by Scott Jurek
When we finished, I could see in the two younger runners’ smiles the feeling I had fallen in love with more than a decade earlier. I started racing ultras when they were in grade school. Their joy reminded me how I used to feel, what I used to know.
We had trails and the fresh air and a little water and food and our fit bodies to move through and with the land. That was all we needed. Seeing Kyle and Tony so happy reminded me that that was all I ever needed, all any of us needed.
How had I drifted away from those simple joys? I wanted to regain the purity and gratitude that Kyle and Tony seemed to hold so effortlessly, so lightly. I wanted to run with the wide eyes of a novice again, with the passion and freedom of someone from whom nothing is expected.
I wanted to be a dirt bag. I wanted to camp out, to drive where I wanted. I wanted to not worry about Leah, to not worry about making a living as a physical therapist and coach while building a career as an ultrarunner. I had been working since I was a kid. I wished I had taken some time for myself. I wanted to keep running, to live in the moment, to explore my limits—but I wanted to do so with no obligations.
When I returned to Seattle, I spent a lot of time with one of my few single friends, Walter. I needed an escape. Even running long distances wasn’t bringing me the peace it had before. So Walter and I spent some time at the bars, playing pool, drinking a little more beer than I usually did, flirting with women. I needed to figure things out.
I volunteered at a race on Orcas Island. On the course, I noticed a hollowed-out tree, and I thought how wonderful it would feel to sit down inside and stay there forever. I felt hollowed out myself.
Running allowed me to define myself as an athlete. It had honed my discipline and strength and sped my path toward healthier, more joyous eating. Pursuing goals with single-mindedness had ultimately bestowed on me the greatest gift of all: the capacity to forget myself, to be absolutely present in the moment, and to appreciate the perfection of every moment. But now even the thought of running did nothing.
Walter suggested I see a shrink. The shrink suggested six months of psychotherapy. I told her to forget it.
Most of the people who knew me knew how I was feeling. Probably all of them knew. The one to speak it was Dave Terry, who had become not just my competitor but a good friend. Dave was more reflective than a lot of jocks I knew, a deep thinker. He worked as a musculoskeletal radiologist but always had time to talk. He could talk about anything, and he did so with a dry wit. His life seemed as balanced as anyone’s I knew. He rode his bike or ran 10 miles to work each way, loved a good meal and good company. He loved women, too, and there often seemed to be one around.
We sat at his kitchen table, each of us with a beer.
“Scott,” he said, “sometimes we have to go to dark places. Things will be better off and you’ll grow. You just don’t know it now.”
I kept running, a 50K here, a 50-miler there. I set personal bests at many early-season races, including the Way Too Cool 50K and, the very next weekend, the Chuckanut 50K. Then I went to Europe to attempt the race around the circumference of Mont Blanc but dropped out with a knee injury. I stayed in Europe, road tripped, ran, biked, and partied in the Dolomites of Italy, all with Dusty. Then I traveled to Greece and won my third Spartathlon (my fastest time ever). I was feted as a hero in Athens, Sparta, and all over Greece.
When I finally returned to the States after two months in Europe, I couldn’t sit still. I went to Vegas for my thirty-fifth birthday with Hal, Ian, and Jenn Shelton, with whom I became friends after the Copper Canyon, to run a 50K. We partied hard and I finished third. But if the dark place had grown brighter, I barely noticed. Running had always provided answers, solutions. Might it still?
In November I went to Texas to run a type of race I had never tried before. In the vast majority of ultras, distance and terrain provide fixed variables, and time reflects an individual’s success (or ignominious failure). In some ultras, though, the measures are reversed. In those races, time is the fixed variable. Runners run around—and around and around—a course often smaller than a mile for 24 hours. Whoever runs farthest wins.
Even the toughest and swiftest ultrarunner finds that the 24-hour contest’s monotony provides mental and emotional challenges that can be insurmountable.
