by Scott Jurek
At one point, the trail began to plummet almost vertically, serving as a kind of funnel for all the millions of gallons of water falling on Vermont that day. The deluge turned the trail into a stream and then into a ditch. My body was so used to bending over and seeking out safe spots for my feet, I was constantly pitching forward and sliding and bruising the same areas over and over.
With Timmy sidelined, Mark “Fat Boy” Godale surprised us for the night shift, driving nine hours straight from Cleveland in a car that appeared to contain all of his possessions: children’s car seats and items from his four daughters, running gear and shoes, a potpourri of trash, and select items for this trip, including a folding lawn chair he planned to set up for sleeping inside his car. The car and its contents were like his current life situation: everything was within arm’s reach, but nothing was useful. A recent divorce had left Godale hobbling mentally as much as he was physically, due to numerous injuries and surgeries. He needed this quick trip to the AT as much as I needed him for the night shift. Over his twenty-five years of running ultras and setting records, he had seen a lot, but I don’t think he knew what he was getting into. He didn’t care. Fat Boy always had the right attitude.
By nightfall, I was holding on by a thread mentally. I asked Fat Boy why there was a house lit up on the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere. He laughed and told me that it was the moon rising behind the ridgeline of trees, not a house. I didn’t have the energy to care what was reality. And yet I was still moving forward. My decades of running had trained my brain in ways I hadn’t even anticipated. It was triaging itself, shutting off certain systems to allow others to keep going. Above all—my legs, my lungs.
Fat Boy and I staggered on into the night. It seemed like we passed one perfectly fine stopping point after another, and somehow Horty was there at each one, waving us on, telling us to keep going, to stay on schedule and get fifty miles in today, keeping track of some master plan known only to him. I was too tired to stop. The path of least resistance was in front of me, and that path kept going until 2:30 a.m.
JLu had to keep driving miles out of her way to accommodate Horty’s extended stopping points. The final stop that night was at single-car-wide Joe Ranger Road. She found the best parking place available for Castle Black. It felt like it was on about a twenty-degree slope, and I spent much of the night at the edge of the bed, clinging to JLu so I didn’t roll off. It didn’t matter; we could sleep like babies anywhere by this point. I felt bad for Fat Boy, who was trying to sleep reclined in the driver’s seat of his car while pitched downhill.
In the morning, Horty slid open the van door with his usual greeting, but I thought I could hear some doubt and sadness in his customary “Let’s go to Maine, boy.” We ignored him and tried to go back to sleep since we’d gotten only a few hours of sleep the previous night. It was pouring outside. I told him I wasn’t getting out this early, even if he was leaving today. I was completely annihilated. Horty came back ten minutes later. “I know this is really hard, and you’ve barely been getting any sleep, but you better get on the trail. Come on, boy, I’ll join you to the next road crossing.” Like a father trying to coax his teenage son out of bed, Horty got my pack ready. I asked him if he could wash out my shoes, which would give me some bit of comfort.
He did. He went out to a muddy creek along the roadside. I saw him briefly swirl my shoes in the water and call it good. I was touched that he did it, though I don’t think he actually got any mud out of them. It was day thirty-six, July 1, and it was going to rain every day until the end of the world. It was really testing my faith in Horty’s favorite aphorism: It never always gets worse. We still had the White Mountains to go. Things would surely keep getting worse. They always found a way. The homemade sign I’d seen late last night while stumbling and sliding in the mud was probably a more suitable adage: “WHEN IN DOUBT, THE ‘AT’ ALWAYS GOES UP!”
I stumbled along with Horty, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. Horty talked about the latest sleep-deprivation research and how most people could function pretty well on three and a half hours of sleep night after night. What mattered most was the quality of sleep. He told me that I could get through this, that I would have to go deeper than I’d ever gone before.
“I’ve seen you give it everything you had, way back in Erwin, Tennessee, then in Virginia, and now you’re gonna work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life. The greater the price we pay, the greater the reward. You can do this, boy!”
