by Scott Jurek
Point taken. Speedgoat knew everything about the AT, but he still hadn’t nailed it. Rickey continued educating me. “We just need to be positive. Jurker needs positive energy. He’ll do it.”
Rickey was right and I decided then and there to put my cynicism aside and be nothing but positive to the best of my ability. Later that evening, Speedgoat, Rickey, and I drove to the Blackburn AT center. Speedgoat was taking notes since he’d never been up that road. We hiked up to the trail and sat on a log in the dusk. I was dressed and ready to run the next six miles with Jurker. It was gonna be a late night and those guys were laughing, sharing a oney bat, relieved that it was me and not them who had the last night shift.
When Jurker came running toward us, he had a train of about a half a dozen headlamps behind him, and their energy cut through the air like a lightning bolt. One of the runners had filled a backpack with dry ice and brought Popsicles for Jurker. It seemed like a fun group, which prompted Rickey to say, “Man, I wish I was running the next stretch.” The excitement was contagious even for me. I could see why people drove for hours to meet up with Scott. I think they wanted to experience the energy, to be a part of the record attempt. I don’t know what it was exactly, but I was suddenly so grateful to run into the night with him. And as it turned out, all the other runners peeled off, so we were alone.
It was a particularly dark and eerie section. I was leading and the trail markers were hard to see at night. The grass and trees were all dewy, so everything seemed to reflect in the beam of my headlamp. We could hear the road crossing well before we reached it. There was an all-night crew doing construction right next to the parking lot. We fell asleep to the bright lights, deafening generators, and jackhammers and slept like babies.
I woke up the next morning elated. Rickey and Scott took off running and I knew that in four miles, they would cross the West Virginia state line. We’d be officially out of Virginia, and as luck would have it, Jurker was set up to do the Four State Challenge! It’s a classic challenge that trail-hardened thru-hikers like to do; they travel the forty-three miles from Virginia through West Virginia and Maryland to Pennsylvania, hitting all four states in one day.
Speedgoat and I met them in Harpers Ferry, the home of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. I’d been in touch with the ATC, and Jurker wanted to stop in, but unfortunately when we got there it was 7:00 a.m. and nobody was in the office. I was surprised anybody was even awake in this sleepy town, but there were some local runners who brought Scott some rocks on which they’d painted The time is now. It was the kind of positive energy Rickey had been talking about and I appreciated it.
We were close to Washington, DC, now and there were a surprising amount of runners waiting to meet him at each trailhead. As the day went on, the weather turned dark and it was pouring rain again. Speedgoat ran the last section in the rain while Rickey and I found a laundromat. He said Jurker’s clothes smelled like apple cider vinegar, a fact I had been ignoring for the past week or so. Not uncommon for ultra-endurance athletes, I knew it meant he was breaking down acids in his body, that he was tapping into his reserves or something worse.
He completed the Four State Challenge plus six extra miles and was soaked through. Since Rickey was leaving the next day, instead of drying off and jumping in bed like he should have, Scott wanted to spend the evening drinking a beer with his friends. I wanted him to sleep, but even more than that, I wanted him to enjoy this little slice of normalcy. Karl eventually went to bed but the three of us stayed up late, sitting in our van, talking about everything but running.
At some point late in the night, a car pulled up. It was two ultrarunning French photographers, Alexis and Roan. I have no idea how they found us out there but we laughed at the randomness. They were going to try to find a hotel and then meet us tomorrow morning.
The rain didn’t let up and Jurker was grateful for the clean dry clothes to start day twenty-three with the Frenchies. Karl left to take Rickey to the airport; Roan was running with Jurker; and Alexis followed me to the crew stops, sleeping in his car whenever possible. I knew he must have been hungry, so I offered to drive into town with him to get food and gas.
I looked up a grocery store and led the way. A few miles from the trail, the terrain got more urban, and, weirdly, I recognized the strip malls. Why did they look familiar? Had I been here before? Suddenly it hit me. I was in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and this was the road Jurker and I drove to find the AT a few years ago.
