North

by Scott Jurek

  It was common for Horty to place signs on long uphills of his racecourses with slogans like “Fat is the enemy of speed.” He founded and race-directed five ultraraces a year for fifteen-plus years. He loved trail running and the community it nurtured possibly more than anyone I knew. Most ultrarunners feared King D-Ho. Or revered him. Or avoided him. Or all three.

  He loved to try to big-time me. He was one of the few people who plausibly could, at least in terms of sheer experience. He had won twenty-five ultras, including some of the most notorious and maniacal endurance races on the planet. He had owned the third-fastest transcontinental run in history, covering America in sixty-five days, running an average of forty-five miles per day, or nine minutes and fifteen seconds per mile—not bad at all when you factor in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Appalachians, and the rest of the 3,067 miles of this country. In 1991 he set an AT speed record. In 2005, late in his career, he went on to set an FKT on the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, completing what he likened to a giant “H for Horton” across the United States: both north–south national scenic trails and the transcontinental run through the middle of the country.

  Horty may not have been the most prominent champion in the sport, but he prided himself on being one of the toughest. He’d twice won the Hardrock Hundred, which, in reputation and reality, is the most grueling hundred-mile race in North America. The course, which starts and finishes in Silverton, Colorado, in the heart of the San Juan Mountains, takes runners over a fourteen-thousand-foot peak, across six snow-covered passes above thirteen thousand feet, through fast-running icy rivers, and into the heart of scree slopes so loose and steep that even runners scrambling on all fours still manage to spin in place and slide down instead of climbing up. The course ascends a total of thirty-three thousand feet and descends the same distance; as the race handouts say, it’s like running up Mount Everest and back down.

  The Hardrock victories weren’t what made Horty resilient, though. It was how he’d won them.

  In 1998, as he was ascending Grant Swamp Pass, a melon-size rock dislodged by a runner above struck his right hand. “A little later,” Horty, then fifty-one, wrote in his account of that race, “I noticed that my glove was soaked through with blood.” Afterward, he learned that he had a compound fracture. In 2001, he and Blake Wood became two of only three people in the world to finish the Barkley Marathons, a race designed to make finishing impossible. Its slogan was “the race that eats its young.”

  I’m not sure if one would call it toughness, stupidity, or that wild-man spirit, but in 2011 Horty somehow convinced his cardiologist to postpone his open-heart surgery by three days so he could race-direct the Hellgate 100K. Like a cat with nine lives, he survived race weekend and was on the operating table Monday for septuple-bypass surgery. Of course he blamed the need for it on genetics and not his gas-station-fare diet.

  I hadn’t seen Horty since the 2014 Hardrock, shortly after he’d had his left knee replaced, when he rode around aid stations on a mountain bike. He hadn’t mellowed much since then.

  “Reeeal purty up here, eh, boy?” A hidden voice emanated from the fresh darkness.

  He found me late in the evening of day five like the AT bloodhound that he was, and surprised me at the grassy summit of the 4,629-foot Max Patch. From there, we looked out over the multilayered North Carolina valleys, bathed in mellow moonlight. It would have been an exquisite moment for anyone. Even for me, after a day slogging in the rain-drenched Green Tunnel, after forty-five punishing miles through the saw-toothed ridges of the Smokies, it was still sublime. A high, lonesome Eden stretched out beneath us, its every hard edge and angle smoothed by occasional diffuse lunar light, broken up only by pockets of phosphorescent bluish-green from fox fire, a fungus that causes decaying wood to glow.

  Horty loved the AT and he loved being in the mountains, but he preferred to take quick hits off the scenery-and-ambience joint. No long drags for old Horty. He had places to go and people to see. And that go-go-go mentality wasn’t just for the trail; it was how he lived all aspects of his life.

