North

by Scott Jurek

  We locked up the house and pulled out of our driveway at 1:20 a.m. on May 23. My friend was getting married in fifteen hours. I’d been giving Jurker the stink-eye for days. He knew we were late and offered to drive through the night on the off chance that we might make it there in time. I tried to act mad, but I was too excited. I queued up my power song, cranked the volume, and woke the neighbors one last time. We were finally on our way.

  Deep South

  465 Miles

  What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

  —Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

  Chapter 2

  Live What You Love

  May 24

  Vast, open plains ripped by us at seventy miles an hour. As Boulder, home, and the Rockies sank into the horizon behind us, our worries and disappointments seemed to recede as well. We were finally on the road. And that road would eventually become a trail.

  But first we had to drive across half of the United States.

  Heading east from the center of the country is one long downhill ride. The Martian-looking sand dunes of eastern Colorado fade into the rolling fields of Kansas and then turn into the flatlands by the mighty Mississippi. It’s land made for road trips. And I loved it—even though I was already exhausted.

  In a bit of worrying foreshadowing, we’d hit the road a lot later than we’d wanted to. Actually, it was early. Very early. and after a couple of hours on I-70, we pulled over at a truck stop to sleep. Unfortunately, our undisciplined start time meant that we were going to miss our first goal. I had promised JLu that we’d make a detour to her friend’s wedding in South Carolina. We were already too far behind schedule to do that. Besides, we probably would have fallen asleep during the ceremony. The past two weeks had been sleepless while we rushed to make sure the van was ready and to prepare for the drive.

  So we were 0 for 1 on the goal list. However, we were still on track for our ultimate destination and schedule. And better yet, we were on the open road.

  Sharing the American love affair for long unbroken stretches of pavement and mile markers, I loved seeing the country unfold and deepen as we headed east. I yearned for that feeling of being in-between: no longer rooted at home and not yet fastened to the destination. Both physically and spiritually loosened. Like Kerouac: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” I was in road-trippin’ heaven.

  Then the phone rang.

  JLu glanced at my phone and said, “It’s Speedgoat,” not disguising the anxiety in her voice.

  I didn’t even need all the fingers of one hand to count the number of times Karl “Speedgoat” Meltzer had called me over the years. It was hard for me to imagine him using a phone or even owning a cell phone. It meant only one possible thing: He’d found out. How had he found out?

  “I…better answer. Put him on speaker.”

  JLu fiddled with the phone and the new radio system we’d installed in the van, a concession I’d happily made for her entertainment on what would likely be long, lonely stretches of driving. And suddenly Karl was there with us.

  “Duuuuude? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  I respect Karl. I admire him. We’re longtime running buddies but also fierce competitors. I think the Speedgoat has been good for the sport, an old-school legend who isn’t afraid to follow his own playbook. Nobody has won more hundred-milers than the Goat. But I was hesitant to hear his thoughts on my trail attempt. I focused on the road and let his question linger against the hum of the freeway.

  “Okaaaaaay,” he said. “First of all, you’re going backward! Why the hell are you going north?”

  Here we go. Karl had run the Appalachian Trail before—he’d taken two cracks at the speed record, to be precise—and been on countless missions to recon the twisted path. He knew it way better than I did; that was indisputable. But I didn’t want to go in having studied the CliffsNotes. I didn’t want to get schooled or steal unearned beta. I wanted challenge. I wanted adventure.

  And—yeah, against my better judgment—I wanted to run north.

  I didn’t worry that the current record was set going south and that nearly all the other recent records and attempts were too. I knew I was running in an arguably slower direction. Karl was going to tell me I was doing it wrong, right from the beginning. And he wasn’t incorrect. He had a lifetime of knowledge and experience with the trail. He’d have facts, figures, stories. The only rationale I could offer for running north was almost embarrassingly whimsical: I wanted to run with the spring. The way most thru-hikers do. The way the visionary Earl “the Crazy One” Shaffer did in 1948, becoming the first person to continuously hike the AT; he penned a memoir about it, Walking with Spring. I was worried that if I admitted that out loud, it might sound like I was attempting the FKT without 100 percent laser focus. Maybe aesthetic pleasure was not a sound rationale. Was I screwed before I’d even started?

