by Scott Jurek
Trail Dawg (aka Andrew Thompson) was an acolyte of Horty, once a cocky puppy at Liberty University whom Horty had brought into his rabid pack of Horton disciples. They did the twisted stuff, like running Horty’s fifty-mile racecourse out and back for a “fun” hundred-mile training run. The Masochistic Professor had taught Thompson well in the arts of extracting pleasure from endless struggle and reveling in the gnar.
But most important for me: Trail Dawg had set the AT record back in 2005 after a bunch of wild attempts. So he knew what I was going through and what I needed, even if that included a few jabs at me to see how I was holding up.
I pressed him for wisdom as we began a day that would involve a four-thousand-foot climb to Mount Moosilauke, the traditional gateway to the White Mountains. The wisdom he shared wasn’t exactly the wisdom I wanted to hear, since he noted that I was already behind Horty and Speedgoat’s battle plan and that this day was definitely going to bleed into tomorrow, as my last few nights had. Another graveyard-shift finish. Another lonely broken night.
Timmy decided to try to take my mind off the bad news. He made several calls to local contacts; he quipped that it wasn’t what you knew but who you knew that opened doors. He mentioned that he recruited a running brother of a climbing friend who was willing and able to help us out. I imagined a lanky climber, like Timmy, so when Andrew Drummond showed up, I was taken aback. He was at least six foot two and had the build of an Paul Bunyan. He was formidable and his presence alone boosted my confidence. He seemed capable of dealing with a multitude of difficult scenarios, from grim weather to the gnarliest sections of trail; we could send him in and expect results. Timmy called him Special Forces, which was perfect. As soon as he showed up, he said he was game for an all-nighter in the Whites.
About fifteen miles into the day, Special Forces and I finished our forty-eight-hundred-foot ascent to the granite plateau atop Mount Moosilauke, a name that came from the Algonquin word for “bald place.” For the first time in eighteen hundred miles, I was above the tree line. The summit was energizing. The sun was shining, and chains of mountains stretched far into the distance. Franconia Ridge was out there, and beyond that, our destination of Galehead Hut. It looked so near. I felt a surge of short-lived optimism. Everything lay at my feet—the whole trail, the whole world.
It was the first of many dispiriting illusions of the Whites.
It’s a strange thing, but even though I remember feeling triumphant and optimistic when Special Forces and I summited and then began our descent, I would later hear that this was the point in the journey when I really started to frighten people. Strangers stared at me when I picked up my food with my dirty fingers and shoved it into my mouth. They said I looked like a shadow of myself, a weaker, sicker version. My skin was stretched taut over my cheekbones, and I had grown scraggily facial hair. More than a Heisenberg but not quite a beard.
My high spirits were partly due to the company of my two newest crewmen and several locals. Special Forces radiated intense adventure, and Trail Dawg—well, he was a trip. As we ran, he regaled us with stories about Maineak’s winter AT SoBo hike aided by a bottle of whiskey and a rickety aluminum-frame pack. He told us how last summer he’d climbed all forty-eight of New Hampshire’s four-thousand-foot peaks in three days and fourteen hours, beating an eleven-year-old record by an hour. He shared tales from the Barkley Marathons, the gleefully perverse Tennessee nightmare that pulls entrants a hundred miles through bramble, across raging rivers, and over almost impassable Appalachian terrain via unmarked paths with nicknames like Rat Jaw, Hell, and Nun-Da-Ut-Sun’Y (Cherokee for “the trail where they cried”). The race began in 1995, and since then, only fifteen people have even finished it. Horty was one. Old Trail Dawg was another. If a challenge was especially burly, he wanted his name on it.
He had attempted FKTs numerous times on the AT and finally cracked the code going SoBo in 2005. His most impressive accomplishment on the trail, to me, came on his last attempt. That’s when, after he ran the first two hundred miles SoBo, fighting his way through Maine, he found that the rivers and creeks he needed to cross were too high to continue. Instead of heading home, he drove straight back to Katahdin, waited a couple days for the rivers to recede, and started over. That sounded utterly mental to me.