It was surreal. It’s hard to explain, but back when we first stepped on the AT, it seemed pretty basic. I didn’t understand Jurker’s reverence for it. But now, knowing what I knew and after everything I’d seen, felt, smelled, and experienced since stepping foot on it in Georgia, it blew my mind. Just a few miles beyond the strip malls and neighborhoods lay this unassuming trailhead, a portal to a whole other world, like Alice’s rabbit hole. We’d been living a different life in a parallel universe, so close to the rest of the world, yet so removed. I thought about the AT’s proximity to major cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Half of the U.S. population lives within a day’s drive of at least one of these rabbit holes.
We got food and drove to the next meeting spot. Alexis fell asleep in his rental car. I walked to the trailhead and found a fluorescent sticky note that read “YOU GOT THIS, SCOTT! HALFWAY!!!” When Scott arrived with Roan, we said au revoir to the Frenchies and I ran the next stretch with Jurker. We were alone and anticipated what was coming, so we ran fast and with purpose. After about a mile, there it was: the official 2015 Appalachian Trail midway-point sign. Holy shitballs.
There were a lot of runners waiting for Jurker at the AT Museum in Pine Grove Furnace State Park. The rain was torrential but when Scott got there, the excitement of crossing the midway point gave him extra energy and he was running with ease. He left with a handful of runners and I was alone again. I wandered around the state park and drove to a lake somebody had told me about. It was completely empty because of the rain, but luckily, just then the storm started to break. I jumped in, and, as clichéd as it sounds, I felt all my cares slip away as I floated on my back and stared at the rapidly clearing sky. We made it halfway! We had a crazy 1,095 miles behind us and another 1,095 to go. We had everything we needed—each other—and that was enough. I closed my eyes, held my breath, and felt the water get colder as I sank below the surface.
Chapter 10
Running Through the Sticks with My Woes
Day Twenty-Five
“Dude, it’s the friggin’ Forrest Gump show out here,” Speedgoat grumbled. “Virginia and Maryland were nuts. Don’t know how you’re doing it, man. All these people would drive me insane. Well, they are driving me insane and I’m not the one doing fifty-mile days! We gotta ditch that GPS tracker, delay the live feed by a day or two.”
I just kept running on the AT treadmill, acting like I was working too hard to give an answer.
Speedgoat wasn’t wrong; it often was a bit like the Forrest Gump show. With the weekend in full swing in Pennsylvania, there were lots of people in addition to countless rock piles. On the one hand, it was hard to be “on” and working my butt off while also answering questions and letting people join me. I often wondered how much energy and time I was expending by opening my record attempt to whoever wanted to join in; most professional athletes wouldn’t even consider letting strangers play alongside them in a championship game or match. On the other hand, I wanted to be myself, the approachable guy who hung out after races for the last finisher, the guy who stayed at events well after the venue had closed to answer questions and pose for photos. It was by no means easy, but that was me. And all of these people were part of my tribe. The hip-hop artist Drake describes his tribe as his Woe. “Woe is my crew. It stands for ‘working on excellence.’ It’s just my whole brand and my whole movement and my way of life for everyone. I want everyone to work on excellence. So all my friends are my Woes and I feel anybody working on excellence in life is a Woe in life as
well.”
To me, anyone who runs or mindfully moves their body is working on excellence. Could JLu and I get the record while still sharing our experience with my Woes? For the time being, I was managing to do both. I’m sure I wasn’t perfect, and people coming out didn’t know what mental or physical state I would be in. They had to take what they got.
My tribe wasn’t coming out only to catch a ride on our train; they were also providing material support. One family brought us six grocery bags filled with plant-based rarities: cheese and meat substitutes, nondairy ice cream, and other items that were hard to come by. The outpouring of support and generosity was humbling. Locals wanted to help in any way they could. As we got farther north, the trail came closer to larger cities and population centers. We appreciated all the donations, but JLu had a hard time finding room in Castle Black’s limited storage. Managing the company of strangers was physically and mentally draining on JLu more than on me. She was the one who was bombarded at trailheads; she was the one who had to answer questions while she was trying to prep things for me; she was the one who was interrupted when she was taking a nap. I felt bad for her additional woes.
