North

by Scott Jurek

  Old Horty understood what I meant. But to him it wasn’t a mystery. He met me at one of the many crossings of River Road in Connecticut and I hollered out to him, “You can feel the rivers changing. It’s different up here. Almost like we’ve crossed into another realm.”

  “You bet, boy. I was wondering if you could tell. You’re heading to the big mountains, and you’re going to love it!”

  Day thirty-two dawned in Massachusetts, and I could sense Speedgoat silently bursting with the pent-up energy of “I told you so.” I hadn’t finished until midnight yesterday, and I wasn’t going to finish much earlier tonight. Speedgoat had stopped staying up for me days before, back in New York.

  I finally started imposing some discipline on myself when it came to other runners. Speedgoat probably would have counseled me to “turn off that fucking tracker,” but I needed to stay true to myself, so instead of adopting any kind of fake coldness or rudeness, I just got efficient. Rather than stopping for photo ops, I asked that people take their pictures on the go. Selfies were fine, but they had to keep up as they snapped them. I wasn’t going to break stride anymore. It felt good. I didn’t turn anyone away, but I managed to put my (and my team’s) priorities first. I felt like it was the kind of middle way that should have pleased everyone. Of course it didn’t. Speedgoat still rolled his eyes when I signed a book or took a pic, even on the run.

  But his hardline approach wouldn’t matter soon, because he was about to take off. It was time for him to get to the Hardrock Hundred. I could tell he was antsy about leaving, and he spent the last several days poring over maps and crunching numbers like he was cramming for a final exam.

  Right before he left, he asked if he could have a private powwow with me. I had been dealing with extreme nausea and fever while running all morning, and I was worried a virus or stomach bug was settling in, but I needed to get every last piece of trail wisdom Speedgoat had to offer. I asked the half dozen or so runners with me if they could give Speedgoat and me some space for the next mile.

  “Horty and I have a master plan; we got you scheduled all the way to Katahdin. Gonna have to plow through fifty-mile days in Vermont, but things let up into manageable high thirties in the Whites and Mahoosucs. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  He filled me in on the numbers and mileage goals. As he outlined the plan, I realized he really, truly did not want to leave us. I knew he would anyway—he couldn’t skip Hardrock—but I could feel his regret and anxiety. I understood. Even though my name would be on the FKT (if I actually made it), this was his adventure too. He was invested. To walk away? Especially now, when I was gaining momentum but also (in his view) taking big risks? It was eating him up. I had noticed a similar dynamic in play with people who’d never even been out here on the trail. Social media had connected thousands and thousands of people to our FKT, and it was shocking to me how deeply many of them were invested in the run. JLu and I were constantly getting requests for more photos, more updates, more, more, more. Followers online would observe my progress throughout the whole day. They woke up with me, they went to work with me, and they went to sleep wondering how far I would push through the night.

  It was another reminder that I was running with the collective ambitions and hopes of a lot more people than I’d ever anticipated.

  With Speedgoat and Bushido Don gone, Jenny and I were briefly down to a skeleton crew. I’d been averaging a little over fifty miles a day for the past week despite the rough terrain, which was good. Not good enough, but good. I was holding steady but not making up additional ground. The idea that I was going to build up any more of a cushion on the record was beginning to seem more and more impossible. The days were ticking by.

  But first we had to get into those big mountains that Horty had talked about back at the Housatonic River.

  Just as the team got low on personnel, my longtime buddy Walter came in, fresh from the corporate world, ready to escape his high-stress work life by getting muddy and destroyed in Massachusetts and Vermont. We started day thirty-two running through the Sages Ravine in Massachusetts. It was a magical section of trail—pristine, verdant, and prehistoric. The trail lies deep in a quiet gully shaded by an old forest, and it’s lined with glaciated boulders that have been sanded smooth by millions of years of ice, wind, and water. It felt like someone could have run this same route a few thousand years before us; it had a mystifying ancient feel to it.

