by Scott Jurek
I ticked off my checklist silently and kept running. Eight miles later, I passed Scott St. John and moved into second place. I made sure there wasn’t even the faintest limp in my stride. You don’t want your competitors to know there’s a wounded animal around. The wounded animal gets taken down by wolves.
I arrived at the Michigan Bluff aid station, at mile 55, after the leader, Tom Johnson, had already left. Johnson was a two-time winner of the event and held the American record for running 100 kilometers on road.
I had to turn the switch on. I had to tell myself, “You can do it, you can do it.” I still felt bad, so I took stock. I took a breath. I took off. At mile 58 I passed Johnson, and at mile 62, the Forest Hill aid station, I picked up the guy who would have made me run—and win—even if my foot had fallen off.
Dusty knew what had happened—I had told him when I saw him at mile 55—and he didn’t talk about it as we ran. He insulted me, as usual. He told me about all the beer we’d be drinking later that night. He might have mentioned that Tom Johnson was a pussy and made more jokes about Bug Boy. And when I asked who was behind me, he said, “Chicks, Jurker, tough chicks are chasing you!” One thing he didn’t do was baby me.
I won my third consecutive Western States in 16:38, my fastest time yet. I beat Tim Twietmeyer by 40 minutes (Johnson dropped out not too long after I passed him). I stayed at the finish line—with my foot elevated—to greet Twietmeyer, St. John, Tough Tommy, and every other finisher.
Ultrarunners train so hard and long and compete so ferociously that the friendships that develop are unusually sticky and tenacious. Otherwise, I’m convinced, no one could tolerate the loneliness. Those friendships have nurtured me, none more so than the one that developed in the late summer of 2001.
That’s when, at a trailhead in Sun City, California, near the base of Baldy Peak, I met Rick Miller when he emerged from his camper carrying two footlocker-sized coolers of beer. It was the night after the Baldy Peaks 50K. Rick and his wife, Barb, had driven there from their home in Ridgecrest. I had finished third, and Barb took sixth among the women. Now, Rick wanted us all to celebrate.
They asked what kind of running I did. I told them about the Western States and the Angeles Crest, and Rick said that anyone who ran 100 miles on a regular basis was insane. I asked if he ran, and if not, what did he do besides tote beer to his wife’s races. He smiled and said he had just finished a 135-mile road race near his home—it ran straight through Death Valley. I told him he didn’t have a lot of room to be calling anyone crazy. (I also made a mental note of the event, which I later came to regret.)
The next morning Rick and I ran together, 6 miles of sunny Southern California trail up toward the Pacific Crest Trail. You can spend your life chitchatting with someone—even a good friend—but spend even an hour moving over a rocky path, breathing in pine-scented air, and I guarantee you the chitchat will turn to something else.
Rick and many others helped teach me the great paradox of distance running. It’s a solitary activity, and to be a champion one must block out nearly everything except the next step and the next, and the one after that. Notwithstanding the thick ties that bind runner and pacer, teamwork doesn’t enter the strategic or tactical considerations of top ultrarunners.
And yet.
And yet ultrarunners—even the fiercest competitors—grow to love each other because we all love the same exercise in self-sacrifice and pursuit of transcendence. Because that’s what we’re all chasing—that “zone” where we are performing at the peak of our abilities. That instant when we think we can’t go on but do go on. We all know the way that moment feels, how rarely it occurs, and the pain we have to endure to grab it back again. The longer an ultrarunner competes, I believe, the more he grows to love not only the sport, not only his fellow ultrarunners, but people in general. We all struggle to find meaning in a sometimes painful world. Ultrarunners do it in a very distilled version. I had learned that by the time I met Rick.
Rick told me about his military service, how he had disarmed bombs for the Navy, that he had lost friends in Beirut and Panama. I told him about my mom, and he told me his mom was sick, too, that she had cancer. I told him about my dad, and he said his dad was a real roughneck, too, and that the two of them had gone through some tough times.