While it was hard to measure the costs and returns, I knew that even though I was giving life energy to complete strangers, I was also receiving a form of energy. It was another give-and-take relationship with a cycle of working on excellence. What I gave was returned to me in the form of inspiration, motivation, and perspective.
As I ran down a ridge at sunset, my thoughts wandered away from the rocks below my feet to the amazing people I’d encountered on the trail the past couple of days. The crowds at trailheads, twenty or thirty at a time, a lot of them bearing inspiring signs, some with quotes from my book: PAIN ONLY HURTS! and BE SOMEBODY! They were giving me a dose of my own medicine. A local cross-country team met me in the late-evening darkness of rolling farmland in the Cumberland Valley, and during the day parents brought their little explorers to run a mile or a few yards with me.
Then there were the big hits of unexpected inspiration that made me realize my struggles on the trail were nothing in the big picture of life. One local runner came out and told me he was there to run thirty miles with me. My initial reaction was an internal cringe. Thirty miles is a long way to go with a stranger. And then he told me about the hellish year he’d just been through. He’d been diagnosed with leukemia and had almost lost his life. He was my age, had a wife and kids. It was easy to put myself in his shoes. The thirty-mile run with me was a gift he was giving himself, a kind of celebration for getting through it. And here I was, feeling bad about my torn muscles and rocks and roots on the trail. My day was transformed. Perspective can be both humbling and inspiring. Those thirty miles wound up being the easiest of that whole stretch.
It was becoming increasingly clear to me that I wouldn’t even come close to the record without the fans, friends, and supporters who were showing up to run with me. The trail was torturing my body every day. Finishing—let alone owning the record—was coming in and out of focus daily, even hourly. But the presence of other bodies, other minds, and other stories made my pain feel like a part of something bigger. And something I couldn’t complain about. There were a lot worse things I could be dealing with besides boulder fields and tropical storms.
As we crossed the Delaware River and left Rocksylvania behind for a brief trip through New Jersey, I made sure that JLu and I ran together. We loved hearing the accents change along with the geography, and we laughed as we did our best to replicate lines we had heard from locals. We needed that time together—time she didn’t have to spend cooking for me, feeding me, scouring my body for ticks, bandaging me, or otherwise tending to my basic needs. Time to simply be a couple. Not a couple fixed on the big goal. That was hard to balance, and occasionally I wondered if we were drifting apart rather than coming together. I got the sense that her spirits were flagging, even though she and Speedgoat had become buddies to the point of mutual admiration (how that had happened was a mystery, yet it also seemed meant to be). She was sacrificing so much to be out here supporting my FKT attempt. On the outside, it appeared to be all about me, but we were a team working toward something we both needed. Something beyond a record.
That is, if we actually got the record. I had made up ground by adhering to the Speedgoat principles of averaging three and a half miles per hour on the AT treadmill and nickel-and-diming my way to Katahdin if I had to, but I was still just barely clawing back to a record-setting pace. The ground I’d lost in the South over just two days was taking me weeks to regain, but I was doing it. I was starting to transform into someone or something else. A sort of AT castaway, a trail animal; I was haggard, bony, and somehow permanently dirty, but I would need to dig even deeper into that bony body if I was going to get to Maine.
New Jersey. It was hard to believe we had made it this far. The runners and hikers came out in force, giving us an enthusiastic welcome, Jersey accent and all. Signs saying NJ LOVES EL VENADO were taped around trees. I was more than halfway done, and the distances between states got smaller and the trail supposedly easier (according to Horty). The mid-Atlantic states brought with them the almost instant gratification of daily border crossings: New Jersey, New York, then Connecticut, which signaled our arrival in New England. Connecticut and Massachusetts would each take a day. It was Vermont, New Hampshire, and then Maine that had humbled many a thru-hiker. They were the undisputed crux of the entire AT.