In terms of physical demands, muscular stress, and caloric expenditures, a 24-hour race is much like any other ultramarathon. Except there are no mountain passes and wildflowers to imbue the event with beauty, no horizon or distant peak by which to measure your progress, no one ahead or behind you to race against, no lonely dawns or solitary twilights in which you can wrap your thoughts. Most noticeably there is no finish line, just a moment in time to mark the end.
Not all that long ago, weekend joggers would wonder aloud why anyone in the world would ever run a marathon. Many marathoners still raise their eyebrows at the notion of running farther than 26.2 miles. And even among ultramarathoners, there are those who don’t see the point of the 24-hour event. I never saw the point myself until I read Ultramarathon by James Shapiro in 1999.
Though extreme long-distance running contests have surely been staged longer than anyone has been writing about them, records of 24-hour races extend as far back as 1806, when two English athletes named Abraham Wood and Robert Barclay Allardice faced off on the Newmarket to London Turnpike for a wager of 600 guineas. Enormous crowds, wet weather, and allegations of cheating marred the event, but a new sport was born in the modern era.
The concept of the 24-hour race stretches back much farther, to a time when humans measured their endurance against the cycle of the sun. The ancient Greek historians wrote of day runners who could cover long stretches between one dawn and the next. According to Peter Nabokov’s Indian Running, Native American ceremonial running was also measured against the sun, “the runners through their exertion strengthening its movement across the sky.”
In the 1870s, the 24-hour event branched off into the six-day race, in which competitors would travel as far as they could on foot in that time. The six-day footrace stopped drawing fans, and for the most part stopped altogether, in the 1890s. It’s experienced something of a rebirth the last thirty years.
The 24-hour race, though, never went away. In 1953, the great Arthur Newton, the father of Long Slow Distance training, persuaded the British amateur Road Runners Club to stage a 24-hour event. For almost the next thirty years, 24-hour events were staged in Italy, South Africa, New Zealand, and even the United States. The first truly international competition was held at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1981.
That’s when the Frenchman Jean-Gilles Boussiquet ran 272.624 kilometers, or 169.3 miles.
In 1984, Yiannis Kouros of Greece ran 177 miles at a 24-hour event in Queens, New York, in spite of taking nearly 28 minutes to stroll through his last mile. He was just getting started. The next year at the same race, despite Hurricane Gloria’s 60-mph winds and driving rain, Kouros made it 178 miles. This time he didn’t walk the last mile.
In 1996, Kouros ran a little over 182 miles (around a track), and in 1997 he ran 188 miles, 1,308 yards. His mark was 17 miles farther than anyone else had ever run in 24 hours. It was the equivalent of seven marathons plus 5 more miles. His average pace for those marathons? Some 3 hours and 19 minutes. Upon finishing, he confidently stated, “This record will stand for centuries.” I wasn’t aiming to break his record. I thought he was right. But I was trying to get as close as I could.
I chose the Ultracentric Experience, held in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. I thought it would be a good test and that I could set a national record. But I also thought the course would be flat, as the race director had promised. It wasn’t. I was tired, and I was impressed at the monumental sameness of the event, but that’s not why I dropped out after 8 hours and 50 miles. I stopped because I knew I had no chance for a record and because running a flat course for 24 hours is difficult enough. A 24-hour race on a 1-mile loop with not one hill but two wasn’t just a challenge, it w
as insane.
I flew to Minnesota to see my mom. From my sister’s house, I called a friend in Southern California. Her name was Jenny, and I had known her for eight years, during the time she worked at Montrail, a company that had sponsored me. Jenny and I ran in the same circle of friends and attended the same runner parties. She had long black hair and a big, almost blinding smile. Not afraid to speak her mind, she told me I needed to log some miles in the dating scene, so she set me up with some of her girlfriends. But she and I stayed good friends.
I wasn’t ready to settle back into Seattle. I wanted another trip. Jenny had recently moved to Ventura for a design job at Patagonia. She invited me down to visit, and the idea of sunshine and beaches sounded better than November rain in Seattle. I had told my friend Luis Escobar that I would volunteer at his 50K race in Santa Barbara. Now I was thinking of moving there, so I wanted to check it out. I told Jenny I would come to California straight from Minnesota. When she asked if I wasn’t burnt out from traveling, whether I wouldn’t prefer to stop at home in Seattle first, I told her, “The road feels more like home to me right now.”