  Luckily Karl had other things to talk about. Namely, all things AT. He yapped on like an excited puppy. I loved that about the Speedgoat. The AT was his baby. And pretty soon he was promising to come out in a couple of weeks and help Jenny crew in Virginia. He had an ulterior motive: He wanted to do some recon for his own record attempt next year, and he needed to drive his van out to the East Coast so it would be ready for a five-hundred-mile training run from Katahdin to Mount Washington. Southbound, of course.

  JLu and I had set out on an adventure for the two of us. We had these romantic ideas about supporting each other, about hacking our way north without anyone else’s help, rediscovering the very best in each other. But we were already behind schedule and taking on extras.

  In Tennessee, we pulled over where the AT crossed I-40. We ran on it southbound, stretching our legs from the drive, knowing we would be retracing those steps in just a few days. I got back in the van and made one more phone call—to Jennifer Pharr Davis. When she set the current AT speed record in 2011, I was immensely impressed. I knew she was one of the strongest thru-hikers out there and she didn’t run a single step during her attempt. I respected her record and I wanted her to know.

  She left a voice mail in return, saying, “The Appalachian Trail is very different than a lot of other places,” adding that she hoped we’d have a “really transformative experience out there” and wishing us all the best. I didn’t ruminate on the way her voice hung on the words different and transformative, but I knew she’d been through the fire.

  On May 25, we pulled into Georgia. The run was two days away.

  And things hadn’t yet stopped going wrong.

  This time it wasn’t my fault. The weather in Georgia was absolutely possessed—high winds and a drenching downpour. For some reason I had been imagining a sort of temperate, pleasant atmosphere in the South. As a Midwest kid, I assumed it was easier living in the southern part of the country. Instead, the forecasts were for tornadoes and flash floods on what was supposed to be day one.

  The weather also meant that our good friend and adventure photographer Luis “El Coyote” Escobar was delayed getting in. Luis, who’d been running ultras since 1990, was joining us for the first few days; he’d be shooting pics while he ran and hiked with me for sections. He was flying in from California but his ETA kept getting pushed back due to flight delays and local Atlanta weather. Finally, he made it—kind of.

  He arrived late at night, and JLu and I had to go pick him up at an ad hoc meeting location: a parking lot outside the Whole Foods in Duluth, Georgia. We drove in, and there, stepping out of a cab, was Luis. Utterly drenched already. And leaning into the gale at about forty-five degrees just to stay on his feet.

  He was lugging a backpack that looked like it was fit for an Everest attempt. I wondered if he knew something we didn’t. Wind-lashed and soaked to the bone, Luis looked defeated. Yet he was totally unfazed. Typical El Coyote.

  “Amigo, I wasn’t going to miss this! Whenever you call, man, I kno
w it’s going to be something good and crazy.” He was game for anything. In his early fifties, he had a youthfulness that could rival the high-schoolers he coached and the twenty-somethings he hung out with. He always said that ultrarunning kept him young. That, and his spunky wife of thirty-plus years. As he says, “I’m the gas, she’s the brakes,” and from what I’ve seen, she doesn’t pump them too often.

  I invited him down to the Copper Canyon with me in 2006 to chase the legendary Tarahumaran runners. Whenever we traveled internationally together, we had to allow for extra airport time because his last name, one shared with a certain Colombian drug lord, always seemed to trigger additional security screening. But this time, we were taking a bus. On our twelve-hour ride back to El Paso, Texas, the bus broke down and we had to pile into another dilapidated bus that was already full. I sat on the floor between the seats with the rest of our group, but El Coyote climbed into the grimy overhead luggage rack and stretched out. For the next six hours. Luis knew how to take a beat-down. He was tough as nails but he knew something that was more important. El Coyote had the ability to laugh when he wanted to cry, the secret to longevity in ultrarunning.

