by Scott Jurek
I walked forward and carried that burden with me; it was going to take more miles and more mud to process. Sure enough, almost on cue, I sank deep into some hidden mud. That was the whole Appalachian Trail in a nutshell. Just when you think you have the rhythm, it cuts you off at the knees.
Later that day, Timmy would be leaving. And a strong midsummer storm was headed our way. The hits kept coming. So I’d be running into wet, cold chaos with a crew made up of eager and fully capable runners but no one I had a deep connection with. The tempest would coincide with our push up Saddleback Mountain, which would inevitably stretch into the wee hours of morning. With Timmy leaving, it’d be like changing ship captains mid-hurricane.
It was too much. I called Jenny and Timmy over to the edge of the van, where I sat slouched in defeat, and told them straight up.
I’ve done the math. The math doesn’t work.
I’m sorry, I fucked up. It’s over.
There weren’t enough hours in the day to break the record. I told them it was fine. I told them I wasn’t quitting, that I’d get to Katahdin, but I’d just walk it in. There was no point to continuing with the sleepless nights of zombie marching
They didn’t listen. JLu folded an entire pizza into one zip-lock bag and filled another with a smorgasbord of Clif Shots and Clif Bars and other staples. She packed my stuff for me like I was a kid going off to summer camp. Timmy peered into my eyes and looked straight into my soul, deeper than even old Horty had, and said, “You’re so close. I’ve seen you go to the edge and back the last ten days. You’ve got this, Scotty!”
I didn’t believe him.
All that full-bar connectivity I’d had in the Mahoosucs had disappeared entirely. I was out of service once again. Over the past forty-two days, I’d seesawed back and forth between really believing I could set the FKT and coming to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t, but this time didn’t feel like part of that cycle. This was permanent. This was it. The math was the math.
I was switching gears. I was starting to look forward to a leisurely hike through the rest of the Maine woods.
I looked at Timmy with clarity.
“It’s not humanly possible. The nail is in the coffin.”
* * *
I was in shock. What the hell was my crazy, blurry-eyed, scrawny-ass, shaky-handed husband talking about? It’s over? And now we were gonna walk it in, just like Leadville 2013 all over again? Oh, hell no. I hadn’t worked this hard and gotten this far to suddenly give up and cruise lazily through Maine on day forty-two. He didn’t want to hurt anymore, and I didn’t want him to either, but he’d have to wait until he got to the other end of this suffer-fest for that relief.
We were too close to quit.
“But I did the math. There’s not enough hours in the days. I fucked up.”
“What are you talking about? We have five days—you can do it!”
Visibly frustrated, he sighed. “JLu. Today is day forty-two. The record is forty-six days, so that’s only four days.”
“Jurker. Hello! We get the entire forty-sixth day plus another eleven hours on day forty-seven.” He stared at me and I saw his mind sputter. I rolled my eyes. Was he kidding me? All this drama because he’d been spewing drunk math? They say not to drive or operate heavy machinery while drowsy; I think they should add arithmatic to that list. We packed a shit-ton of food, and sent him on his way with two strangers.
I said good-bye to Timmy. Like Speedgoat, he really didn’t want to leave our team but he had work obligations back home. His imminent departure made me realize I had gotten dependent on him to help me strategize and keep morale up. Both those things had become harder in the past couple of days as we started to enter really wild territory. Thankfully, Timmy had been marshalling replacements.
It turned out that our friends Topher and Kim had understood how badly we needed them after all. It was great timing, because Toph had recently quit his job and was hanging in Mammoth Lakes with a bunch of elite ultrarunners when he received Jurker’s SOS message. Jurker had sounded so dire, Toph later told me, that he’d replayed the message on speakerphone, and everyone winced from the palpable sounds of desperation. They immediately booked tickets to Portland, Maine, and they would be arriving that night. Best of all, the two of them with Timmy had been devising a game plan for what would be the most critical part of our trip and the biggest logistical puzzle: The Hundred-Mile Wilderness, the infamous stretch of central Maine that humbles thru-hikers every season.
