by Scott Jurek
That’s not to say that I rushed back down the trail to thank her. All in good time.
Besides, she really had kindled a line of thinking that was burning me up. Maybe racing and winning wasn’t the challenge I needed right now, or ever again. If that was the case, I really didn’t have a good answer to the question of what I wanted. What would come next?
More trail, for starters. We were a mere twenty miles through our planned hundred-and-fifty-mile section. I didn’t want to finish. I just wanted to keep hiking toward forever. JLu made me realize I didn’t know what I wanted next, but the desert reminded me what I wanted now. Give-and-take.
I have always been fascinated with multiday adventure runs and thru-hiking. As a kid in Minnesota, I never traveled beyond a handful of neighboring states, so I was in awe of people who rode their bikes along the shore of Lake Superior and of the cross-country cyclists I saw. Later, I heard stories about people walking and running across the country. The idea of powering myself across the country—an expanse I could barely conceive of—was overwhelming. I vowed that I would do it someday, somehow. Then the rhythm and patterns of life got in the way—school, summer jobs, internships, college, work, grad school, more work. When I got into ultramarathoning, I read about the great Trans American Footrace and of records being set on long national scenic trails and on trails that crossed famous landmarks in national parks. But then my new focus on ultraracing took over, and I promised myself I would do the multiday and “really long stuff” toward the end of my career.
And then, in 2003 on a run on this same trail, twenty-two hundred miles north in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, I told my buddy David “Horty” Horton that I thought I was ready to tackle the speed record on the PCT. He said, “You were made for this, boy! But wait a little bit, do some more racing, you have time. Let me do it first, then you can break my record!” That’s old Horty for you; he’s always got some half-sage advice to offer with a little something in it for himself. He had already set a speed record on the Appalachian Trail earlier in his career, so he knew what he was talking about. I really didn’t care when I did it, and he was probably right. I had plenty of time to blow away whatever slow record he set on the PCT. Back then, I always had plenty of time left.
I also couldn’t forget what another veteran ultra buddy of mine, Rob “Hollywood” McNair, had told me when I was tempted to run the Trans American Footrace after listening to his stories. “Scotty, you run that race and that will be the last race you’ll run!” he said. “Stick to fifty and hundred milers.” Now I knew what he’d meant.
So maybe it was JLu that did it. Maybe it was her brutally honest reminder that my career was coming to a close. All of a sudden I didn’t have much time left. There weren’t years stretching out in front of me, far-off days where I could stick a dream and wait for time to bring me to it. The only thing that stretched before me now was the rock and dirt and brush of the Anza-Borrego.
We had a week out here, but I wanted more. We had only started scratching the surface of our big life questions. I wanted more miles and a firm answer to “So what’s next?” One that didn’t involve hemming and hawing and halfheartedness. I wanted to go back to those woods in Minnesota where I’d fallen in love with the idea of life-altering adventures and trails that went on forever.
Suddenly, I also wanted to get out of the heat.
It took only a few moments to piece together a plan. I would run one of the National Scenic Trails. There were three big ones, and we were on one of them, the PCT. We knew parts of it like the backs of our hands. The Continental Divide Trail, the longest, at thirty-one hundred miles, followed the Rockies right through our new home state of Colorado and seemed like a good choice. But something about it didn’t feel right.
As soon as the idea came to me, it started to roll downhill and gather momentum: Why not try to beat the Appalachian Trail speed record? It was perfect. I wanted a completely new type of challenge, and I’d barely ever been on trails east of the Mississippi. JLu was right; ultramarathons weren’t doing it for me anymore. After a hard twenty years of competing, that wasn’t a surprise. But a speed record in the woods and mountains, a monthlong adventure to crack myself open once again? I’d lost the passion to push my body and bend my mind to chew up miles in ultraraces. But I still loved to run and explore my surroundings on foot. I loved being out here.
