by Scott Jurek
It was the final leg on the final day on the Greatest Mountain, and I savored it. We couldn’t have asked for a more bluebird day. I was with JLu, surrounded by our friends, and we climbed our way up, taking nothing for granted.
As we began the final ascent, I was once again happy for my decision to go north instead of south. The last five miles of the trail up to Katahdin are like a grand finale. It’s incredible terrain all around, endless and spare and severe. People up in Maine have long thought that when the sun rises in the east, it hits the summit of Katahdin first. The Penobscot tribe puts the residence of its storm god there, and we’d learned that forty- to fifty-mile-an-hour winds are typical conditions.
Not today. Today was perfect. The higher I climbed, the stronger I got. The stronger I got, the easier my stride became. JLu laughed as she watched me. I was too tired to be exhausted, or vice versa.
We passed a crew of trail workers breaking up rocks with sledgehammers. I stopped and thanked them. Then a group of young hikers came along and giddily formed a human tunnel for me to run through. Others had gathered, having heard today was the day, and they high-fived me as I sprang up and onward.
When we passed the first false summit, we checked the time, just to be absolutely sure. It was one more mile to the actual summit, and we had three hours and forty-five minutes. It struck me that Toph’s insistence on one hour of sleep for me instead of four might well have decided the outcome. I scanned the mass of hikers for him and caught his eye just long enough to telegraph my absolute gratitude.
As we drew closer to the famous sign at the summit, I was reminded of the first time I’d seen it, in a photo. When I met Horty, back in the early 2000s, he’d taken me to his office, and hanging on the wall was a poster of a thru-hiker draping himself over the sign. His body language told a complex story not only of the exultant triumph that fills you with satisfaction and joy but also of the profound depletion that leaves you hollow and hungry. I’d wondered ever since what it would feel like to finish that same journey and touch that iconic sign.
There were tons of people on the peak. No wonder—it was a beautiful summer Sunday. I stopped, once, to soak in the atmosphere. JLu was right behind me, smiling. People started cheering and applauding as we got closer. She waved and motioned for me to keep going.
“Go!” she yelled. “Go!”
“No.” I stuck out my hand for her to grab. “We’re going together!”
It was 2:05 p.m. on July 12, 2015. I had run the Appalachian Trail in forty-six days, eight hours, and seven minutes. I had beaten the record by three hours and thirteen minutes.
One by one, our friends came over the top and joined the crowd of strangers, fans, and well-wishers. The summit magnet of Katahdin that had pulled me north was now pulling all of us together. I leaned my face against that weatherworn wooden sign that I had been dreaming about for thousands of miles. I hugged and kissed JLu. The area around the sign had suddenly become wonderfully, happily crowded, and people wanted to know how I felt.
I said, “Today is my wife’s birthday!” and everybody burst into singing “Happy Birthday” to my best friend.
A year ago we had sought peace and healing in the California desert. We’d found just enough to make us want more. I’d had a wild idea, born out of frustration and stuckness, and JLu had responded to it with both confusion and understanding. Of course she had. She was the secret to my sauce, the salt to my pepper, and being with her had been my luckiest break. I was a better person because of her, and she was the reason I was standing on that mountain.
She was also the reason why I might never have begun this journey. JLu made my post-racing life rewarding and fun; I had lost the desire to push my body to the edge. I was content. But even complacency has a shelf life. I felt an urge to reconnect with my old self, the one that might not win but still kept fighting.
Up at the top of Katahdin, I realized some of the people who’d gathered there were just starting their two-thousand-mile journey south to Springer Mountain. One of them already had a trail name, Frisbee, and I signed her disc: Get to Springer no matter what. I saw something in Frisbee’s eyes that mirrored what JLu and I had felt forty-six days ago. JLu and I had finished our pilgrimage, but we could only wonder what Frisbee would experience.
The point of a thru-hike is different for everybody. Some people assume thru-hikers are running away from something, trying to escape the real world. For me, it was transformation. I wanted to find something I thought I’d lost, to test strengths I didn’t think I had anymore, to rekindle the fire I’d thought was long extinguished. The journey was the tool I needed to pry myself open.
I guess old Horty was right. This is who I am. This is what I do.
Epilogue
September 2016
The wind came gently through the old oaks high in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It felt like an old friend, its sound and its feel and the memories it brought with it. It also felt new to me that day, almost unfamiliar. Our existence is always like this: the same but different, light then dark, found now lost, here and there and back again.
Other parts were entirely different. Above me, the nighttime sky held countless points of light and was wide open and cloudless—nothing like the gray waterlogged ceiling that hung over most of my days on the AT. All around me, the hint of fall was in the air instead of spring. I wasn’t sleepy; I was fully alert. And most pertinent: I wasn’t the poor soul just wrapping up Day 43 of a certain two-thousand-mile journey.
Speedgoat was already fast asleep in the shelter. I had just hiked in thirty pounds of food, water, and sleeping gear (including Speedgoat’s pillow) eight miles to provide a few comforts. I knew that kindness. True to his precise planning, this would be his first and only night camping on the trail. He didn’t like sleeping on rocks like I had become accustomed to. It was uncanny to have returned to the same grassy meadow where fourteen months ago I doubted myself as I drifted off for a quick nap, serenaded by these same rustling oaks.