The Whites were Trail Dawg’s kind of place. He forged ahead in front of us, through rugged, rocky climbs and then down into mucky lowlands where portions of the trail morphed into creeks.
As we scaled North Kinsman Mountain, Special Forces pointed out a peak in the distance. “The backside of that one is full of the nastiest scree you can imagine. It’s just a slippery-slide of little rocks, with plenty of trees and brush to crash into.” He wasn’t complaining. Like Trail Dawg, he seemed to get more gleeful as things got rougher. I didn’t mind; I just hoped their joyful masochistic wisdom would wear off on me. It was exactly the kind of crazy I needed to finish this thing.
Fifteen miles in, and day thirty-seven was just getting started.
I had been on my feet for too much of the past twenty-four hours, too many of the past ten days, and I was beginning to display the signs of long-term wear.
Horty and Speedgoat had both been explicit in their directions: get to Galehead Hut the first day in the Whites. They said it would give me a psychological lift and then shorter daily mileage would ensue after that. I followed orders even though I did notice my mental state had started to warp. Since the Whites were completely foreign to me, I was inclined to cling to whatever concrete advice I had. I needed to start breaking down the remaining and toughest part of the AT into smaller tasks anyway. If I focused on the impossibility of reaching Katahdin within ten days, I despaired. Focusing on Galehead made things smaller.
But I was fading, and day thirty-seven seemed to be whipping by. I wondered what I would do if I didn’t make Galehead until sunrise. Would I just keep running? That sounded impossible and I had to avoid that at all costs. I needed to get to Galehead—I needed to sleep.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. As I’d dreamed this up, back home in Boulder, I’d imagined myself getting stronger as I approached Katahdin. Less Bilbo Baggins in Mordor, and more Galahad and the Holy Grail. But that wasn’t happening.
I wasn’t becoming more powerful, not at all. Instead I was being stripped down not only of fat, muscle, and nerve but also of my mental toughness. I was losing it, but maybe that’s what I needed to do.
At Franconia Notch, I met up with JLu and the others who had hiked in a mile from the parking lot. We took our time carefully reloading my pack with absolute necessities for hiking through the White Mountains at night—headlamp, extra batteries, waterproof jacket, additional layers, space blanket, and as many caffeinated calories as possible. Trail Dawg was leaving and all I could hear over the waters of the Pemigewasset River was his proclamation “That’s a twenty-four-hour day, my friend.” This should have been a flashing red warning light, but the Horty-Speedgoat protocol of “Galehead or Bust” had me seeing only green.
A less-hobbled Timmy cycled back in and with Special Forces we all left Franconia Notch in the waning light. Even though I was buoyed by their comedic banter, we soon donned our headlamps to combat the gnarled and rocky terrain, and I felt the sinking repetition of here-we-go-again, another Late Late Show finish. I tried to utilize selective amnesia to the many recent twenty-hour days, as Frank Shorter rightly claimed that “your mind can’t know what’s coming,” in reference to previous marathon trauma.
The night took on a surreal quality, as if we weren’t consuming only miles and hours but also mescal buttons. When we finally reached the ridge of the bald granite mountaintops, it reminded me of a Martian landscape of stark and beautiful stone expanses with no other earthlings except for three alpine space walkers.
“Holy shit!” For the first time I had dozed off and almost catapulted down the granite trail. I was actually sleepwalking before I suddenly snapped to and caught myself as I slid down a series of cascadin
g roots atop steep stone slabs. Timmy later told me that my movements resembled water sliding down the path of least resistance, as if I had surrendered to gravity.
As my trail compatriots traded laugh-out-loud anecdotes and parody songs, I realized how much fun I could have been having. I was like the boy in the bubble; I could see but not actually touch their world. I would laugh to myself in between head bobs. I had no idea what time it was. The hands on my internal clock slowed then sped up, and I couldn’t determine if it was really late or really early.
A swirling fog suddenly appeared, as if a genie that had long been straining against its cork had finally wrested himself free from the bottle. It seemed as if the genie were showing me another dimension of the AT, one that would have me losing my mind as I had never done before.
