“I was not aware that Ray Rice eats Chia Pets,” said linebacker Terrell Suggs. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Ravens’ star rusher Ray Rice has been ditching trendy supplements in favor of the ancient nutritional secret of Tarahumara runners: Chia seeds.

Reports of a drought crisis have been emerging from the Copper Canyons over the past few days. Because it’s sometimes hard to tell what is credible from what has been sensationalized, WIll Harlan is on his way down to directly assist and assess. Will is experienced, knowledgeable, and utterly honest, and yesterday he emailed me…

When I was researching “Born to Run,” I visited the Hopi reservation in Arizona and got to spend time with Hopi elder Bucky Preston and his ultrarunning protege, Dennis Poolheco. It was a wild time, including a freezing moonlit scramble over the mesa while trying to find our way back out of the wilderness and…

Last year, at our first Naked Tour event (Running: A Musical), I urged Barefoot Ted to perform a semi-magic trick by handcrafting a pair of Tarahumara huaraches while simultaneously condensing his entire quest for the perfect running shoe into 10 minutes. Ted, naturally, had ideas of his own, so his talk ventured into unexplored realms…

UPDATE: Peter Sarsgaard, who’s co-writing and directing the “Born to Run” movie, is in Taiwan with Scott. He wrote this excellent pre-race summary: http://talk.brooksrunning.com/2011/12/09/scott-jurek-attempting-to-break-world-record/ Tonight at 8pm EST, Scott Jurek faces his most pitiless opponent: The clock. Timed races are among the most fiendishly difficult, because figuring out the pacing is a challenge only the…

Get past the product pitch and you’ll find Meb’s real message — at age 36, he finally got off his heels and changed his form to a gentler foot strike. The result: * He was able to get rid of the orthotics he’d been wearing since college * He ran the fastest marathon of his…

See? Couldn’t be easier.

Jason of The Nadas just alerted me to the Tarahumara song he wrote back in the ’90s after backpacking the Sierra Madres Run in Place

I’m curious to see whether anyone finds that the 100 Up relieves plantar fasciitis, beyond the possibility of preventing it. I had my own bout with the dreaded vampire bite back in late 2007, after I’d returned from the Copper Canyons and was working on Born to Run. It didn’t stop me from running, but…

…my journey of discovery began afar: while watching Kenyan runners go barefoot I’ve been impressed by Dr. Mark Cucuzzella ever since I first heard his story at a Boston Marathon forum two years ago (where, incidentally, he was mocked by a running-shoe expert). I’ve been down to see him in Shepherdstown twice, and I’m sure…