JLu and I were set to run the next section across the state line into New Hampshire, two distressed peas in a pod. As we slogged through the mud, she told me how hard the previous night had been for her. She told me that she hadn’t slept and that, even before that, she’d almost lost it while driving the van up muddy unmarked logging roads in the fog. She reminded me that I had once promised her she would be the crew chief no matter what, but that last night, she’d suggested stopping for the night and Horty had suggested continuing, and I hadn’t listened to her. I was on autopilot, just following the controls that Horty manipulated. I had become occluded to the person who was my lifeblood. I couldn’t believe how I had forgotten her.
I told her I was sorry, and I was. I choked up and then began to full-on sob. It was all too much. I couldn’t protect JLu out here; I couldn’t even help her. I was the danger to her. Me and the AT record.
“I’m sorry. This is crazy. It isn’t worth it. Look what I’m doing to you. Look what I’m doing to us,” I said between sobs. And in a pleading voice, I muttered, “Let’s just go home.”
We were exactly four hundred and fifty miles from Katahdin, only four hundred and fifty miles from finishing what we had set out to do seventeen hundred miles back, in Georgia. We had come so far and had gotten through so much, yet we had so much more to go. And now, after all we had been through, I was ready to hang it up.
She shook her head, and we kept going. Without her, I would have stopped in Vermont, stuck in the mud.
* * *
It was the second time I’d ever seen him cry. He almost never cried.
Not when his mother died.
Not when his friend committed suicide.
Not when we got married.
Not when I nearly died.
The first time was in April, just two months before we wept in each other’s arms in the middle of Vermont.
We went in for an ultrasound when I was eight weeks pregnant. It was hard to know what we were looking at on the screen, but we could see the tiny grain of something that we were told was the baby. We were so excited. It had been almost a year since my first miscarriage and ER visit. We were in the middle of final preparations for the Appalachian Trail, where we hoped that our baby would spend its first trimester on its first big adventure. Then the ultrasound tech measured the speck and typed two words: No heartbeat.
She didn’t say anything; she just went to get the doctor who would review the images with us and deliver the news with more ceremony. But we already knew our dreams were over.
At the doctor’s office, we were stoic and composed for each other. I tried to be positive, and I said all the things that people always said to me: “It wasn’t meant to be. It will happen when it’s right.” Jurker tried to console me, but it wasn’t necessary. I was numb to the disappointments by now.
When we got home, I lay down on our couch and put my hand over the place where the baby should have been thriving. I felt sick, like I was carrying around an empty promise. Jurker scooted me over and lay down next to me. And then he started crying. Not just crying, but shaking and sobbing. It broke me, and we were suddenly sobbing together over the loss, over our misfortune, over our dwindling hopes of ever having a family.
Sometimes it felt like Jurker wanted a baby more than I did. When we first met, I’d thought he was the quintessential hippie. He certainly exhibited some of the traits. He wore his long curly hair pulled back in a ponytail and always rocked Birkenstock sandals. I’d see him riding his m
ountain bike all over the hills of Seattle. He didn’t own a car. He would take the bus out to Issaquah to train in the mountains. I used to see him shopping at my co-op, Madison Market on Capitol Hill, with his reusable canvas bags, filling up on bulk items on Member Appreciation Day when everything was 10 percent off. He would fill these heavy five-gallon glass water jugs with reverse-osmosis water and haul them back to his studio apartment in a bike trailer. In the early 2000s, he was definitely that quirky vegan guy who seemed so extreme. He was an environmentalist and an idealist.
When we started dating, he didn’t want to have kids. It’s not that he didn’t like them; he just didn’t need to have his own. His grandparents were foster parents who took care of infants with high needs until they were well enough to be adopted. He grew up changing diapers and swaddling and bottle-feeding babies. He had been groomed to be a great father; he just didn’t have a desire to be one. At the time it didn’t bother me—I never thought we would get that far anyway.