I stayed at Jenny’s. We went for runs along the beach and talked about relationships and life. We picked oranges and pomegranates and cooked together, and I spent a lot of time by myself at the beach while she went to work. I felt peaceful. I felt happy. I flew back to Seattle feeling content.
If I had known the turn things were about to take, maybe I would have tried to hold on to those feelings.
At the beginning of 2009, I developed plantar fasciitis, a painful swelling of the connective tissue that runs across the bottom of the foot. I worked on rehabbing like crazy and adjusted my training, running barefoot on the sand and grass, icing and strengthening. Some days I felt great, other days the irritation in the foot caused me to cut training runs short.
Then Leah called and told me she hired a lawyer. She wanted my coaching business, physical therapy practice, and my professional running career appraised, and she wanted her share of my businesses.
I imagined a life of training, working, and racing, and then writing checks with all the money I had earned and having only enough to pay my room and board—if that. Back to square one in debt. I had just gotten out of debt a few years earlier. I was angry—and frightened of bankruptcy. I contemplated “going guerrilla.” I would retire from competitive running, go off the grid, and work on an organic farm for room and board. My plan would give me more time to visit my mother, too.
Before I went underground, I made another trip to Ashland to visit Ian and Hal. We ran and hung out together, and after a 15-mile loop at a place called Applegate Reservoir, just outside Medford, we sat together over beers at a burrito shop.
It hit me that night—as I was contemplating a life alone on a country farm—how important friendship was to me. It also struck me how ironic it was that my most important friendships had come from a sport singular in its isolation and demands on self-reliance. Ultramarathons aren’t won by teams, yet the bonds I have forged through this sport of obsessive individualism are stronger than any others in my life.
Ian and Hal were as seasoned and wise as any in the sport. Like me, they were part of the twenty-something ultrarunners from the mid-nineties. We, known as the new “Old Guard” by our younger rivals, knew the purity of the sport, but we knew something that the newbies didn’t: how easy it is to lose sight of what really matters. How simple and easy and wrong it is to get caught up in all the hype of winning and reputations. I’m sure we had veterans say the same about us.
Like veterans of any sport, of any age, we drank beer that evening and pondered what the kids coming up didn’t know. We talked about the days before the Internet, and Twitter, and cell phones—when to get a reputation or something as precious as a sponsorship you actually had to do something, like win a Western States—or more like several (Hal had won it twice). We talked about how anyone could post a blog now saying that so-and-so was washed up (there had been many written about me) or that such-and-such was the guy to watch (even though he hadn’t done much more than run a small town ultramarathon or fairly fast marathon). We drank more beer and toasted a time when earning a sponsorship meant a free pair of running shoes and maybe some shorts, and—if you were really amazing and amazingly lucky—help with travel expenses. We talked about how the surfers chasing waves and the dirtbag climbers in Yosemite had it right, that even though big money was coming to those sports, the real athletes did it for the love of the sport itself and the love of each other—encouraging one another to explore their limits.
I mentioned something about how it was easy to criticize someone anonymously on the Internet, and Ian—who had heard criticisms personally when he paced me at the Western States in 1999—said, “You should go back there and win it again, just to shut them up.”
Yeah, I said, not a bad idea, but not for me. I told the guys my plan for retiring and going off the grid so I wouldn’t have to buy back businesses and my name and racing career.
Ian snorted.
“Hey, dude, just go out there and run hard and pay it off. Settle it.”
Shortly after that night my sponsor, Brooks Sports, asked me to run the Western States 100. Whether it was to shut people up or to please Brooks, I’m not sure, but I agreed.
I don’t know if it was my flaring plantar fasciitis or lack of training or the virus and fever I fought a few weeks before the race. I don’t know if I was physically fine but emotionally and mentally still a wreck. I was in the top five at 40 miles, when I ran down Deadwood Canyon to where the famed swinging bridge crosses a branch of the American River. The trail squirreled 2 miles and 1,500 feet up from there, to the Devil’s Thumb aid station. Three aid stations farther on was the town of Foresthill and Dusty. If I made it that far, I could finish. I would finish. I was still in the top ten. At Foresthill, Dusty would scream and curse, whisper and cajole. One piece at a time! Who do you want to be?