  He had brought his own camping gear but the rain was still relentless when we finally got back to the campground, so we invited him to spend the night inside the van—if he could fit. He found a way.

  We had planned to make the twenty-four hours before day one a total rest day, a time for sleeping as much as possible, but that night, Jenny and I huddled together in our little mobile headquarters next to poor El Coyote, who lay crammed and contorted between cans of vegan chili, resting his head on a pillow of powdered coconut milk.

  Castle Black hardly felt like a fortress as it shook in the gale. Rain slashed across the roof, branches scratched at the sides, the night stretched on…

  …And we decided to postpone day one.

  When we woke up the next morning, we knew it had been the right decision. The skies were still dark, the wind was still Wizard of Oz–ing around, and conditions were discouraging.

  We hunted down a place where we could fill our brand-new mini–propane tank. We’d rely on that to make warm meals, and if the weather was going to stay like this, I was going to crave comforts at the end of each long, wet day. We checked out the AT southern-terminus trailhead, hiked a mile to Springer Mountain, and sampled some Southern culture in the form of boiled peanuts purchased at a roadside stand. My spirits were rising. I liked the South already and regretted that I wouldn’t get to experience more of it.

  We decided to have a last supper together with Luis and an independent film crew that was going to follow us for a few days to shoot a documentary about vegan athletes. We all met in the lobby of the lodge at Amicalola Falls State Park, and I found myself standing beneath a giant wall map of the Appalachian Trail. A bit of regional décor. The lodge held the last modern amenities that giddy thru-hikers would see before setting off on their two-thousand-mile journey.

  That map made me both nervous and excited at the same time. I tried to catch JLu’s eye but she was staring up at it, her neck craned to take in the whole thirty feet of the map. I could tell she was a little freaked out too. It looked like a map of the world or of Middle Earth. It looked huge.

  I wondered if the lodge staff was trying to have some fun with the eager thru-hikers, giving them a little “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here” thrill. What it did to JLu and me was make us actually come to terms with the sheer scale of what we were about to do. From our perch in Boulder—scribbling notes, looking at maps online, reading books—it had been easy for us to miniaturize and modelize the attempt. No longer. We were really here. And as I looked up at that map, in some way, it put fear in my bones.

  Nothing about the map—or the Appalachian Trail itself—invited even the contemplation of speed. For starters, there’s the magnitude of it. Say you started your journey at the northernmost point of the trail, the summit of Katahdin, Maine, and in a stroke of spectacular miscalculation, you tacked northeast instead of following the white blazes south. If you traveled the same distance as the Appalachian Trail spans, you would find yourself on the outskirts of Reykjavik. The AT is 2,189 miles long—the distance from Los Angeles to Atlanta. It would wind halfway around Pluto. And of those intimidating 2,189 miles, I had been on a mere twenty of them, a handful of miles in Vermont, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, less than 1 percent of the entire trail. Even with my vast experience running roads and trails around the world, the data was daunting.

  Imagine running eighty-four marathons. Consecutively. Over the gnarliest and oldest mountains in the world. The AT follows the spine of the Appalachians, peaks once rivaling the towering summits of the Himalayas, now ground down by geologic millennia.

  The Pacific Crest Trail, at 2,650 miles, is longer than the AT, and the Continental Divide Trail, at 3,100, is longer still. And while a lot of Westerners boast about the snowpacks and deserts, the granite outcroppings, the alpine meadows, and the oxygen-sucking heights, the fact is that if you’re fit, it’s a comparatively smooth ride. The western trails have their frozen passes and jagged peaks, but most miles were graded for horseback travel, and their switchbacks rarely climb at anything steeper than a 10 percent grade. As a foot-travel-only path, the AT is much sneakier and more devilish. It dives directly into ravines. It snakes into foggy river bottoms and then shoots straight up hills so dense with undergrowth that even deer have trouble climbing them. It is almost hard to describe it until you actually set foot on the AT’s potpourri of rocks and roots. The tread and grade are like tentacles that grab at you from different directions when you least expect it, making forward progress a tedious and tense battle. On top of that twisted floor are walls of woods and a ceiling of tree limbs that are challenging in their own right. The Appalachian Trail is so wooded and thick, so dense and enclosed, that it is known as the Green Tunnel.