And then I heard the tiny, almost secret peeps and chirps emanating from the bushes. “Are those the birds? No!” I was crushed to hear their songs, which signified the approaching dawn. Even the freaking birds were mocking me. Then over the next hill we saw it: Galehead! Even though we were close enough to make out the doors and windows, I saw that the way ahead curved down, around, and then back up. That mere mile appeared impassable.
“No, no way, how, what…I’ve got to sleep now,” I weakly explained as I lay down on a perfectly flat rock.
Timmy looked at me like I was crazy. “But it’s right there.”
“I can’t do it, dude, give me twenty minutes.” I pulled my headband over my eyes and instantly fell asleep.
Timmy stood over me and thumbed New York Times articles on his phone as Special Forces went ahead to Galehead. Most likely by the time his head was hitting the pillow, mine was jerking awake. I snapped my head north and almost crowed, “Let’s go to Maine!”
As the sun began to push above the horizon, I rediscovered my body and felt my limbs warm. I remembered how to use them. I remembered why I was there. I forced myself into some semblance of walking and stumbling. I’d been going for about twenty-four hours.
We pushed on. Or that’s what Timmy told me happened, at least. I don’t remember arriving. I have a vague memory of climbing up a giant ladder and Timmy spotting me from below. The bunk beds were stacked five high, and due to our late arrival, the only beds available were on the fifth level. I poured myself like wet concrete into the bed, and I heard him saying something about two hours.
That’s it. I slept for two hours.
And then awoke to the smells of breakfast. Timmy was shaking me. The hut was a small dormitory run by the Appalachian Mountain Club and staffed by college kids, who sang wake-up songs and made tasty meals. One of them played the fiddle. I climbed out of bed, drank some coffee, ate some miraculous oatmeal, put on the same drenched socks and shoes, bade farewell to the young chorus of joy, and then Timmy, Special Forces, and I staggered off.
Almost right away I was on a steep ascent of South Twin Mountain, and soon we were climbing hand over hand, grabbing roots to pull ourselves over rocks and boulders bigger than we were. The rain had stopped; the sun was shining. I’d run all night and into the next morning, for twenty-six hours straight with only two hours of sleep. I had never felt this beaten. The cumulative stress and sleep deprivation were exacting a toll I never could have imagined.
It was a small moment, a few minutes after we began hiking on day thirty-eight, that crystallized how defeated I was. I didn’t break down crying; I didn’t fall asleep standing up. It was something simple and pathetic. A root. One of a trillion I’d seen and avoided over the past several weeks. But as I saw it coming, I didn’t know what to do. Was I supposed to step around it or over it? I just couldn’t remember. When it finally came, I tripped on it and stumbled forward. I’d forgotten how to raise my legs, how to run like a sane person. In Vermont, I’d thought I’d hit rock bottom, but the granite load of the White Mountains of New Hampshire pushed me even farther down, and then I broke. Just like everybody had warned.
Suddenly, running down toward us—almost floating—was a guy in a sleek running kit, breathing easily and lightly. He moved like a memory of myself, like El Venado had, once upon a time.
“Hey, Scott!” he said. I didn’t know him. “How are you doing, man?”
I slowly tilted my head upward and then mumbled, “How…the…fuck…do you think I’m doing?”
Within a few steps, I was mortified that I had said that out loud. My censors were on break, having a smoke out back with that genie who had escaped from the bottle.
It wasn’t like me to snap at someone out on the trail, especially someone who had simply asked me how I was doing. I realized almost immediately that my short fuse had to be a symptom of something deeper. I entertained the idea of turning around, chasing the runner down, and apologizing right then and there. But that just made things worse; it was hard for me even to imagine myself going fast enough to catch up to him.
The truth was, I was crawling. It really felt like I was on all fours, moving forward inch by inch. Of course I had known that I would go through stretches like this, but I had also known—known deep down in my bones and muscles—that by this point on the journey, I would have become trail-hardened like I always had before. By now I should be stronger.
That transformation wasn’t happening. I wasn’t becoming a sharper version of myself; I was getting smaller, slower, and weaker.
