Micah True - Telegraph After leaving high school, he went off to Humboldt State University to study Eastern Religions and Native American History. To pay his fees, he began fighting for money in backroom bars, billing himself as the "Gypsy Cowboy": "I just wandered the country fighting," he recalled, "taking dives, winning some, losing but really winning others, mostly putting on good shows and learning how to fight and not get hurt." After a few years he took his winnings and decamped to the Hawaiian island of Maui, "looking for a purpose in life." In a hidden cave he found a hermit called Smitty who fixed him up with a cave of his own and took him to visit Maui's sacred sites. It was Smitty who first got him into running. They would run between sacred mountain-tops, then run back again, fuelled only by wild papayas. Gradually Hickman the backroom brawler became Micah True the ultrarunner - Micah after the Old Testament prophet and True after a dog. During one of his runs, he met Melinda, a psychology graduate student from Seattle who was in Maui on holiday. They fell in love and he returned to live with her in Boulder, Colorado, where he could run the mountain trails and resume his career as a fighter. When a photograph of True, bare-chested, fists cocked and wild haired, appeared on the cover of a local paper with a quote indicating that he would "fight anybody for the right amount of money," he was invited by a kick-boxing promoter to appear in a nationally-televised bout against Larry Shepherd, America's fourth-ranked light heavyweight. True was not a kick-boxer and wondered whether he might be letting himself in for a thrashing. He went ahead anyway but, rather than the usual boxer's tactic of dodging and dancing, as the bell clanged to start the match he sprinted across the ring and, before his opponent realised what was happening, laid into him with a furious barrage of lefts and rights, then "kicked him in the face so hard I broke my toe - and his nose." He returned home to celebrate with Melinda, but found that she "had a knockout blow of her own to deliver." She had met someone else, she informed him, and was going to live with her new lover in Seattle. News that he had become the fifth-ranked light heavyweight kick-boxer in America seemed small compensation for True. He decided to retire from the ring and decamped to wander America in his battered Chevy pickup, working as a furniture mover and running in every spare moment. In 1986 he established his reputation as an ultrarunner by winning the Rocky Mountain double marathon in six hours and twelve minutes. True first came across the Tarahumara Indians when some of the tribesmen turned up to run the 1994 Leadville Trail 100 (a gruelling race through the Rocky Mountains equivalent to nearly four marathons). When the Tarahumara needed someone to guide them for the last leg of the race, he volunteered. Soon after the Tarahumara left, he followed them. Running became his life. Even when his adobe hut in the Copper Canyons was nearly demolished by a landslide, he went on a run before getting the roof back over his head. After the First Copper Canyon Ultra Marathon was held in 2003, the race became an eagerly awaited and increasingly popular annual event. The most recent Ultra Marathon, held on March 12, was the largest ever and attracted hundreds of participants, most of them Tarahumara Indians. Later True tweeted: "We are [messengers] fuelled by the message. When the message we carry is of Truth/Beauty, love, hope, and peace... Barely three weeks later, Caballo set off from Mexico to Arizona to visit his girlfriend, another runner and, as he had done many times before, stopped off at the Wilderness Lodge in the Gila National Forest, a park in New Mexico. It should, for him, have been a routine 12-mile run. He left his dog behind at the lodge but never returned. After a major mountain rescue effort, his body was found on March 31 in a remote part of the park, with legs dangling in a stream but with no obvious sign of injury. One of those who found him said he looked peaceful - as if he had stopped for a nap and never woken up. No cause of death has yet been established. Micah True's motto was: "If I get hurt or die, it's my own damn fault." Micah True, born November 10 1954, found dead March 31 2012