  We made good time, and by late in the day we were making our way to Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts at thirty-five hundred feet.

  We ran fifty-one miles that day, and much of it was dark, cold, and wet. A storm blowing in from the Midwest announced its impending arrival. Meteorologists were calling it an “atmospheric river,” and it had been kicking up hundred-and-twenty-mile-an-hour winds and bringing tornadoes, drenching rains, floods, hail, and mud slides to much of the country. The forecast for Boston was for winds of fifty miles an hour and possibly a tornado. I thought of the mile-long mud holes of Vermont that I’d heard so much about. And those were supposedly on a good day. They were probably turning into ponds of morass now.

  Walter and I ran past Pittsfield in the beautiful Berkshires, the town where Herman Melville had written Moby-Dick, and a group of locals fell in line with us. One was a talker. He wanted to know what we had seen, how we were feeling, how many miles we were planning for the day, what we thought about Massachusetts. Then he wanted to talk about start-ups and the problems with a lot of technology and the beauty of data. Were we running for a charity, and if so, could he donate? And had I heard about the weather coming in? I don’t think he took a breath. Finally, Walter spoke up.

  “Dude,” he said, “you sure can talk.”

  “Oh yeah,” the guy answered. “My friends call me Word Count.”

  It turned out that one of those friends was four-time Boston Marathon champion Bill Rodgers, and as we ran through the town of Cheshire, he got him on the phone. It was surreal. The legendary Boston Billy was giving me words of encouragement as I ran along the AT!

  After that, we felt more comfortable asking for some quiet time (we figured he was used to people requesting that), and when Word Count peeled off in Cheshire, Walter and I got to catch up in earnest. Walter was the opposite of Speedgoat; he didn’t care about numbers or hard facts. If Speedgoat were a TV show, he would be something on CSPAN, whereas Walter would be a reality show on E!. He was mindless entertainment for me and knew me on a different level. He wasn’t a fellow competitor and he finished hours after me in races. He had once weighed close to three hundred pounds and lived a real all-or-nothing life. He’d had a lot of fun (which JLu and I vicariously enjoyed after we had settled down). He transformed his life in an incredible way and got sober and stable, so he could then be my wingman and designated driver when I needed to go out in Seattle after my divorce. I’d party and he’d throw back soda water, having just as much fun as me, until we closed down the bars. He was a great friend, one who I could confide in.

  I’ve always loved hanging out with people who’d manifested their own destinies, people who have made things happen despite the odds. There are no better runners, no better human beings. At least—they’re the people I like to roll with. And often, they weren’t the fastest runners or the most successful. They endured and they were real to the core.

  On the trail, I let Walter’s Tinder updates and his stories of the latest dating scene entertain me. He filled me in on the Boulder gossip and told me what our friends were up to. It was a world I felt so far removed from, yet I remembered it well. We ran and hiked as if we were on a training run, catching up with each other with no worries and no places to be.

  It was just Walter and me for the night shift of day thirty-two, a three-thousand-foot climb up Greylock. As we neared the summit, the wind screamed and pushed huge clouds of fog through the evergreens. It was summer and hours before sunset, but the trail went dark as midnight. Walter and I felt like we were back in the Se
attle foothills of Tiger Mountain, where we’d both spent many wet, dark miles. We laughed at how running those tough miles were some of our fondest memories, the ones full of Type 2 fun that you appreciated after they were over.

  By the time we dragged ourselves to the summit of Mount Greylock, the winds were gusting to sixty miles an hour, the temperature had dropped to forty degrees, and we were soaked with icy water, exhausted, and starving. JLu cooked us some pasta with marinara sauce and kalamata olives, and the van trembled and shook in the gale. I told Walter to forget about the tent he had intended to set up and to find some floor space in Castle Black, El Coyote–style.