A year had passed. I could hardly believe it. My AT trial had left me gasping for air and grasping for reality, but it had done so much more. Most important, it had tested—and honed, tempered, and steeled—my bond with JLu. I was still in awe of what she did for me last year, and suddenly I wanted to share my thoughts and feelings with the person who had joined me along the entire way. I called her that night from Spence Field Shelter. The modern cell signal, both amazing and unnerving in its ubiquity, was crystal clear as I heard her voice answer from across the country.
“Jurker! Where are you? What’s it like? Is it raining yet? Are the bugs bad? Have you seen any SoBos?”
She loved for me to describe the places the two of us had been, and I indulged her with my observations on how things were the same, and how they were so different too. How the climbs and descents that I limped through in Tennessee were now dusty instead of muddy and how the hotel where we stayed with Horty in Erwin didn’t look as depressing this time. One thing hadn’t changed at all, though. The backroads were just as sketchy as she’d left them.
“Unless that rain dance you’ve been doing causes a hurricane, he’s gonna break our record.”
She laughed. “That lucky bastard! Third time’s a charm. I’m happy for him, and I love that you’re there, helping out. I just wish I could be there too. I was so looking forward to watching him suffer!” She laughed even louder. “Tell him to hurry up. I need you back here to help with the baby.”
I could hear Raven keening in the background, and my heart went out to both of them as it always did and always would. She was born Ravenna Lynn Jurek on June 1, 2016, almost exactly a year after we’d started the trail.
“I miss you guys. It feels weird without you. I’ll be home soon,” I assured her, and hung up. I missed them both, but at the same time, I loved being out here. It was the middle of nowhere, as almost everyone would agree. But it was also something else for me. It was the middle of myself, the center of my existence, who I am a
nd what I’m a part of: my tribe, my family, and myself.
I knew she wasn’t worried about my peace of mind after losing the record. I’ve had all but one of my records broken. They don’t mean anything; it’s the acts that stand as moments and emblems for ourselves. I used Pharr Davis’s record as a device to extract the best out of myself, a goal to keep pulling me forward. You train not to beat other people but to beat time and previous performances.
I’ve always thought of trails as veins on the surface of the earth. There was so much to learn from running and sharing these wilderness passages as they crisscrossed through ranges and canyons like blood vessels spanning the continent. Each section of the trail became a volume in my living body of knowledge that was drafted by Mother Nature. Horty and Speedgoat wrote a few pages too. As did everyone else who had shared even a moment of the AT with me. That’s why I had to go help Karl. I had my piece to write for him as well. I had my own wisdom now, and it was my responsibility to pass it on. And like the progression from student to teacher, it is the passing along of that assistance, counsel, and perseverance that moves us all forward.
For several months after my run, my legs felt heavy, while I quickly regained the weight I’d lost—and then some, as JLu liked to point out. To be safe, we both took antibiotics for Lyme disease and checked to make sure no major damage had been done to my nervous system. Nothing to worry about. I bounced back and my energy returned.
In January I received a New Year’s photocard from Frisbee, stating she’d made it to Springer exactly six months after she descended Katahdin and she’d carried that Frisbee the whole way. The runner I’d snapped at in the Whites caught me at the Boston Marathon Expo the next spring. As I apologized profusely, he just laughed and said, “I shouldn’t have asked how you were doing, since the answer was written on your face.” I grimaced again.
My body healed. I became what I was before I’d started running north. I returned to normal, physically. But I wasn’t so sure about my intellectual and spiritual components. Could I ever be the same after such a pilgrimage into my deepest self? Doubt lingered on after we finished. Perhaps Timmy said it best when offering a pop-psychology assessment of my post-run state: “After such a beautiful and brutal odyssey, that white trail blaze is branded onto his soul forever.” I had nothing to add to that. I still don’t.
People often ask what getting to the other side provided and why I did it. And beyond the predictable and polite, I find it difficult to really say. Why would anyone volunteer for such suffering?
One theory that I embraced after a certain newcomer graced my life is that undergoing something like the FKT attempt was kind of like producing offspring: I wouldn’t know what it was like until I went ahead and did it. On the other hand, I’m still figuring out fatherhood, so I’m not sure that really tracks either.
Maybe the whole thing was one long and muddy Zen koan, and only through considering it in the first place could I begin to comprehend the unanswerable. I remember Timmy telling me about a presentation he gave at a university where a professor’s child suddenly raised his hand as an image of the yin and yang symbol appeared. When Timmy called on the precocious youth, he asked what color the line was between the black and white sides. The little Buddha was onto something. The line exists, but now I think I know that you have to start walking it to figure out what it really looks like.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if I ever know exactly what it all was. The adventure was as much about what I saw and who I met while hiking on the trail as it was about the perceptions that I discovered within myself, and I suspect that those impressions will endure longer than anything else. Much more a life course than a race course, the entire two-thousand-mile line north truly was my greatest reward.