Along with Toph and Kim, one other person was set to arrive, a total ultrarunning powerhouse who was as invaluable to Jurker as she was to me. I was so relieved to see Krissy. She looked much better than me—rested, clean, bright-eyed, and tanned. She was one of my best friends, and it felt like she’d brought a piece of home with her. I thought Krissy would want all the details on Scott right away, but she was more concerned about how I was doing. After forty-two days and nights of serving Jurker, I was unashamedly eager for some time for myself.
Krissy Moehl and I had met way back in 2001 when we were both new hires at a footwear company in Seattle and shared a cubicle. I’d never been a runner before and she was just transitioning from running track to going longer distances. It blew my mind back then. The thought of running a marathon (and beyond) sounded outlandish to me, but here Krissy was, a sweet, normal, even-keeled girl, about to run her first 50K race. Her enthusiasm was infectious. In two years, I went from not running at all to running a half marathon, a full marathon, and then my first 50K. I wasn’t fast like her, but I could understand why she loved it.
Over the years since, we’d traveled around the world together, going to races from Hong Kong to France, and I crewed for her at some big ones like Western States and Wasatch. She’d known Jurker even longer than me; he was the one who got her into trail running when they worked at the Seattle Running Company. They were like brother and sister, so it was no surprise that she was a little grossed out in 2008 when I told her he and I had hooked up.
She had caught a ride out to the trail from a Mainer, and she managed to intersect with me near Rangeley Lake, a beautiful spot just west of Saddleback Mountain. Almost as soon as she got there, I asked, naturally, “You wanna jump in the lake?” A storm was brewing but it was still warm enough to swim. We changed in the van and caught the last rays of sunlight.
“Whoa! Look at all your bug bites!” She pointed to my arms and legs. I hardly noticed them anymore. They were reminders of the Deep South, which felt like a lifetime ago. I wondered what else had changed about me.
After drying off, we hopped in Castle Black and drove to Sugarloaf Mountain. On the way, I brought her up to speed on Scott’s status and prospects. By the time we got to the mountain, it was really pouring, and we booked a room at the ski resort. Our room was total luxury, and I’ve got no regrets. I appreciated every bit of it, starting with the hot water and ending with the clean sheets and down comforter.
There was even an outdoor hot tub, and that night we got in it and gazed up at Saddleback Mountain. It was raining hard and the mountain was smothered in cold fog, and I wondered if Jurker had made it to his destination that night, a rustic three-sided lean-to. It was so nice to feel comfortable and clean, but I did feel a twinge of guilt in not even knowing where Scott was at that moment. My imagination began to run wild. Maybe he was out there in the storm, hunkered down in his greasy fart sack with two near-strangers while I was having a blast with my best friend.
Even in a queen-size bed with tons of pillows, I couldn’t sleep more than six hours. I jumped out of bed as soon as I woke up and checked the tracker. Jurker was already on the move, which was good, but it crossed my mind that maybe he hadn’t actually stopped that night. I hoped that wasn’t the case—it’d really make me feel guilty about the hotel.
Topher and Kim met us that morning, day forty-three, at the hotel and we hashed out a plan. They came prepared with a map collection that would have made Speedgoat proud. Toph had downloaded a few AT
apps on his phone, including one that gave him real-time GPS locations so he could calculate Jurker’s pace when they were running together.
The plan that morning focused on the few—but serious—remaining obstacles.
The Kennebec River was thirty-six miles up the trail. If he was moving well, he would reach the river in the middle of the night. Do not ford, the guidebook warned. Take ferry service. I looked up the ferry service (which turned out to be a man in a canoe) and found that the hours of operation were from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We estimated Jurker could reach the river’s edge just after midnight, so that wasn’t gonna work for us. Everyone following our progress closely figured the same thing and debated online about what Scott was going to do.