I wasn’t even looking for a relationship. In 2007, I had just run my first hundred-mile race, and I’d broken up with a long-term boyfriend. The following year, I left my beloved city of Seattle to start the next chapter of my life in Southern California. I was living my dream of designing running clothes for Patagonia and I wasn’t in a state of mind to slow down for anybody.
The truth was, even when we became good friends, I felt bad for him. When he was newly single, I set him up with one of my hot climber friends in Seattle who was also recovering from a breakup. When that fizzled, I suggested that he visit me so I could introduce him to my single lady friends in Ventura, but he ended up spending all of his time with me.
But we were both transitioning and neither of us was willing to break stride the way you need to in order to nurture a relationship. And yet we did. Without even trying, we fell in love. By the time we decided to move to Boulder together, in 2010, he’d had a change of heart about kids. The angst he felt about the world was a little softer, and his outlook was a little brighter. The idea of raising a child sounded almost fun. I don’t know what it was exactly, and I didn’t pressure him (I wasn’t sure I even wanted to get married). I think that, in me, he found somebody who appreciated life the way he did, and he wanted to share that same joy with the next generation.
But it turns out it’s not always that easy. First he had to have his vasectomy reversed. As an idealistic thirty-year-old, he’d been staunchly anti–population growth. Seven years later, he told all his running friends that he’d had a hernia fixed, so he couldn’t run for a month, but our close friends knew why he was walking around like he’d just gotten off a horse. One joker opined, “Holy shit, you had your balls cut twice for no reason!” Love makes you do crazy things. Or undo them.
For instance, this. Here we were on day thirty-six, holding each other in the pouring rain in the middle of the woods and sobbing uncontrollably together for the second time in less than two months.
And like we always do, we put our heads down, leaned into the rain, and kept moving forward. We were physically and emotionally drained, at the end of the line. Scott had one last bright idea. “Should I call Toph and Kim?”
It sounded useless; there was no way Topher could break away from his hectic job as the CEO of an outdoor company to help a friend on the East Coast. But we had nothing to lose, so when he found himself hiking alone in the rain, he made a desperate SOS call. Of course, he got Toph’s voice mail.
“Hey, Toph, I hate to do this to you, but I need you guys to come out here. I know you’re busy but we really need you for the Hundred-Mile Wilderness in Maine. Call Jenny and figure out where to meet. The trail is gnarly out here but you could use the extra mileage; I heard you came up short at Western.” Trying to make light of the desperate situation, Jurker jabbed at him for having had to drop out at the Western States 100 a week earlier.
We ran into Hanover and crossed our second-to-last state border, going from Vermont into New Hampshire. I went to the Hanover Co-Op and loaded up on vegan groceries at this little oasis.
The dramatic day didn’t end without an absurd final act. That afternoon, somebody took a picture of Jurker sitting by the side of the van. His soaking-wet clothes were sagging off his body, his eyes were bulging from the sleepless night, and the photographer applied a filter that made him look even more gaunt than he really was. Then, as the machinery of social media whirred on, someone else snagged that picture and pasted it next to another photo of Scott from day three. The difference was stark. Of course it was—he’d been running fifty miles a day for weeks. But then another poster, a respected member of the running community, used the cheap photo trick to claim that Scott was wasting away due to his vegan diet.
It was amazing how many people had advice for someone they didn’t know who was doing something they could never do. I bit my tongue; I had other issues to tend to on Facebook. Somebody had created a fake account using Scott’s profile photo, soliciting unsuspecting female fans for money. Strangers were constantly sending me messages and when I didn’t respond, they’d get offended. In what was perhaps divine intervention, I accidentally spilled the contents of my water bottle onto my phone and completely fried it for the remainder of the trip.
Chapter 13
Special Forces
Day Thirty-Six
It wasn’t a hallucination.
There really was a chocolate cake on top of the mountain.
