The Detour

IN THE NEW BOOK SPIRIT RUN, NOÉ ÁLVAREZ RECOUNTS THE 6,000-MILE JOURNEY THAT TRANSFORMED HIS VIEW OF THE WORLD

- MOLLY MIRHASHEM

“I BECAME A WRITER for a reason,” Noé Álvarez tells me a few moments after we meet. “So I wouldn’t have to talk too much.” The 34-year-old is quiet but friendly, wearing a beanie and a flannel shirt. We’re at a coffee shop in Boston, where he lives, discussing his forthcoming memoir, Spirit Run, a remarkable account of a 6,000-mile ultramarathon relay through North America.

Álvarez was raised working class in Yakima, Washington, the son of two Mexican immigrants. Early on in Spirit Run, he laments the impact that years of labor in an apple warehouse had on his mother’s body, explaining how he’d internalized a singular idea: his parents’ existence was a painful one, and making it to college was his only way out.

In 2003, Álvarez earned a full scholarship to Whitman College in Walla Walla and figured he’d secured a more comfortable future. But on campus he struggled, falling behind on his classwork while feeling like an outsider among the largely white student body. In the spring of his freshman year, he attended a student conference and found an escape from academics—the Peace and Dignity Journeys, an organized run that passes through hundreds of indigenous communities in Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Central America over the course of several months.