We’ve already taken Raven on lots of long hikes, including one across the Grand Canyon, and I’m sure she’ll get interested in some of the outdoorsy things we do. As she gets older, we’ll tell her about how we ran and hiked all the way up America, from the bottom to the top along a major trail artery, faster than anybody else ever had. She’ll probably want to know why, but I doubt we’ll be able to tell her in a way that makes total sense, because her own sense of why will be very different. That’s how it should be. Out there in the wild, on a long journey, you hike your own hike, blaze your own trail, and only you can find what you’re looking for.
Acknowledgments
Like completing the AT, this book required a collective of talented, wise, and supportive individuals to get me to the end. My buddy Aron Ralston says it took me forty-six days to complete the trail but forty-six months to write about it. Not quite, but close. At a point when I was struggling with this project, a musician friend told me, “You have your whole life to write your first album and then you’re expected to write the second one in six months.” And I could relate.
Thank you to my literary agent, Richard Pine, for never giving up on me. Richard had been faithfully prodding me for years to write another book. Every once in a while, he would send me an email to check in. One afternoon while I was hobbling through Virginia, Richard wrote, “I’ve been following your trip. This adventure could very well be its own book.”
Thank you to the crew at Inkwell Management. William Callahan, you are an alchemist and you helped turn my muddled thoughts into gold.
To Tracy Behar, Ian Straus, and the team at Little, Brown, I know we drove you nuts, but we work best under pressure! Thank you for always giving us one more day, one last tweak, one final edit, to make things right.
And to Timmy O’Neill: you have fought for us like no other human being ever has. You went to war with me in the Green Tunnel and in the writing pain cave. I am forever grateful to you for helping me remember and be able to describe the feelings and the sounds and emotions of the wild AT. I owe you a debt that I hope to repay when you write your book.
Thank you to Christopher McDougall for your guidance, as always. Somehow your abstract and wacky ideas make sense.
The beautiful maps are by Jeremy Collins, the only person we wanted to bring that two-thousand-mile line to life.
Luis Escobar, thanks for continually answering your phone when I call. You are a master of light, and your photos bring us back to the trail so we all can relive the emotions of every moment.
The heavy lifting happened at night. Thank you to all my trail compatriots who followed me into the dark, carrying camping gear and keeping me from sleepwalking off the edge: Andrew Drummond, Timmy O’Neill, Gabe Flanders, Tristan Williams, Ryan and Kristina Welts, Nate Sanel, John Rodrigue, Joe Wrobleski, Chris Clemens, Mark Godale, Aron Ralston, and Walter Edwards.
To Topher and Kim Gaylord and to Krissy Moehl: you guys were the missing pieces to the final act. You redefined what friendship means when you answered my SOS call and came to help.
David Horton and Karl Meltzer, your guidance and enthusiasm were taken to heart and I am fortunate to have had you on my squad. Even if your early morning “Let’s go to Maine, boy!” wake-up calls and nickels and dimes drove me to the brink.
To everybody who did some miles with me, to my fellow thru-hikers, to the trail angels, to the people who came out to see me at trailheads, and to everyone following online, you got me 2,189 miles north.
To Dean Potter: I wish we had come to the Valley before you took your last flight, and I wish Raven could have met you and seen your magic. The world feels so much darker without your light. We miss you, a constant inspiration, even on the other side. Fly free, brother.
And to Jenny, this book is for you, because of you, and is you. There is no one else I’d rather walk through the fire with. You are my perpetually rising sun, my warrior, my endless source of inspiration and joy. I spent a lifetime wandering and when the path led me to you, I finally found my direction.
About the Author
Scott Jurek, one of the greatest runners of all time, has claimed multiple victories in the historic 153-mile Spartathlon, Hardrock Hundred, Badwater 135-Mile Ultramarathon
, and Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, which he won a record seven straight times. He has been named a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and one of Sports Illustrated’s Fittest 50. The New York Times bestselling author of Eat and Run, Jurek was featured in the book Born to Run and has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Time, and ESPN The Magazine, and on CNN. A passionate vegan, he lives in the mountains of Boulder, Colorado, with his wife, Jenny, and their daughter, Raven.
Photos
Jenny and me starting our Pacific Crest Trail section hike, May 2013, Campo, California. (Scott Jurek)
Jenny climbing through the zigzags of Half Dome. (Dean Potter)
Jenny topping out on the Regular Northwest Face of Half Dome with Dean Potter, June 2011, Yosemite National Park. (Dean Potter)
Where it all began, Appalachian Trail southern terminus, Springer Mountain, Georgia. (Luis Escobar)
Signing the logbook before setting off from Springer Mountain on May 27, 2015. (Luis Escobar)
Wrapping up 53 miles on Day 1 at Unicoi Gap, Georgia. (Luis Escobar)
Morning of Day 4, crossing the Fontana Dam outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park. (Luis Escobar)
The start of my knee injury on Day 6, Lovers Leap Rock, North Carolina. (Luis Escobar)
Taking it all in on Day 7, Cherokee National Forest, North Carolina. (Luis Escobar)
Jenny keeping it all together in Castle Black on Day 9. (Luis Escobar)