Even the unfamiliarity attracted me. I instantly loved the idea of running somewhere totally new, totally unexplored, and totally unplanned. As my grandfather liked to tell me as we rambled over his back forty acres in Wisconsin, “The best way to know your land is to walk through it.” Every twist and turn of the trail, every vista and boulder, and every road crossing and trailhead, would be completely foreign to me. A new, undiscovered world around each corner.
Of course, I wouldn’t be rambling. I’d be chasing the speed record. Horty had done it years ago. I knew I could. Maybe it’s what I needed to rekindle the flame that JLu had noticed dying out.
Later on, I would work out the details, but my mind almost immediately started running through the calculations. I would run and hike an average of fifty miles or more a day for about forty-five days along one of the most rugged trails on the planet. I would cover 2,189 miles while climbing and descending a million vertical feet. Over the course of about six weeks, I would cover the entire length of the Appalachian Trail faster than anyone before me.
Well, I would attempt to.
And I knew that I couldn’t even begin to attempt it on my own.
We’d preserved our postfight silence for miles when I stopped on a switchback and let out the guttural kraa of a raven. That’s her trail name, Raven, like the color of her hair and the smartest birds around. JLu kraaed back, and when she caught up, I blurted out my plan.
“I think I want to do the Appalachian Trail, go after the record. It has lots of road crossings for you to meet me so we can hang out throughout the day. We can have lunches together and you can run sections with me. It will be a vacation, a fun adventure for both of us!”
Maybe if I kept talking, she wouldn’t get a chance to say no.
JLu stopped dead in her tracks with a look of dismay and a wince of confusion. She had heard me talk about speed records and thru-hiking, but that had been idle daydreaming. And there was a trail that was much closer to us than the Appalachian, a trail that we both loved. We’d lived in Seattle for years, so the Pacific Crest Trail felt like our backyard. I had covered most of the trail in the state of Washington and parts of it in Oregon, and I’d run races on sections of it in California. JLu loved playing “find the Pacific Crest Trail crossing” with me as we made weekend road trips when we lived in Southern California. The PCT had been my home course, and then it became ours.
“The Appalachian Trail…” JLu said with a look that I knew all too well. “Why?”
Then there was silence, a deafening silence that even the eternally still Anza-Borrego Desert couldn’t match.
Because I’m stuck.
Because I’m forty and I need to feel what it’s like to go to the edge again, and then go farther.
Because I’m so thankful for everything I have, and for just a little while I need to remember what it feels like to have none of it.
* * *
May 2015
Before I agreed to go on this trip, I made Jurker promise me that we would rehearse. Not for him—all he had to do was run—but for me. I was the one who was going to have to drive a van to remote meeting locations and serve as a roving aid station several times a day. Even though I had plenty of experience, I was worried. I had been running ultramarathons for thirteen years, including two one-hundred-mile mountain races, so I knew what kind of logistics were involved. But this wasn’t a race or an event; it was more of a multiweek vision quest than anything else, and it was going to be much more complicated than anything either of us had done before. So I wanted to practice.
That didn’t happen.
It wasn
’t really Jurker’s fault—or anyone’s fault, for that matter. I’d had my second miscarriage in April, right when we were supposed to be on a three-day trial run on the Arizona Trail, and then D and C surgery on April 30, nine days before we were scheduled to pick up our cargo van in Chicago. We had hoped to buy the van a month earlier, but given the added medical bills, the refinancing on our house took longer than we’d anticipated. Setbacks, not deal-breakers, but they left us scrambling to put all the pieces in place and there was no time for a rehearsal. Our departure date grew closer, and we were not only way behind schedule but also way underprepared. Every Appalachian Trail record holder had hiked the entire trail or at least significant sections of it before starting his or her fastest-known-time (FKT) attempt. We’d never even been to half of the fourteen states it crossed. Nevertheless, I can’t claim that we were complete AT newbies. A few years ago, Scott was speaking at a running event in Pennsylvania near an AT crossing, so we drove the rental car to the trail. We ran out three miles and back. Those three miles, 0.14 percent of the trail, were the entirety of my Appalachian Trail knowledge.