It was heartening to look at a full AT map and see how much ground we’d covered. I loved feeling the progress and knowing how far I had traveled by human locomotion. The squiggly red line that went from where I was to the end of the Appalachian Trail was getting shorter and shorter.
It was a good thing, too, because by the time JLu and I ran across the Delaware River, I was starting to feel an obstruction that was hard to describe. Not the early wall I’d hit a few days in, and not a mental wall or a sense of doubt or the physical barriers of injury and crippling soreness. It was a heaviness, an imaginary fifty-pound pack that felt all too real.
It was in the Kittatinny Mountains in New Jersey that I struggled with the daily despair of How can I keep doing this for another two weeks? It was a strange form of depression. I would be happy throughout the day, with some ups and downs. Running and hiking tens of miles a day isn’t always a joyful experience. I would finish the day flying high on the satisfaction of completing another fifty-plus-mile day. That moment of glory would last a few minutes, and then I’d feel a sinking sensation as I remembered that in less than six hours, I would be waking up to do the same thing again. I was caught up in a cycle of emotions every damn day.
The runner who patiently waited outside Castle Black at 6:00 that morning was bubbling with excitement, but I told him I might not say much as we ran. I couldn’t confide in him. I couldn’t even confide in JLu because she had her own emotional roller coaster to deal with. And I sure as hell didn’t know how to describe it to the data-driven Goat, even though he probably knew exactly how I felt. He had been there, and he’d cracked. Maybe this was how depressed people felt. I could put on the happy face, soak up motivation from those who came out to run with me and cheer for me, feel the power of my legs propelling me, but deep down inside, I was faltering, sinking.
There was one other person I needed in my corner. He had seen me at the height of my career and at the darkest times during my divorce. He’d helped me climb up and out of that, and now he might be able to lift me up and push me forward, regardless of the heaviness I felt.
Don Makai was like an adopted father to me. I valued his expertise—he was a runner too—but what I really needed was his comforting paternal presence. He was the opposite of Horty and Karl; he was a genteel, agreeable, buttoned-up attorney from Seattle. But he was also as strong as steel. He’d trained extensively in the martial arts. His own teacher had been trained by the karate legend An’ichi Miyagi, the inspiration for Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid, and that legacy seemed to
live on in Don. He carried himself with that same Zen-like dignity, but he could quickly switch to Mortal Kombat mode.
Don practiced a form of Okinawan karate called goju-ryu, a discipline whose adherents could do things like catch arrows and break concrete blocks with their bare hands. I’d thought that was the stuff of movies from my youth, but then he showed me pictures of himself breaking through stacks of wood boards.
Years ago, he had introduced me to the Japanese philosophy of Bushido, or the “way of the warrior,” which stressed honor, simplicity, and courage. There are echoes of its lessons in the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, especially in the tenet that has most influenced me: The mind of a warrior (or anyone performing a difficult task) should be so attuned to the moment that thoughts and emotions do not impede proper action. A mind in this condition is thought to function so optimally that the right decisions come naturally and pain and fear disappear. I often saw similarities between this mind-set and what elite athletes refer to as being “in the zone.” When I successfully adopted the mind of the warrior, I felt a great sense of must-ness replace my confusion and anxiety. I must keep going—no question. Was I going to release my heaviness or carry it the rest of the way north? Was I even going to make it to Maine, much less break the record for doing it? I had no idea. Literally. I had no idea in my head beyond the overwhelming must. Keep going; it’s as easy as that. A single focal point. Keep going. Stay in the now. Every moment contains only one thing: the potential to keep going.
JLu intuitively understood what I was going through on some level, even more than Horty and Speedgoat did, and she e-mailed Don and included a list of provisions he should try to bring. When he arrived at the trail, she was so happy to see him that she almost cried. Having an old friend she could trust to look out for us, she finally let her guard down. I wasn’t so much happy to see him as relieved. Just knowing he was coming had already started to lighten me.