  I quickly realized that Horty and I had very different approaches out on the AT. We both wanted me to get the FKT, but we had different visions of what exactly that might look like. He’d shown up just in time to share a summit in Appalachia that was especially beautiful after sunset. The soft, pulsing colors, the silence and cool evening air, and the surge of dopamine coursing through my body made me want to soak in the ache of nighttime for hours, to bathe in the flush of hard-earned endorphins. Horty didn’t soak. Horty didn’t luxuriate. I don’t think he ever had. He was one for offering advice, though. He told me I should get this day finished up and get on over to Lemon Gap. He said I had to be more efficient if I wanted even a hope of owning the FKT. He told me I needed to get to sleep earlier so I wouldn’t have to run through the dark at night. Then he took off south, back the way he had come, down to the trailhead and his Honda Element. He shouted at me as I turned away from the fox-fire-lit valley and faced north.

  “Now, boy, watch for them trail markers! Gets reeeeal tricky down below!”

  He was right; it got real tricky down below. As I negotiated the wet, rock-strewn trail, my lower joints were frequently and unavoidably torqued. I felt an intensifying twinge in my right knee as I descended. And the repeated stress to my ankles and shins was throwing me off and destabilizing my gait like a shaky foundation. Whatever caused it, the knee pain had first visited me earlier in the day, on the thirty-mile descent out of the national park and along the ten-mile section where JLu joined me. I knew something was up when she kept pulling away from me on the downhills. She never drops me on downhills, not even when I have thirty miles on my legs. We laughed it off, running happily in an afternoon thunderstorm, and then I gobbled down soggy vegan cheesy potato chips. Later, JLu tried to cheer me up and mock me at the same time by blasting the Rocky theme song from her phone as I clearly struggled to catch up. It was in those little spaces of laughter amid the seemingly infinite muddy miles together that Jenny and I knew we were in the right place. And that sharp knee pain? It wasn’t going to ruin our party. Like all seasoned runners, I tried not to think about it as I approached the day’s end at Lemon Gap; I hoped it would just disappear overnight.

  It didn’t.

  The next morning, my knee was swollen, sore, and achy. As a physical therapist, I knew enough to suspect I had irritated the cartilage beneath my kneecap. The condition is so common among runners that it has a spectacularly obvious name: Runner’s Knee.

  It was irritating and painful, but not fatal to my chances; it wasn’t going to stop me. I had known ultrarunners to finish races as their kidneys were shutting down and they were losing control of their bowels. One veteran mountain runner, Joel Zucker, gutted out the last twenty miles or so of the 1998 Hardrock Hundred while suffering a near-crippling headache. After the race, on his drive to the airport to catch a flight to his home in Upstate New York, he died of a brain aneurysm. Runner’s Knee wasn’t even near the worst thing someone could have. We all kept going.

  In the first eight miles of June 1, day six, I climbed five hundred feet, then dropped twelve hundred, then ascended again, then dropped again. I took some pleasure in the fact that the rain had finally stopped, and after a few miles my knee loosened up and seemed to remember its job: hiking and running fifty miles a day. That’s the interesting thing about Runner’s Knee (or Patellofemoral Pain Syndrome, as it is more formally known among medical professionals)—it can often feel better if you’re moving, as long as the stress to the cartilage on the underside of the kneecap is minimized. Like a fresh blister that’s being pressed, inflamed and angry patellar cartilage doesn’t like to be poked and prodded. If you run too fast, go downhill too often, or log too many miles, there’s little likelihood of recovery. Avoiding too many miles was out of the question for me, so I gambled that I could ease the burden on my right knee by putting just a bit more weight on my left leg. The b
et seemed to pay off, and the morning’s reprieve from pain was encouraging.

  By the time I got to North Carolina Highway 212, I was late and in significant pain. I had an ice pack wrapped around my right knee and wasn’t so much running as hobble-hiking. And I was only 310 miles into the journey.

  I was soaking in the spirit of the trail, though. A few miles back, I had passed the Shelton gravesite, where the Union-supporting Shelton brothers were laid to rest after they and thirteen other alleged Union sympathizers, including women and children, were ambushed and brutally killed by Confederate troops. (The Shelton Laurel massacre was the basis for a scene in Cold Mountain.)