I was worried. Jurker…wasn’t. He didn’t seem to feel the pressure of our prep time running out. He wasn’t cranking out spreadsheets or studying previous record holders’ splits. He wasn’t obsessively checking the blogs and trip reports of past attempts. Then again, even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t. The most recent supported attempts had all been southbound; we were going north. It would be a completely different run.
The extent of Scott’s planning boiled down to this: He made one single-sided spreadsheet with approximate daily mileage, bought The A.T. Guide: A Handbook for Hiking the Appalachian Trail, Northbound 2015, and called it a day. I bit my tongue.
To be honest, our lack of logistical planning didn’t worry me as much as Jurker’s indifference to physical training did. He wasn’t out running long back-to-back days in the mountains with a heavy pack like he’d said he would. He also hadn’t hired a strength coach or done any overnights on the trail. But whenever I grilled him about training, he gave me the same answer.
“Twenty years of ultramarathon racing is my training.”
I couldn’t argue with that. My version of training is casual. I mostly run solo with my iPod full of hip-hop and electronic tunes; sometimes I run with friends, but always without a watch. Once, after missing a Boston Marathon qualifying time by two minutes, I asked Jurker in frustration, “Why can’t I run fast?” He said, “You can, but you don’t like to hurt.” Which is absolutely true. I prefer to run with ease, and it means I’ve never dropped from a race, even if I’ve never won one. I’d seen Jurker drop (or nearly drop) from seven big ones over the past six years. He always gave the same reason, one that I didn’t recognize: his heart wasn’t in it.
Well, it had better be this time.
I wasn’t going to give up my spring and summer for some halfhearted effort. And I knew what it looked like when he faked it. The Leadville Trail in 2013 was a perfect example. He’d convinced himself that this was going to be his big comeback, that he would win this race that was steeped in ultrarunning folklore, a race in which he’d finished second ten years prior. And he went through the motions. He looked the part, said the right things, did everything to a T—everything except the running. I’m not sure if he was banking on muscle memory or if he was planning to will himself to the podium, but he just didn’t compete. Even I could tell that much. On race day, he looked like he was struggling just to stay in the top ten. And then, finally, when he had about twenty miles to go, I saw him give up. He didn’t fake an injury; he didn’t drop out. I just saw him relax. He stopped fighting; he was running like I do, running with ease. I guess he didn’t want to hurt anymore.
With three miles to go, he was jogging it in. But when the finish line came in view, he perked up and yelled, “JLu! Run with me! Let’s run it in together!” I cringed. I was embarrassed for him, but how could I tell him that? Yes, I was proud of him for finishing, proud of him for cheering the runners who passed him, but I was sad for him too. I knew this wasn’t what he was looking for. At the finish area, Jurker hung around and chatted with everybody, seemingly unfazed to take the L. Maybe he was getting used to losing, or maybe it no longer mattered to him. Jurker actually seemed happy.
I’m not as gracious or as nice as Jurker. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.
I’ve known Jurker for fifteen years and he’s always been that way, extra-nice. I moved to Seattle on March 26, 2000. I remember the date because it was the day the Kingdome imploded and everybody was in a kind of civic mourning. I had never been into running, but since I didn’t know a single soul in town, I started doing local 5K races in hopes of meeting people. Scott worked at my local running store, the Seattle Running Company, and even at the height of his career, he was so approachable that I didn’t realize he was a celebrity in some circles. I remember seeing him after I finished my first half marathon; he congratulated me as if I’d run an Olympic qualifying time.
I caught the running bug and two years later ran my first 50K ultramarathon. My main training buddy was a guy named Charlie who was also a friend of Jurker’s. In 2004 Charlie decided to run the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, and I volunteered to crew and pace him. Around thirty-eight miles before the finish line, we heard that Jurker had won the race and broken the course record. At the awards ceremony, people swarmed over Scott, and someone asked, “How long do you want to keep doing this?” It was his sixth consecutive win. He was on top of the world. To this day, I remember his answer; it was immediate and confident. He said, “There are still a few things I want to do but I won’t be doing this forever. I’m going to retire by the time I turn forty.”