We talked about everything. At the time, I had been reading Noam Chomsky and listening to Amy Goodman on the radio program Democracy Now. Rick and Barb were fifty-two and I was twenty-six. Politically, we were two very different breeds. But he told me that we’re all human, that there’s so much messed-up stuff going on, we need to hold on to what we love. We ran for 2 hours. Every step of the way, I knew exactly where I was. I was running the Path.
Word had gotten out that I had run the second half of the Western States with a blown ankle, and Jeff Dean told me that the victory there elevated me from “cult figure” to “legend.” He said he didn’t know if he’d be able to come up with another name if I won a fourth time.
I aimed to find out.
BREATHING
Breathing is critical no matter what you’re doing, whether it be meditation, calculus, or boxing (beginning fighters first learn how to breathe so they don’t exhaust themselves by panting). One of the most important things you can do as an ultrarunner is to breathe abdominally, and a good way to learn that skill is to practice nasal breathing.
Lying on your back, place a book on your stomach. Breathe in and out through your nose, and try to make your stomach rise and fall with each breath. When you succeed in doing so, you’re breathing from your diaphragm rather than your chest (which allows you to breathe more deeply and efficiently). Once you’ve mastered that, try nasal breathing (in and out through the nose) while you’re running easy routes. For more difficult runs, like hills and tempo workouts, breathe in through the nose, then exhale forcefully through the mouth (akin to what yoga practitioners call “breath of fire”).
Eventually, you should be able to breathe through your nose for entire easy runs and to inhale nasally during the less strenuous sections of even 100-mile runs. I experimented with nasal breathing when I was training for the Western States 100, and it helped me become more of an abdominal runner. Nasal breathing humidifies and cleans the air. As a bonus, it allows you to eat quickly and breathe at the same time, whether running easy or hard.
Indonesian Cabbage Salad with Red Curry Almond Sauce
I became intrigued by peanut sauce as I ate more and more Thai food. When I learned that almonds are higher in calcium than peanuts and contain monounsaturated fat, as opposed to polyunsaturated fat or processed oils, I decided to substitute almond butter for peanut butter. The ginger and curry paste give the sauce a Thai feel, and the agave (or maple syrup) sweetens the dish. If you, like me, thought you hated cabbage, do what I did: Don’t cook it. In this case, the raw food tastes much better.
½ head green cabbage, coarsely shredded
4 stalks bok choy or 1 head baby bok choy, sliced into ¼-inch pieces
1 carrot, peeled and cut into thin rounds
1 red bell pepper, seeded and cut into 2-inch-long thin strips
¼ cup chopped fresh cilantro
½ cup raw sunflower seeds
½–¾ cup Red Curry Almond Sauce (see recipe, below)
Toss all the ingredients to combine and let sit for 10 to 20 minutes or more before serving.
MAKES 6–8 SIDE-DISH PORTIONS
Red Curry Almond Sauce
½ cup almond butter
½ cup water
¼ cup fresh lime juice or rice vinegar
2 tablespoons miso
1 tablespoon minced fresh cilantro
2 tablespoons agave nectar or maple syrup
2 teaspoons Thai red curry paste, or to taste
1 teaspoon onion powder
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon ground ginger
Combine all the ingredients in a small mixing bowl or blender. Mix well until smooth. Keeps refriger
ated for 2 weeks or frozen for several months.
MAKES 1½ CUPS
13. Of Bears and Gazelles
WESTERN STATES 100, 2002 AND 2003
Don’t work towards freedom, but allow the work itself to be freedom.
—DOGEN ROSHI
I knew my fourth try was going to be brutal. It was 105 degrees, I had a touch of the flu, and I was sure people were talking about me the way I had talked about Twietmeyer. The world was filled with guys like Ricklefs. I had been a guy like that. Maybe the past year someone had been holed up in a basement apartment on the outskirts of Seattle, emerging at night only to run Mount Si, back to back to back to back. Maybe that guy was faster than me, stronger. Maybe he was a better athlete.
If I thought biology was destiny, I would have given up a long time ago. I’ve got scoliosis, my left foot toes out, I had high blood pressure in elementary school, and my marathon time of 2:38 is nothing special. My height is a mixed blessing—good for stride length, bad for heat and technical trails—which makes my brain that much more important.