Someone with the ferry service said if Jurker didn’t use the “official” ferry, his record wouldn’t be official. Other people quickly pointed out that previous AT FKT record holders, including Horty, didn’t pay the fifty dollars to use the ferry. Horty forded the river. That was an option, but one I wasn’t too psyched about. We had never been to this river before and had no idea about the currents or what lay downstream. I didn’t trust Jurker in his sleep-deprived state to walk across in the dark. He was starting to resemble a piece of driftwood, and I pictured him floating away.
So when Mandy and John, the owners of a local adventure center nearby, volunteered to stash canoes for us to use when we arrived, we thanked our lucky stars (and a local runner, Gary) for that fortuitous piece of priceless trail magic.
The second hurdle was the Hundred-Mile Wilderness. I was impressed at how much research Toph and Kim had already done. It’s a uniquely complicated section of the trail to support because it is crisscrossed by logging roads, and the entrances to the wilderness are guarded by locked gates that open and close at specific times. So once we got in, we wouldn’t be able to leave until the gates re-opened. If we took too long and got caught inside, we could be screwed. There were also no amenities of any kind once inside.
We studied the maps and entered the wilderness as soon as possible. Once we were inside, Topher suggested we drive our routes and scout out our meeting locations, just to make sure our vehicles could get to each destination. That stereotypical phrase (said with a northern Maine accent) “You can’t get they-ahh from hee-yah” was invented for places like this.
Jurker would cross the two-thousand-mile mark this morning. Only a hundred and eighty-nine miles lay between him and Katahdin.
We were about to find out if we could get they-ahh from hee-yah.
Chapter 15
The Hundred-Mile
Nightmare
Day Forty-Two
I probably shouldn’t have been crunching numbers in the state I was in. When JLu corrected me and pointed out I had an entire day that I’d overlooked, it was undeniably bittersweet. The FKT was still possible—but, man, did that leisurely walk to Katahdin sound good.
Not yet, though.
Day forty-two hinged on that moment. Before it—before JLu had brought me to my senses—everything was chaos. Up and down. Physically I was feeling okay, but mentally I was a basket case. Her talk braced me.
Ryan and Kristina had taken off. Timmy had just left us, and Toph was due to arrive tonight, but for the moment, I’d be running with near strangers. They joined me for the second stretch of the day, a nineteen-mile night run over Saddleback Mountain. It got me thinking about how my team had worked (and occasionally not worked) so far. It got me wondering about how teams come together or fall apart.
It made me nervous, as we ran through the night, that my current team consisted of me and two men I’d never met before. And we were plunging into the most challenging last step before the final ascent. This was the darkness before the dawn. John Rodrigue and Chris “Tarzan” Clemens looked stable enough, and I had heard they had toughness, but I was at the end of my rope and I didn’t have anything left to manage a team. I needed to be managed. To give that responsibility to strangers was a risk I hated to take.
Could they motivate me?
Were they going to know when to push me and when to give me slack?
Were they going to know how to push me?
A few hours before, in the afternoon of day forty-two, I’d been ready to walk it in to Katahdin. It was a critical moment.
I was also a little worried Tarzan might think I was deranged. He’d seen me beat my broken pole into pieces earlier in the day. Not a good first impression.
John had come to us via the friendly and über-helpful Maine Trail Monsters running club, so I knew he’d at least have experience out here in the endless north country. Tarzan was here with Luis, and I trusted El Coyote’s choices. It was comforting to run with them knowing that Tarzan had thru-hiked the AT in 2012, so he had recent memories of what I was going through.
Beyond those few details, I didn’t know them. The FKT was at its most perilous—we were officially in make-or-break mode—and I’d be running with the equivalent of Facebook friends of friends.
But beggars couldn’t be choosers.
The last goal of the day was to get in nineteen miles and spend the night at the Spaulding Mountain Lean-To. The miles would include a two-thousand-foot trek up Saddleback Mountain, then a drop back down, followed by another two-thousand-foot climb up Spaulding Mountain and everywhere in between, the countless mini-climbs the AT is known for.