  Next, an endless ridge before the two-thousand-foot plunge down to Devil Fork Gap to meet JLu. I’d already managed to run fifty miles, and the sun was going down. Given the century-old tombstones, the fog, the rain, and the darkness, the mood was spooky—straight out of a horror film. To top it off, when I got down to JLu and the van, Horty told us that this area was known for locals hostile toward the AT and thru-hikers. Their resentment dates back to a land-grab the U.S. government made to forge a right-of-way for the newly created National Scenic Trail. During Horty’s 1991 AT record, this area was littered with booby traps: barbed fishhooks were hung across the trail on monofilament fishing line to rip through the flesh of thru-hikers. Next to the road crossing where she parked, JLu saw a handwritten sign to all the hickers, as it was spelled, blaming them for the death of a dog that had followed them and gotten run over by a car. It became a meme among this year’s thru-hikers; they started calling themselves “hickers” and “hicker trash,” as if they were a bunch of outlaws and misfits feuding with the Southern locals.

  I hobbled into Castle Black while dodging imagined fishhooks. It was becoming clear that I had lost the bet with my right knee, and now there was another problem: a jabbing pain in my left thigh. I was fairly certain that I had been favoring my right knee so much that the fatigued and overused muscle in my left thigh had ripped. My quick diagnosis: a laterally torn quadriceps.

  Luckily, I knew the recommended treatment. Unluckily, I knew the recommended treatment: Rest, ice, compression, and elevation, or RICE, an acronym that might as well have been SCREWED. Mild strains usually heal in about ten days, but moderate ones can take up to four weeks. A severely torn quad can keep someone out of full action for a couple months.

  Time was not on my side. I lay in bed in the van with ice water dripping down my legs, one hand clutching a pot of olive-oil-drenched whole-grain pasta and the other an AT guidebook. Just twenty-four hours after the pain started in my right knee, I appeared to have injured my other leg to balance out my extremities. In the FKT gambling game, I needed to win more than time; I needed to score a new set of legs.

  As I finally drifted off to sleep, I thought about Horty’s encouraging “You were made for this, boy!” way back on the Washington PCT twelve years earlier. Then I thought about last night’s hike with Horty. I wished I’d stayed up there in the moonlight.

  The previous two days had brought more miles, more rain, more pain, and more doubts. The honeymoon period was definitely long gone. By the end of day six, I’d hit a seemingly insurmountable wall, built right across the Green Tunnel.

  That wall grew taller each day.

  I hit the trail early and alone, hobbling and grimacing, but making steady progress, until…

  I blinked and tilted my head slightly upward.

  I heard it before I could see it.

  Far above the ceiling of oak branches, beyond the emerald tunnel that had become my entire world, the sky was cracking wide open with a thunderous roar. I’d been on the trail for only a week, but I already knew that the AT ceiling was not actually going to keep me dry.

  Sure enough, as the rain intensified, it found more and more holes in the lattice of foliage overhead. Within moments, the trail was transformed into a slow-moving river of mud, and I was soaked to the bone. The soft roar of the rain smothered every other sound: my breath, my heartbeat, the splashing of my footfalls as they landed in one puddle after another. Even the songbirds had grown silent, which they never otherwise did. I was alone. I was wet. Again.

  There were times when the endless trail stretching forever north felt as comforting as a shelter, and there were times when it felt like a dark, isolating cave. And every once in a while, I felt like slowly falling toward a distant something. I didn’t know exactly what was pulling me on.

  This was one of those times. It had been only three days since I stood in that high clearing in the Smokies and felt a surge of doubt and self-pity about the adventure I was finally on. But, as I was going to discover over and over again during my FKT, three days was more than enough time to go from a peak to a valley.

  I was stumbling over mud and rocks and roots, making my way forward on a ribbonlike trail that rose and fell to the rhythm of the unknowably ancient geology in this part of the country. I was falling north.

  Not to suggest there wasn’t any variety. I don’t want to give the impression that following the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina was a constant, undifferentiated stretch of suffering and pain. There was poetry and, of course, novelty. For instance, my right and left legs were experiencing entirely different injuries.

  Hobble. Limp. Hobble. Limp.