In a sprint, if you don’t have perfect form, you’re doomed. The ultra distance forgives injury, fatigue, bad form, and illness. A bear with determination will defeat a dreamy gazelle every time. I can’t count the number of times people have said, “I can’t believe he beat me.” Distance strips you bare.
So what if other bodies might be stronger? I would use my mind. Bushido.
“I want to make everyone work hard,” I told a reporter before the race. “I want to make them hurt.”
I loved ultrarunning and I loved ultrarunners, but even a superpolite vegan could be a dick during competition, sometimes even to a friend.
Dave Terry, the world-class projectile vomiter, was running on my shoulder by mile 15 of the Western States. Three years had passed since I’d first rolled to the finish line, and Dave and I had become pals. I had grown to admire his work ethic and the way he went out of the way to show kindness to everyone he met. Dave was a solid runner, often in the top three, but seldom a winner. He never let his frustration boil into anything like rudeness. What was most striking was the way he seemed to understand someone’s sadness before it was even mentioned. Dave always had a few wise words of encouragement to share—especially, it seemed, to those who needed them most.
“Hey, Scott,” Dave said as he pulled alongside. Such a sweet guy. I smiled.
“Hey, Dave!” I said in the same tone of voice I might have used if we had been sharing a beer at his kitchen table or discussing plans for a Saturday night movie.
And then, before he could answer, I said, “What are you doing up here? You must really want to hurt today.”
Then I took off.
No one called me flatlander anymore. No one opined (at least in my presence) that I was going out too fast or that Twietmeyer—or anyone else—was going to reel me in. When I wasn’t leading, I reeled others in.
It wasn’t just competitors who were treating me differently. People came into the store just to ask me questions—about what I ate, how I trained, and what shoes I liked. I had sponsorship deals from various footwear, clothing, and energy bar manufacturers, but that only covered travel expenses (not necessarily lodging or food).
It was all because I could run far, fast. And I could do that, I was convinced, because of what I was eating. I stopped the raw diet right after my 2001 Western States victory—the extra time involved in chewing was too much. I’m serious. That, combined with my concern about getting enough calories, drew me back to cooking. But I kept a lot of what I had learned: the smoothies, a large salad for lunch, paying attention to ingredients and preparation. Eating raw was like getting a Ph.D. in a plant-based diet—hard work, but worth it.
At the same time, due to losing a food sponsor, I started making my own gels. I mixed brown rice syrup with blueberries or cocoa powder and made it in bulk. I also experimented with kalamata olives and hummus on whole wheat tortillas for long runs.
My blood pressure and triglyceride levels dropped to all-time lows; my HDL, “good” cholesterol, shot up to an all-time high. I had virtually no joint inflammation, even after miles of pounding trails and roads, and on the rare occasions I sprained an ankle or fell and whacked my elbow or knee, the soreness left faster than it ever had before.
Was it the fiber that sped food through my digestive tract, minimizing the impact of toxins? Was it the food I was adding—the vitamins and minerals, the lycopene, lutein, and beta carotene? Almost every day a new micronutrient is discovered in plant foods that offers protective effects against disease. Or was it what I wasn’t eating, the concentrated carcinogens, excess protein, refined carbohydrates, trans fats? Factory-farmed animals are treated with growth hormones and steroids to encourage their rapid transit from birth to slaughterhouse. If we wouldn’t take steroids ourselves—or eat a bowl of transgenic, pesticide-soaked soybeans—why would we eat the flesh of an animal that has?
Or was the sum of a plant-based diet greater than its parts? Vegetarians are likely to have healthy habits outside the kitchen as well as more active lifestyles and less smoking. A major study shows that vegetarians watch less television, smoke less, and sleep more per night than meat-eaters.
