SALT LAKE CITY — Christopher McDougall is either the best or worst possible guy to rehab a traumatized donkey. It’s hard to tell which.
The journalist/author, known for his 2009 bestseller “Born to Run,” is tenacious, inquisitive and supremely well-connected. On the other hand, he doesn’t know squat about donkeys — or at least he didn’t.
In McDougall’s newest book, “Running With Sherman” (Penguin Random House, 334 pages, adult nonfiction), which came out Oct. 15, he writes, “Donkeys operate on one frequency — trust. They do nothing on faith, but everything on certainty.”
That is, simply, not McDougall’s M.O. His career began as a war zone reporter in Angola for The Associated Press. (He had no reporting experience, but got the gig because the AP needed someone.) With “Born to Run” — an exploration of superhuman long-distance running among a hidden tribe in Mexico’s Copper Canyons — he recently told the Deseret News, “I sort of impulsively leaped into (it) … thinking I could sort it out, and then realized pretty quickly that I was out of my depth.
“A good number of my career choices … have actually been just jumping off and flapping your wings, and hoping you’ll learn how to fly on the way down,” he added.
And with Sherman, there was a lot of flapping.
A new life for Sherman
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
That insight, from the Gnostic Gospel of St. Thomas, becomes McDougall’s own personal gospel through the events of “Running with Sherman.” Mainly out of necessity. McDougall first meets the eponymous Sherman, a sickly donkey, in a decrepit barn near McDougall’s home in rural Pennsylvania. An animal hoarder had put Sherman there and never let him out. Confined to a tiny stall, and mired in manure and rotten straw, the donkey is nearly catatonic. His hooves had never been trimmed, and were “so monstrously overgrown they looked like a witch’s claws,” McDougall writes.
McDougall adopts Sherman, but doesn’t know if the downtrodden donkey needs rehab or hospice.
Within 48 hours, McDougall hatches an unlikely plan: get Sherman into the Leadville Boom Day race — a marathon high in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains that pairs each runner with a donkey. By most measures, the race is certifiably insane, as the tiny mining town of Leadville becomes trampled by hordes of frustrated runners and easily spooked donkeys. “First-timers either love it and never stop, or disappear and never return,” longtime Leadville racer Ken Chlouber tells McDougall. “You’ll either be cured or addicted.”
To call McDougall’s plan far-fetched might be an understatement. Sherman can barely walk at first, he’s been traumatized by a lifetime of neglect, and donkeys are among the animal kingdom’s most stubborn. It’s tough to imagine Sherman ascending a mountain alongside a human running partner.
“In certain cases, we like to think of ourselves as masters of the universe, smarter than all the other animals,” McDougall explained. “(There are) plenty of instances where the animal’s instincts are better than ours. And for me in particular, I think there’s definitely a level of ignorance that I embrace, of things I’d prefer not to know.”
And through “Running with Sherman,” McDougall is confronted with how much he doesn’t know. His Philadelphia-bred voice and personality comes through so strongly in these pages — he’s simultaneously brash and introspective, with considerable wisdom and an adventurous spirit that often challenges that wisdom. Perhaps the book’s tone is an outgrowth of training Sherman, which requires McDougall to bring forth every ounce of what is within himself, as St. Thomas would say. Is McDougall woefully inadequate to the task, or perfectly suited for it? The answer is perhaps a little of both.
What McDougall sometimes lacks in know-how, he compensates in resources. His many Amish neighbors (themselves skillful runners and donkey whisperers), his numerous friends in the running world, even renowned dog trainers — they all enter the picture at various points, helping McDougall chip away at an otherwise impossible goal. He deftly weaves personal narrative, first-person interviews and secondary research into an insightful, entertaining and ultimately gripping story. Readers will learn a lot about donkeys here, but also about evolutionary theories, and Amish history, and autism.
Moments from Sherman’s journey were also printed in a multipart New York Times series, which ran in 2016 and 2017. “Running with Sherman” ups the drama, giving readers a sense of what it all felt like in real time. (Netflix also bought the rights to the book, and will adapt it into a feature film.)
“One of the things that surprises us as journalists is people’s willingness to tell us stuff, tell us stories,” McDougall said. “And that’s really the key to working with the donkeys: Make as little noise as possible, and observe as much as you can. So to me, I feel like there’s definitely a hand-in-glove relationship there between journalism and working with animals.”
Messing up a good thing
As we talked, McDougall recalled being in London a few days earlier for a speaking engagement. Instead of taking a car from his hotel, McDougall decided to run. Then he got lost. Wandering around Hyde Park as the sky turned dark, McDougall felt his frustration rising. Then, in that frustration, a moment of clarity: Why are you turning this into something negative? You’re in a beautiful city, the weather is nice, you’re going to an event with people who really like you.
“And I had this idea that the run is always perfect when you start it,” he recalled. “That first step when you start a run, at that moment the run is perfect. And then all you can do from that moment on is make it worse if you stress.”
“Running with Sherman” testifies to that fact. Things rarely go smoothly for McDougall and Sherman — their undertaking feels constantly tethered to accident, disease, death and other tragedies. McDougall said he doesn’t believe in fate, though, and that’s probably a good thing here — put in his position, most people would think Sherman just isn’t destined to run.
At its core, “Running with Sherman” feels like a book about self-awareness: what it takes to gain it, how easy it is to lose it, and the ensuing consequences of that loss.
“I think we are creatures of movements, and we ignore that at our peril,” McDougall said. “And a lot of what we’re dealing with in the world today, with obesity and mental health issues and stress levels, and even anger and patience, I think it’s because we have stepped away from who we really are as creatures of movements. And so we’re not bringing out that thing that’s inside of us, and so it’s just destroying us.”