Running Hopi: Transcending time and getting schooled by Hoffman Shorty

 

I run. And I weep. My tears may come from the fact that it’s 6 a.m., or perhaps from the burning in legs and lungs as I try to hold the pace of the leaders. But I’m pretty sure my sobs come from a deep joy inspired by the way the rising sun lights up the ancient buildings of Old Oraibi on a mesa distant, and the way it does so at the very moment that gravel road gives way to a narrow rain-dampened trail. This trail, I imagine, has been trod for centuries by runners vying against one another, or heading off to distant farms to tend to the corn. My 97 fellow runners and I, it seems, have transcended time.

It’s early September, and this is the 40th annual Louis Tewanima 10 kilometer footrace, which takes place in and around the Hopi village of Shungopavi in northern Arizona. The race is named after a Hopi who was yanked as a young man from his home in Shungopavi in 1907 and shipped off to boarding school in Carlisle, Penn. There, the cross-country coach noticed the youngster’s talent, and Tewanima began running competitively. He finished 9th in the 1908 Olympic Marathon, and won the silver medal in the 1912 Olympic 10,000 meter run, setting an American record that held until Billy Mills, a Sioux, broke it in 1964.

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