Martin’s voice caught as he recalled this. He wiped his eyes. “I thought, ‘What is the significance of this moment?’ These horses were like my young runners; my favorites were nicknamed ‘the four horsemen.’ ”
He resolved to bring his reality to a wider world.
This was not quickly done. Outsiders are allowed to enter Canyon de Chelly only with a Navajo guide. He consulted with archaeologists and park rangers and with the Navajo families who still harvest corn and melons and cherries and apples in this canyon.
That first year it took two days to sign up 150 runners for the first Canyon de Chelly ultramarathon. Now runners wait at the assigned minute each year and hit the refresh button on the race’s website in hopes of getting in. The race draws runners from across the nation, and Australia, France and England.
To run is to become immersed in Navajo cosmology. “We run east to the first light,” Martin told the runners before they took off. “We yell to clear our passageways and to let the creator hear our prayers.”
All day long shouts echo up that canyon.
By midmorning, the sandstone canyon walls turned a translucent pink and red, as if lit from within. The sky was razor blue.
There is beauty and terrible history hidden in these canyon walls. In Canyon del Muerto, which fingers off from de Chelly, Spanish soldiers slaughtered 115 Navajo in 1805; in the main canyon, Kit Carson and his soldiers and Ute allies cleared out the Navajo in 1864.
“We feel their spirits dancing at night,” Staley said.
The swiftest runners averaged a bit more than 8 minutes per mile. The 3 miles of sand at the beginning and the end present the toughest challenge; it has not rained for weeks and feet slide as sneakers fill with sand. The effort required is roughly equivalent to running up a 3,000-foot mountain.
Martin took to the microphone and introduced the runners as they reached the finish line. He placed turquoise necklaces around their necks and directed them to his mother, who had prepared vats of mutton and vegetable stew and fry bread. His father, Allen Martin, tall and commanding, is the medicine man and once a formidable runner.
Higdon approached the finish. Running up to the canyon rim, her weakened foot cramped and she crawled to the turnaround point. At mile 24, her calves and quads and hamstrings locked up.
She slowed to a walk. “I took four deep breaths to remind myself of our many blessings here on Mother Earth.”
She stopped 50 yards short of the line, bent over, cramping again. Martin had been her high school coach. They made eye contact and smiled and she reached the line. He slipped a turquoise necklace around her neck.