I consoled myself with the thought that my current state, equal parts escaped convict and mobile shipwreck, was not the worst state I could be in. I could be sitting still, either passed out or asleep. Back on that rock, in that motel, in Castle Black, or on my own couch, dreaming about throwing away the record. As long as I was falling forward and getting up to fall again, I wouldn’t come in last in the race against myself.
I’d had some education in this kind of overreach before. Way back in 2000, back when I was really at my physical peak, I won the Western States 100. It was the second year in a row I’d won it. That would have been enough for almost anyone, but I got into the Hardrock Hundred that year too, and I decided I’d do that race right after Western. I’d have only two weeks off, two weeks to recover. There was no way I could win it, and I knew I’d be tired, but I figured I could at least cruise the race and enjoy it. Maybe get the lay of the land for the next attempt, the real attempt.
I dropped out of the Hardrock after forty-two miles. My legs were destroyed.
I had been young and naive and way too optimistic about how well I’d recover.
The truth was, and is, that mountains humble you. They humbled me. You can steal a performance or two, but you’d better be prepared to sit back and rest after your finish.
A decade and a half later, I was older and less naive. I hadn’t thought I’d be blazing through this section of the White Mountains, but I’d thought I’d at least be upright.
By the middle of day thirty-eight, I was preserving what little energy I had left by avoiding decision-making altogether. I just pressed Play and let Timmy and Special Forces tell me when to stop.
There was one delectable moment that day in the Whites. We came to a little cabin called Zealand Falls Hut, an oasis for hikers. I was so spent it felt like I was taking a line of credit that I could never pay back and I slumped on a bench outside; I didn’t want to be lured inside lest I lay my head down to sleep. But even outside, there was peace. I could hear hikers and the young staff cooking and laughing.
And it was where Timmy found a priceless treasure.
Later I learned that Timmy had left twenty dollars for a massive bag of potato chips, an absurd amount in the real world. But in the wilderness, it was worth it. I would have paid a hundred. The fat, the saltiness, the crunchy carbs—they were pure comfort. All three of us were shoveling them in with abandon. Timmy later showed me a picture he took of me with my little feast. I was guarding a pile of chips in my lap and looked pitiful. First I laughed, then I realized I barely recognized myself.
“You look like a fugitive emerging from a year in hiding,” he joked. Timmy
always knew how to employ the best gallows humor.
Nine potato-chip-fueled miles later, at 3:00 p.m., we stumbled into a clearing and a jam-packed trailhead parking lot. We had finally arrived at Crawford Notch. And I still had a disturbing twenty-four miles to go that day, including a five-thousand-foot climb up to the summit of Mount Washington.
The crowd waiting at Crawford Notch included JLu, who’d expected me to arrive there at 9:00 a.m. She had been sending runners up the trail to try to find me all morning—a wise tactic, since it also allowed her to have some peace and quiet there at the trailhead. Once I got there, she immediately tried to get me rested and ready. Maybe if I’d had Jenny back in 2000, she’d have talked me out of trying that audacious double dip of Western States and the Hardrock that had humbled me. Now, luckily, I had people who told me what I needed to hear. Timmy, for one. It was Timmy who’d seen me snap at the innocent runner we’d crossed. Like JLu, he realized I needed protection (from myself, mostly), so he leaped into action before I could reveal the antisocial depths to which I’d fallen. He became the jester of the Whites, cracking jokes and generally keeping people’s attention off me, while Special Forces guided me down the path.
The key thing he did was create a buffer of approximately fifty feet of trail space between me and the people behind me. If a group started running faster or if I slowed down, he would hold the gang back until the fifty-foot cushion was restored. Under other circumstances, I would have felt bad about keeping myself so separate. I wanted to be a part of the jovial group of runners, but I wasn’t in the right state of mind. It was the greatest gift anyone could have given me at the time, the gift of not having to be on.
Still, Timmy couldn’t hide everything from the others. He later told me that at one point, at the head of a bunch of eager runners, I stopped so I could pee. I didn’t even move off the trail. I just stopped, relieved myself right there, and then kept running. He said I was like a feral animal, unbothered by courtesies.