Copper Canyon

That's my friend Michael Miller down there in beautiful Mexico.

Michael and Kimberly Miller are the hosts of the Copper Canyons Endurance Runs.

And one more time, telling you, you want to go, go with me.

I'll meet you in Chihuahua.

We'll get in a private van with a professional driver.

We'll drive straight down into the heart of the Copper Canyons where we will meet old man, Michael Miller and his lovely wife, Kimberly.

And we will spend a week together traveling and enjoying the life, the lifestyle of the Tarahumara folks that live there in the Copper Canyons.

Come on, check it all out.

Doing fine.

And as our listeners just heard, you're actually, although the background that you have is showing the Copper Canyons, you're in Utah now.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

And I started rebuilding myself from this really broken state and really embodying this concept of being enough.

And those demons haven't come back.

Um, uh i don't know if you have to get yourself to that broken state in order to kind of fix some of those things i don't know if i'm anomalous i'm grateful that where i am because it's been years now and it hasn't happened again and it was a daily thing for me for decades and uh yeah so and then um A couple months later, a month and a half later, I had the opportunity to come here to the Copper Canyons and run with Arnufo from Born to Run.

Sure.

Yes, we were born to be able to run, and that's a good thing.

And then he also reflects on the Tarahumara Indians in the Copper Canyons of Mexico.

Yeah.

who, you know, they're not as healthy as he makes them out to be.

Growing up in Mexico, he developed a deep love of the natural world, especially wildlife.

He earns degrees in biology and land management, in addition to learning from the Tarahumara people in Copper Canyon, Mexico, and during a wildlife study program.

An immigrant, Sergio has lived on the ancestral lands of the Ta Na'atham and the Pasque Rock I'm sorry, lands since 2004.

In addition to his work on the Sierra Club, Sergio has also extensive conversation experience, but today he calls himself a recovery conservationalist, which we're going to talk about.

No one teaches us how to run.

If you go actually into these tribes, which is what he did, he went into the Tarahumara, which is in the Copper Canyons of Mexico, they actually train running.

They play a game where they kick a ball basically up and down a mountain, and it teaches them how to run light, which makes it easy, which makes it fun.

Right.

So that's just some of the things I think are bringing in HIUAPs in for a closer look.

But there's other anomalies like the Giants of Copper Canyon.

Okay,

that.

They were probably coming up into the Sea of Cortez.

They disembarked there and they started to walk towards Catalina.

the mountains, Copper Canyon.

So the first place was a cemetery in Onaves, which is probably, it's a little bit out of the Chihuahuan Desert.

And yeah, the pace, my average pace was five minutes and 46 seconds per kilometer, which included some days that you could not run because I crossed mountains.

from north to south, the Tarahumara, the Copper Canyon, you know, and also I wanted to climb the highest point in Mexico, which is the Pico de Orizaba.

It's a little bit over 5,000 meters altitude.

It's the highest volcano in Mexico.

Of course, you can't do that by yourself.

Even in the Tarahumara Sierra, I asked some friends to guide me.

So some guys guide me through the Copper Canyon because I didn't know the way.

And you could not do, you know, like before, like I did before the project, I did scouting.

And I wanted to ask you about that experience at that point.

In the Aztec language, the area was called the Wirikuta in the way, way, way back of the Copper Canyons, which are many, many, many times larger than the Grand Canyon of Arizona.

And the underground, or what we would call the black, was called the Tkwotsi.

And one of the things that once your terror dies off, because it's terrifying.