  For nearly an hour, we had the coziest little dinner party in all of Massachusetts. It was one of those perfect nights where the screeching bleak weather outside only made the warmth inside more pervasive. We ate to our hearts’ content, tried to remember some of the crazier things Word Count had said, and pressed Walter for more stories from his wild dating life. Three old friends, laughing and eating and talking about failed dates and awkward hookups, all on the top of a mountain in the middle of a storm, crammed into a dirty van whose wheels were just barely holding on to the earth.

  Three old friends and…Horty.

  An icy gust of rain blew into the van as the sliding door opened and Horty’s voice, ferocious as the gales outside, rattled the van. “Hey, boy, better try and get some sleep, Vermont is gonna be real nasty.”

  Horty said the word nasty with a pirate’s breathy gusto; he loved to launch into his new and wild adventures when seas were at their highest. Horty relished the gnar. To him, true adventure should be steeped with elements of failure, risk, and even death, preferably all three. He was especially fond of the Shackleton quote “I love the fight and when things are easy I hate it.”

  He was right about Vermont, I knew it. I was exhausted, but as I drifted off I saw the fields and forests of Vermud, as Vermont was known, turning wetter and muddier and wetter and muddier. Horty the soothsayer. Horty the piratical harbinger of doom.

  Things were going to get real nasty. It was nice to have a night to forget about it.

  * * *

  Crewing for a hundred-mile race has its challenges, but it’s usually over in a day. I’d been crewing for Jurker on the Appalachian Trail for an entire month straight. Every time Luis or Horty came back, he would remark, “I can’t believe you’re still out here.” To be honest, I couldn’t either. I know that Horty’s wife, Nancy, didn’t crew for him on the AT, and Speedgoat’s wife, Cheryl, crewed a couple sections. I understood why.

  Since I was Scott’s only constant crew, and neither of us had an opportunity to take any real breaks, it meant that both members of our typically happy household were reaching their limit at exactly the same time. We were both stressed; we were both sleeping poorly; we were both sacrificing so much. It was hard for us to support each other in any meaningful way.

  Some stressors were avoidable. Some people weren’t. I loved everybody on our team and appreciated all the people who came out, but every once in a while, I wanted some alone time with my husband. It felt like we never had a single moment of privacy anymore and I was actually starting to get a little jealous of the friends and fans who got to run long stretches with him all day. He had promised me we could run the next section together alone but when Jurker arrived, a few local runners were already with him and more were waiting to join.

  I gave him a look that said, I need to talk to you—alone. And he gave me that Not now, I’m busy look right back, without hesitation. Then he invited the next group of runners to join him. I gave him another look, one that said, Oh no, you didn’t. After a month of waiting on him hand and foot, I felt completely disrespected.

  I gave the van keys to Walter and took off running down the trail. There was a side trail and I knew he thought I’d taken that because I heard him calling my name: “JLu! JLu!” Good; I hoped he went down that trail looking for me. I was in full sabotage mode now. I kept running as fast as I could just to make the point that he didn’t deserve my company. I descended a series of bluffs, and after a few switchbacks, I no longer heard his voice in the distance. He must have gotten the hint and told the runners he needed some privacy. I heard him calling after me some more: “JLu! JLu!”

  Once I hit the base of the bluffs, it was relatively flat and I tore through the trees even faster. I muttered between breaths, “I will break you,” and ran for my life. I was pushing myself, and the surprising/annoying thing was, he was gaining on me. I knew he’d been feeling good, but not that good. How was that possible?

  He inevitably caught me and I stopped. I was silent yet poised to bound off again as I waited to see what his first move would be. It felt like we were back on the PCT, having a blow-out fight about everything and nothing at once.

  “JLu, I’m sorry. I know I should have told them they couldn’t run with me, but what was I supposed to say? ‘No, I’m sorry you can’t run with me today, I need to talk to my wife in private’?”

  “Yes! That would have been a perfect thing to say. People have to understand they can’t always run with you whenever they want to. I’m so sick of you not standing up for me, not giving our relationship space. This is my trip too, remember?”