  Which hadn’t sounded so bad back when we were first toying with the idea at home. A tunnel sounded nice. An escape from miscarriages and the failure to start a family. A chance to focus on just one thing, to do something hard, to get away from a warm bed and pancake Sundays and a life that I loved but that had ceased to be enough for me. I think we all assume that we’ll chafe against conformity and settling in our lives, but settling isn’t dangerous because it’s unpleasant. The real danger was that I was beginning to like it.

  JLu saw it too. She knew how comfortable I had become. She wanted a new challenge for both of us. Still, standing under a three-story map of the AT labyrinth as wind and rain howled outside, we couldn’t help wondering if we’d been a little hasty in picking this particular challenge.

  The next morning, May 27, 2015, the alarm startled me. Not because it was loud but because I was surprised I had actually fallen asleep the night before. The rain had been pounding the van incessantly, and because we didn’t have time to properly insulate the roof before we left Boulder, each drop seemed to land like an open-handed slap across the thin sheet of metal three feet above my face. It wasn’t just noisy in there; it was cramped too. JLu and I were used to tight fits, but somehow the twin bed that we shared—normally without issue—seemed to shrink in the humidity.

  Then there was Luis. He was curled up on the five-foot patch of floor we’d cleared for him. If he hadn’t been snoring, I might have squished him when I hopped out of bed. El Coyote stacked a few boxes of coconut milk to make a chair, and the three of us drove to the trailhead in the dark. It was silent in the van. The winding road seemed endless in the rain and we were all tired and nervous. There were still so many unknowns.

  Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward. We stepped onto the trail and hiked southbound to Springer Mountain, the shortest way to access the Southern Terminus. Fog was swirling around the viewless summit, and rocks were greasy with a mixture of rain, mud, and humidity, but there was no more postponing. And I knew that I could expect to see plenty more of this kind of weather over the next forty-odd days. We couldn’t wait
for perfect conditions. From the very beginning, JLu and I had been moving forward only semi-prepared.

  No reason to start being cautious now. It was time.

  We turned on our headlamps and signed the summit logbook.

  I wrote, On one of the biggest adventures of my life. Georgia to Maine!—Scott “El Venado” Jurek.

  And JLu wrote, Live what you LOVE! Jenny “Raven” Jurek.

  I made a few last-minute adjustments; I tinkered with the GPS tracker and my watch. We firmed up plans to meet Luis, who would drive the van that morning so I could run with JLu; we hugged each other, and then I said, “Well, let’s go to Maine!” At 5:56 a.m. our odyssey began.

  We were putting everything on hold for two months. This insane Green Tunnel and the landscape surrounding it was going to be my life, our lives, for the foreseeable future. We would be eating, sleeping, thinking, dreaming out here. The planning was done, our doubts were irrelevant.

  And contrary to what I’d feared, my body felt ready too. I had never run more than two hundred miles in a week, and, as a physical therapist, I knew the risks involved in logging three hundred and fifty miles a week. But I also knew how to listen to my body. I’m far from symmetrical, nor do I have the perfect physique for running, but with careful preparation and prevention, I’d never been sidelined due to an injury for more than a few weeks over two decades of racing hard.

  Injuries and problems were inevitable; that was the point. We were used to problems. That’s what all this was: a two-thousand-mile problem that JLu and I would get to solve on our own terms, together. Hidden in them were opportunities for growth, but we hoped there wouldn’t be too many.