“Do you think it’s for you?” Fat Boy sounded appropriately suspicious. He’d been out on the trail for only a couple of days, so he still had standards of hygiene.
I just grabbed it and peeled back the foil. It was still warm.
“Of course it’s for me!” I dug in and devoured it. I told myself it was vegan, and it tasted sufficiently vegan for me not to think too much about it. Godale and I ate the whole thing. He didn’t earn the name “Fat Boy” for being overweight. It was given to him by Horty, of course, after Godale recounted a story from Western States. A runner passed and asked, “Are you Mark Godale?” When he replied yes, the guy seemed puzzled and remarked, “You don’t look as fat as you do in Ultrarunning magazine.”
“Aren’t we getting close to the road? This is the longest three miles I’ve done in my life,” he said as we descended from the summit of Mount Cube. He was stating the obvious. The story of my life, every night on the AT.
Godale once again had the graveyard shift with me on day thirty-six, in the foothills of the Whites. I knew he had a lot on his mind but I knew he needed this. He was a real OG from my era, a seven-time 100K World Championship competitor, and he’d held the twenty-four-hour American record before I set a new one in 2010, but he’d been plagued by a series of chronic injuries. Despite his wounds, every April for the past twenty-four consecutive years he had willed himself to complete the Boston Marathon.
Years ago, he’d messed himself up running in a slot canyon in Sedona and broken a bunch of bones. He’d undergone many surgeries and was lucky to be alive, but even now, he still half hobbled on the trail, and his gait almost twisted him sideways. He was in constant pain, which he was candid about. During easy stretches, I’d ask if he was feeling any better, and he’d inevitably reply, “No, it hurts like hell every step.” I sort of appreciated having someone next to me who was as beaten up as I was, if not more.
And yet, even with how broken he was, he still took pity on me. As we descended Mount Cube, he remarked that I seemed to be starring in three movies at once: Forrest Gump, Groundhog Day, and The Truman Show. The comparisons were painfully spot on.
Godale was an excellent partner during a rough couple of nights. He knew when to indulge me and when to push me on. That night, at a particularly narrow corridor of switchbacks with sharp drop-offs on one side, I hit a wall and I told him, “I gotta lie down. Like, now.” He said it was a bad place for that—and he was right—but instead of vetoing the idea, he let me lie down, and he stretched his leg out to put something between my body and the cliff in cas
e I rolled over in my sleep. “Ten minutes,” he said as I closed my eyes.
I woke up with a start, panicked. I felt like I’d been out for hours.
“Already? Scott, it’s been two minutes.”
It didn’t matter. We got up and got going. My body had its own clock and I was at its mercy.
It was 2:00 in the morning when we finally got to the road crossing that I decided would mark the end of the day. Everyone was already asleep, so I crawled into Castle Black and Mark crammed himself into his car for a few hours of partially reclined rest. Nothing came easy in the Live Free or Die state.
Even though we had pushed deep into the night, I hadn’t met the mileage goal on the plan Horty had laid out for me. I should have gone another five, to Lake Tarleton Road near a town called Warren, but I was finished, and Horty wasn’t there to yell at me. I’d nickel-and-dimed my way back into contention for the FKT and now I was at risk of nickel-and-diming my way out again.
Day thirty-seven dawned brightly, along with the hope of rebounding before officially entering the Whites.
I was greeted in the morning by an old hand, at least at the Appalachian Trail. He had the bravado of a drunken cowboy, loved to mess with my mind, and went by the name of Trail Dawg.
“Think about it! You’re forty-seven miles from Galehead, and lately you’ve been going two miles an hour. That’s a twenty-four-hour day, my friend! You won’t be done with today until tomorrow. Bet that fucks with your brain a bit.”
He shot me a cocksure glance and a wink for good measure and didn’t wait for me to respond.
“No fancy calculus needed out here. Yep, the ol’ AT speed record is just simple arithmetic, a harsh math teacher that will bust your balls every time. Man, I fuckin’ love this shit!” he said.