Now, at forty-one, he wasn’t so confident anymore. I heard it in his voice, saw it in his manner. When people asked him if he was done racing, he got defensive. Eleven years ago he was planning on hanging it up at this point, but now it seemed like he was having a hard time letting go. I got it; he’d built his whole career winning races around the world. But he’d always told me he looked forward to sleeping in, to slowing down and spending more time at home.
So what was he trying to prove on the Appalachian Trail?
I didn’t have time to ponder that question. We had less than two weeks to convert our black cargo van, which we named Castle Black, into something we could live in, and then we had to load it up with everything we might need for 2,189 miles of running.
An electrician installed a 200-watt solar panel on the roof.
We made a bed frame and threw a twin-size foam mattress on it.
Scott made a small tabletop for the gas camping stove.
I sewed blackout curtains.
There was no time to install a fan or windows.
I cut out pieces of reflective bubble wrap and duct-taped them to the walls for insulation.
We bolted down six low-budget shelving racks for storage.
We transformed those sixty square feet of bare metal into a home on wheels…kind of.
To me, the sooner we left, the better. I had RSVP’d yes to a friend’s wedding in South Carolina on May 23. Jurker had insisted we go—he knew how much it meant to me, and he promised we would make it on time. We worked on the van around the clock, and it seemed to rain around the clock. It was one of the wettest Mays on record in Boulder. We couldn’t build our bed frame in the rain. The first time it let up was at 11:00 one night. I didn’t want to wake the neighbors but time was running out, so we drilled and sanded into the wee hours of the next day.
The longer we stayed home, the more Jurker overpacked. Every day he dug up dusty old gear from our garage and loaded it in the van. “Should I pack these mosquito head nets? Better bring them just in case.” Two minutes later: “Do we need this cast-iron griddle? What if you want to make me pancakes? Better bring it.”
“Are you seriously packing twenty pairs of socks?” I asked.
“JLu! Do you understand that my feet
are the most important thing out there? I have to keep them dry!”
I rolled my eyes and removed ten pairs when he wasn’t looking.
The timing was stressful but the work was fun and it took my mind off the things I was looking forward to leaving behind in Boulder. The pain, the frustration, the needles, the doctors, the surgeries. Friends stopped by to help with the van build-out and we often stayed up until 2:00 in the morning getting everything dialed in.
One afternoon my phone rang but my hands were covered in duct tape so I didn’t answer. My friend Timmy O’Neill left a message. “JLu, bad news from the Valley. Dean Potter died yesterday.”
I crumpled to the floor. Dead? I had just talked to him ten days ago. We’d had plans to visit him in Yosemite in April but my miscarriage had gotten in the way. I was devastated. Dean had lived far out on the edge, so perhaps it seems naive that I was shocked by his death. He was a master of the dark arts, devoting almost three decades to a series of high-risk, all-or-nothing pursuits, like free-solo climbing, some of the most towering, difficult rock faces without a rope or partner. And wingsuit flying, where he leapt from those same overhanging walls and glided not only downward but also as close as possible to the rocks he aimed to avoid.
Contrary to having a death wish, he sought to push himself to and through the impossible. He was the most meticulously precise and calculated guy I’d ever known, even more than Jurker. Razor-focused with a bird’s-eye detail for everything, Dean was the Dark Wizard—in tune with the wind, wildlife, and the trees, and the last person I’d expected to die.
Suddenly, our adventure made much more sense and I felt an urgency to disappear into the mountains. That’s where Jurker and I go when we need to clear our heads, to reprioritize and reexamine our lives. I was still concerned about being underprepared, but now I couldn’t wait to get in Castle Black and drive east.