  Without giving him a chance to respond, I grabbed the tracker out of his vest pocket and held it in the air, scanning for the nearest cliff. Unfortunately, we were on a flat and wide section of trail. Undaunted, I cocked my arm back and prepared to chuck it as far into the trees as I could. At the top of my lungs I shouted, “It’s me or the tracker!”

  His eyes widened. “No! JLu! Don’t!”

  Another big storm blew in along with a high-wind advisory for eastern Massachusetts. Jurker and Walter were slogging their way up Mount Greylock, battling rain, mud, and gusts reaching forty-five miles an hour in town and closer to sixty miles an hour near the summit. Par for the course; this was our storm du jour.

  Speedgoat flew home but was following our progress and always available for remote consultations. I didn’t throw the tracker into the woods. I made my point and Jurker understood. We were a team and there was no time for holding grudges. We had other things to worry about.

  On day thirty-three, the torment raged on while we ran over and under storm-downed trees and right into the town of North Adams, tucked up in the northwestern corner of Massachusetts. In a wonderful coincidence, there was a music festival going on there that weekend that our friend Timmy O’Neill was emceeing. He was planning on joining our team so we met up in the parking lot of a Big J grocery store. I’d never been so happy to see him. We were old climbing buddies from my college days in Boulder, and over the years he’d become a best friend and mentor. He’d actually presided over our marriage on a hillside in Sunshine Canyon.

  Seeing Timmy on that blustery afternoon after a month of that grind was a huge morale boost for me and I knew he would provide the same for Scott. Even better, his emcee gig was almost up, and he was free to join our team the very next day.

  Jurker had been referring to Timmy as his secret weapon for weeks now. Everybody warned us about the White Mountains and their granite slabs and peaks. We had heard stories of exposed cliffs, and while Scott admitted he had a slight fear of heights, he always downplayed it. Unfortunately, I had seen with my own eyes how bad it truly was.

  When I worked for Patagonia in Ventura, California, I would routinely make the six-hour drive out to our friend Dean Potter’s shabin (that was his term, a cross between a shack and a cabin) in Yosemite for the weekend. Ever since those days, climbing the Regular Northwest Face of Yosemite’s famous Half Dome had been a dream of mine.

  Dean had promised me that if I trained for it, he would guide me up the route. Jurker knew this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up, and he was psyched to help make it happen in June of 2011. We left the shabin at 3:30 in the morning and started hiking in the dark toward the Death Slabs.

  The name alone should have tipped us off, but we were riding on Dean
’s confidence in our skills, so we didn’t even think twice. In the darkness, our headlamps cast just enough beam to illuminate our immediate area, which helped quiet Jurker’s fears of falling over the edge. If you can’t see it, it can’t hurt you. We scrambled up easy yet serious third- and fourth-class terrain, connecting steep sections rigged with fixed lines, often old, sunbaked ropes tied off to trees or predrilled bolts.

  We negotiated massive jumbled boulders that eventually led to a particularly steep and long section of vertical, water-polished rock. There were a couple of knotted lines dangling down from the inky-black rock faces. A skeptical and sketched Jurker looked up at the ropes, then to Dean, and finally to me and told us that he was “beginning to understand why this approach is called the Death Slabs.”

  Dean assumed that since Jurker was a world-class athlete, this would be no problem. But he’s not a technical rock climber, and here he was, scrambling up steep, wet, fifth-class slabs. He was also wearing worn-out running shoes that probably had five hundred miles on them.

  It had been a long winter, and there were more than a few spots where the snow still accumulated on narrow stone ledges. Ice-cold water was running down the face and seeping underfoot.

  Jurker didn’t complain but we could tell he was struggling. He had been carrying all of my gear so that I could save my energy for the climb, always the knight. But I insisted I take my pack for this stretch and he reluctantly handed it over. He muscled his way up the first fifty feet of terrain, hanging on to the wet, tattered ropes with white knuckles. If you’re not comfortable slab climbing, you’ll tend to not trust your feet and overgrip with your hands. This means your arms rapidly fatigue.