Running.

Thanks to good friend Alice Jones for the forwarded copy of this excerpt. Enjoy.

From: Down the River, "Footrace in the Desert" Edward Abbey"

Labor Day, 1980: the Hopi town of New Oraibi, Arizona. Seventh Annual Louis Tewanima Footrace. The course extends for seven long looping miles in the desert heat, over dirt roads, across the highway, and up a winding and sandy trail to the top of Third Mesa and the three-hundred-year-old village of Old Oraibi..."

"...We watch the lead runner approach, a bare-chested young man with a red bandana tied around his long hair. He has a bony, almost gaunt face, a small, lean, muscular, perfect body, and serious eyes. He runs steadily, uphill, breathing audibly but not, it seems to me, with any trouble. He is at least a quarter-mile ahead of everybody else. Watching him go, on and on at that apparently easy, unflagging pace, I feel an emotion which I have not felt in a long time: a certain awe in the presence of ability and determination far beyond any ambition of my own, a surge of admiration for the physical beauty of a good athlete in action.

'Who's that,' I ask.' Hoffman Shorty,' says one of the men near me.' Hoffman Shorty? You mean Shorty Hoffman?'' No, Hoffman Shorty. He won the race last year too.'

[...] A mile away and five hundred feet below I see one small lone dark figure streaking among the corn patches, the bean patches, the garbage dumps, and burnt-out abandoned Chevrolets that lie between Old and New Oraibi. Hoffman Shorty is far ahead of me. And of everybody."