Instead of grunting up the climb, I jumped into the cool water of the American River and went for a swim. Not in a million years could I have imagined myself stopping in the middle of the Western States 100 (or any race, for that matter) to go for a swim. The waters were rejuvenating, and all my worries melted away. I floated on my back, staring at the brilliant blue sky. Dusty wouldn’t get to work his dark magic this day. My race was over.
Later, after wandering around the course, urging on runners, thanking volunteers I never had the chance to talk to, trying to enjoy the race as a spectator for once, I returned to the river at the Rucky Chucky river crossing. Dave Terry, who had come to volunteer, was there, too. We sat on the bank, two veterans, and shot the shit. I told him I had quit the race. He said it was no big deal, I had nothing to prove, that sometimes finishing and winning weren’t the answer. He said we all went through difficult times, that during the tough times we learned the most, and those lessons made us stronger. He said I’d be okay. Dave was always a top runner, but never the top. Maybe that explained his kindness.
Things did work out. Or at least they seemed to. Jenny and I fell in love and managed a long-distance relationship. We’d stay at my apartment in Seattle or hers in Ventura, California. We fastpacked into remote hot springs, went climbing in Joshua Tree, caught live music in L.A. We’d hit the Pacific Crest Trail in early spring, and even though we would spend 4 hours there, a lot of it was taking pictures, smelling flowers (literally), lying in the grass, and looking at the sky, reveling in its beauty. Jenny was turning from vegetarian (since high school) to vegan, and I was cooking Thai pumpkin curry, tofu avocado rolls, and eight-grain strawberry pancakes. Jenny was impressed because she’d never seen anyone mill their own flour before. When we were in Ventura, we’d hang out at the farmer’s market, forage the neighborhood for figs, guava, and avocados. We’d run on the beach and squeeze fresh orange juice from her neighbor’s tree. It all helped take my mind off the fact that I hadn’t won a major race that year.
I decided I would redeem mysel
f in the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB), in France.
The course circumnavigates Mont Blanc, covering 105 miles in three countries, with more than 30,000 feet of both ascent and descent. It draws more than two thousand participants each year. The equivalent of the Tour de France in the world of trail 100-mile racing, it had defeated me twice already. Or I had defeated myself. In 2007, I dropped out halfway into the race, painfully aware that the ankle I had injured before the Hardrock less than six weeks earlier hadn’t healed. The next year, because I had seen only 50 miles of the course, I arrived a few weeks before the race and ran the entire course with Italian friends over three days. Then I figured I should learn it from the French, too. So within 12 hours of finishing the three-day tour, I set off to run it in four days with Team Lafuma, including Julien Chorier, Karine Herry, and Antoine Guillon. It was the most mileage and vertical change (200 miles, 60,000 feet of vertical change) I had ever run in seven days. It was too much. On the last day, I developed patellofemoral pain (aka “runner’s knee”), which sidelined me for the next ten days. I did everything to rehab it, but on race day, after spending a lot of time in second and third place, the knee hurt so much that I couldn’t run downhill. I dropped out at mile 75.
In 2009, I was in good shape and in a good frame of mind. Jenny was running, too, and Dusty was crewing for me (the race doesn’t allow pacers). What I hadn’t counted on was the rain and, worse, the fog. I ran well early and was in the top ten until I got lost. I found my way back and moved into the top three. And that’s when nausea and cramps hit. The last 20 miles I could hardly keep anything down. This time, though, I was determined to finish. And I did, in a little over 26 hours. Eighteenth place.
When the announcer handed me the microphone after I crossed the finish line, the first thing I said was: “I am proud to be in the UTMB finisher family.” Dusty said, “I’m proud of you, Jurker!” The next day Dusty crewed, and we both cheered for Jenny as she finished in her first try.