  Jolt. Burn. Jolt. Searing burn.

  I was just seven days into my run, and my left leg had a severely torn quadriceps muscle and my right had a raging kneecap inflammation. With one step, I would get an electrifying jolt, as though a dentist was drilling through my right kneecap, and my next step would ignite a searing pain through my left thigh. With every other stride, I imagined someone slicing through my left thigh muscle with a butter knife.

  I’d spent a lifetime pushing my body right up to its breaking point. I’d had injuries that invited me to make comparisons to all kinds of medieval tortures. I’d suffered. Twice I’d run 135 miles through Death Valley on days that hit 125 degrees. The Appalachian Trail was downright bucolic compared to the Mojave Desert.

  All of that was true, and at the same time, none of it mattered.

  I had never been in this much pain, ever. I’d been injured before, demoralized and beaten down. But this was different.

  Seven days into my speed-run attempt on the Appalachian Trail, I was beginning to realize that there were two types of pain. There was the kind that I’d known for decades: the catalyzing kind, pain that’s fierce and angry, that kicks you in the ribs as you’re scrambling forward and slaps you across the face as you get to your feet. The kind that starts screaming at you as you approach the impossible—and makes you want to scream back. That pain fills you up. It weighs on you. It makes you big.

  And then there’s the pain that does the opposite.

  This pain was taking from me. I was emptying. I felt like I was leaving pieces of myself on the trail. I was disintegrating. Very simply, I was failing, fast.

  For more than twenty years, my legs have been my second-greatest asset, propelling me over thousands of miles and on runs throughout the world. They had never failed me. But my greatest asset—which I’ve only occasionally lost—has been my mind.

  Well, it had been my mind.

  But on that day, as my legs were indisputably failing, as the rain picked up, as the doubts started to ring louder in my ears, I understood that despite all my conditioning, despite all my attention to diet, I’d been neglecting to work on my why. As in: Why was I even out here in the first place?

  I’ve experienced my fair share of success. And I know this: You rarely ask why when you win. It’s a word you can outrun and outperform. Applause makes it hard to hear yourself. But just because you ignore it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And why doesn’t get old and tired. It catches up, and it gets louder. It churns up thoughts that are best kept down in the dark.

  Maybe I’m too old for this.

  Broken and very much alone, I checked my watch and limped on north.

  Even if everything went acc
ording to plan, I still had at least thirty-five more days on the trail. Thirty-five days to chase the record and outrun the ghosts of hikers and runners who had already proven themselves. On paper, I was a strong candidate to set a long trail record. I’d endured mountains, deserts, roads, and trails filled with adversity.

  And I wasn’t alone, not really.

  I knew that JLu was somewhere waiting, wondering, and probably feeling every bit as alone as I was. Although we were doing this together, she had her own obligations and a very different set of challenges. This trail adventure wasn’t just mine; it was hers too. It was ours. It had been my idea at the start and she jumped on board quickly, a collaboration stemming all the way back to that argument in the Mojave.

  I was forty-one years old and blazing my way into midlife. Some paths I’d traveled had been smooth and obstacle-free, but others had involved some hasty bushwhacking. My mother’s passing, a divorce, multiple jobs, and unrealized plans to start a family had recently, rapidly, accumulated. I’d been in and out of debt, and now I was carrying a mortgage (for the first time in my life), car payments, and medical bills, financial worries that felt like a nagging injury that I just couldn’t shake.

  But I had plenty of experience with pain, and I was managing. Actually, I was more than managing. I was content. Endurance itself brought its own deep-seated warmth; I’d achieved a lot, and the rugged path of my life had shaped me into the person I was. And there was that paradoxical peace of mind that emerged with middle age: As I accumulated more and more memories—good and bad—the pain of each individual bad one was blunted. What’s one more mile when you’ve already run forty-nine?

  But more than that, I had so much to be grateful for. Most of all, my best friend and wife, JLu, and her willingness to let me entertain the why.

  Way back in the desert, the why had seemed so obvious—first to me, then to JLu too. It felt like fate that the Appalachian Trail and I would meet for a battle of wills.