Is Born to Run Clean? Profanity and Content Guide for the Audiobook

Christopher McDougall's book about the Tarahumara runners of Mexico's Copper Canyons and a wild ultramarathon set up to race them basically launched the barefoot running craze, and it's a blast to listen to. It's also full of loud, colorful characters, and they talk like it. Our reviewers tagged 202 moments in about eleven hours. Profanity is the bulk, 148 moments, mostly mild, but eleven of those are severe, and there's a steady run of crude anatomical language. The thing I'd flag above everything else is slurs: eighteen of them, all severe, and nearly all are one ethnic slur for Latinos that comes up again and again. There are 22 blasphemy tags, a few violence and sexual content moments, some crude humor, and brief substance use. All told you'd skip a little over seven minutes, and one stretch late in the book is especially heavy, with nineteen tags. Little of the runtime is filtered, but the severe slurs lift the verdict to Moderate, and the language is constant. For an adult runner, I'd filter slurs at every level and severe profanity and leave the rest. For a high school runner, filter profanity, blasphemy, slurs, sexual content, and crude humor at every level. The story, the science, and the race itself all survive, and you'll still finish the book wanting to go run somewhere hard and far.