I wasn’t sure of the answer, but my diet seemed to be working. So when I came across naysayers—and there were plenty—I weighed my experience against their theories. When I read Eat Right 4 Your Type, by Peter D’Adamo, right before my first Western States and learned that my blood type, O, was the least suited of all types to vegetarianism, I worried a little, but not too much. According to D’Adamo, my ancestral profile made me a “canny, aggressive predator” who preferred baby seal meat to bean burritos. But those burritos had fueled me through that first Western States as well as two others. (I wasn’t the only one who didn’t go along with matching diet to blood type. Dr. Fredrick Stare, founder of the Nutrition Department at the Harvard School of Public Health, calls this book “not only one of the most preposterous books on the market, but also one of the most frightening. It contains just enough scientific-sounding nonsense, carefully woven into a complex theory, to actually seem convincing to the uninitiated.”)
I maintained my smoothie habit. I made more friends at farmer’s markets. I soaked beans, baked bread, rolled oats. I entered other races, searched for new training routes. Even though I knew the Western States would be more challenging than ever, I was confident.
Before the race, Dusty had bet an old friend of his in Minnesota, Rod Raymond, one of the standout endurance athletes of Duluth, that I would win a fourth consecutive Western States. Rod took the bet. If Dusty lost, he would have to landscape the Raymonds’ front yard, a job worth $2,000. But if Dusty (and I) won, Rod had to give Dusty his 1984 Suzuki Tempter motorcycle.
The race was tough but not close. The last 20 miles, Dusty ran beside me, repeating over and over: “Vroom, vroom, c’mon, Jurker, gotta get my motorcycle.”
Later, Dusty called Rod and got his voicemail. He yelled into his cell phone. “You owe me a motorcycle, bitch!”
I won a fifth Western States in 2003 in 16:01, another 20 minutes faster, and UltraRunning magazine called it “Performance of the Year.” During that race, Dusty, behind me, screamed something as we were descending a dried creek drainage, headed to the American River, but I didn’t pay attention. It was 72 miles in and I was gliding, effortlessly. “Dude,” he said, “do you realize you just stepped on a rattlesnake back there?”
That was the race when Tonto died. He had been spending the week with Dusty and me, running every day. During the race, Tonto stayed at my friend Shannon Weil’s ranch, which was on the course. I saw Tonto at mile 55 when I passed the ranch. The next morning, after I had won, Shannon called to tell me Tonto was gone. After the awards ceremony, Dusty, Scott McCoubrey, and another friend and runner named Brandon Sybrowsky helped me bury Tonto just outside of Michigan Bluff, right next to the Western States Trail.
I won again the next year, in 2004, and set a new rec
ord of 15:36 (9:22 per mile pace), earning another “Ultrarunner of the Year” honor and, more importantly, accomplishing what I had set out to do six years earlier. Brooks Sports hired me that year to work with their design team on a new trail shoe called the Cascadia and to do presentations and store appearances. In 2005 I won a seventh consecutive Western States, something no man had done before (or since). I also trimmed off 14 inches of my hair to donate to Locks of Love, for children with cancer. It was no big ceremony, but it felt better than any other haircut I had ever received.
I treasured those races, but just as much I treasured the weeks before the competition. The local press sought out Dusty, and he always had a quote ready. In 2003, the Auburn Journal accidentally ran Dusty on the front page with the caption, “Scott Jurek 5-time winner of WS100.” We laughed about it and even had him go up at first to accept my award. The WS board wasn’t happy. But we loved it.
At night, at the campsite Dusty and I had set up in the Sierra Nevada mountains, the temperature would drop into the 30s, and before turning in we’d look at the sky. Neither of us talked about the way Dusty had inspired me to run or the success that accrued to me because of that running. We didn’t talk about how being with each other was in many ways an escape for both of us. For Dusty, those weeks took him away from his peripatetic life, his wanderings in Minnesota and Colorado, chasing snowflakes and trying to eke out a living through odd carpentry jobs. For me, it was a refuge from a life of responsibilities I had never anticipated.
Not even ten years earlier, I had been trudging snowmobile trails, dreaming big and spending big. I had planned on running hard, counted on winning. What I hadn’t anticipated were sponsorships with Brooks, Pro-Tec, and Clif Bar, delivering presentations, and attending trade shows in between races. But, as I had discovered, those were flags on the path of ultrarunning, markers on the path Hippie Dan had urged me to find. Or were they warning signs? I didn’t know.