After we’d climbed six miles through the dense forest, we popped out onto an open alpine ridge. As we neared the top, the fog was so thick I could feel its tendrils swirling around my face. It blotted out the sky, and as we ran, our packs and clothes were dotted by drops of rain that seemed to materialize out of nowhere.
With John motivating us, we made a steady push up and down the ridges of Saddleback—nothing spectacular, but our rhythm reassured me that I could still perform when I had to. I took the opportunity to interview them both (and hoped not to find out anything discomfiting).
John was an unassuming hard man, a single dad with a grown son who’d recently caught the ultrarunning bug himself. He was self-reliant and reserved, a classic Maine provincialist, who heard I would be running through the local trails and cleared his schedule to be available to help in any way.
Chris Clemens was paper-thin but quick as a whippet, with muscles like steel cords. Caballo Blanco had called him Tarzan because he had long brown hair and was perfectly comfortable in the middle of nowhere. Chris filled his pack with an outdoorsman’s knack, jamming in a tent, sleeping bags, and more food than I could imagine us eating. It turned out to be just the right amount, but I could never consume enough calories per day. I’d still lost close to nineteen pounds.
I quickly dismissed my apprehension about whether these guys would help me perform. Having their fresh energy around me was as good as being with old friends.
It was still light when we summited Saddleback, a beautiful mountain with slopes covered in purple and pink midsummer wildflowers. We picked up the pace as the trail dropped suddenly into a steep decline—and there, to my shock, was Timmy with a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in each hand. He had decided he wasn’t ready to leave the adventure just yet.
Clearly in a party mood, he’d been up at the crest with a couple of guys who worked at the Saddleback ski lodge. They’d hiked up the ski run, and the three of them had started the party without us.
“Man,” Timmy said boisterously, “when you guys were coming down the ridge, it looked like you were descending on a cloud!”
He was beaming at me, and I later found out why. He said that as I was running down the hill, he could tell from the look on my face that I was back in the game. He said it was the polar opposite of the look he’d seen less than twelve hours earlier, when I’d told him it was all over. Timmy’s mood, as usual, was contagious, and the party at the top of the mountain felt celebratory, a harbinger of good fortune.
That night at the Spaulding Mountain Lean-To was wet and dreary, but on the morning of day forty-three, I dragged myself out of my sleeping
bag at four thirty, squeezed as much water out of my socks as possible, and got ready by consuming the leftover pizza JLu had packed for me and a couple of Clif Bars. They broke down my tent, and I went ahead without them, knowing they would catch up.
I had four and a half days to reach Katahdin. I had slept a mere four hours for the second consecutive night. Each night was the same; as soon as I laid my head down, it felt like it was time to wake up. I needed to get more sleep, but I also needed to cover more miles. Despite the mist and fog, the air was balmy even before sunrise. I’d woken up warm, so I felt loose and just a touch rested. But the real reason I was feeling good was I knew Toph, Kim, and Krissy were about to join our team.
But as excited as I was for the arrival of one of my oldest and most trusted friends, I had no idea just how crucial he would be in the last, excruciating days and hours of the FKT.
The morning of day forty-three quickly warmed up as the storm passed. Just as we left the talus slope and reentered the Green Tunnel, I spotted an oncoming runner. Topher!
“Are you kidding me? This trail is crazy; it’s so gnarly. Is it all like this?”
“You’re in for a real treat!” I said as I gave him a solid hug.
True to form, he wasted no time. “From right now, we’ve got four days and five hours to get to the top of Katahdin. You’ll need to average somewhere close to fifty miles a day. It should be doable, if we execute it right. The x factor is sleep. The y factor is your hourly pace.”
Topher had the numbers. He had the authority. He had my ear. If he said it was possible, I believed him. I didn’t have the energy to doubt.