“That’s what Adderall is: B-L-O-W,” she spelled out over the phone.
The two went back and forth repeating those letters because Aaron couldn’t figure out what she was trying to spell, until his mother became frustrated and blurted out: “Cocaine, dipshit! That’s what Adderall’s like.”
Aaron’s mother, Terri Hernandez, declined the Globe’s request for an interview.
In another of their jailhouse calls, Aaron lamented that he long felt he could never be fully open with her.
“There’s so many things I would love to talk to you [about], so you can know me as a person,” he told her. “But I never could tell you. And you’re gonna die without even knowing your son.”
The strains of this relationship were apparent to many of Aaron’s closest friends and family, but not to the college recruiters and coaches assessing his rare ability as a football athlete. In wooing Aaron, they felt they needed his mom on their side—she was, after all, the only parent of this rising national star who tragically lost his father in high school.
It was their story, and publicly they would play their roles in it well.
Meyer, one of the nation’s top college coaches, traveled to Bristol. He visited Aaron’s childhood home and met with his mother.
There was another visit. Hernandez’s high school principal said he also met with Meyer. The Florida coach asked for something that took the principal by surprise.
Meyer wanted Hernandez at the University of Florida—and soon.
Nick Heil
Is Kilian Jornet for Real?
from Outside
* * *
Around 2 a.m. on May 28, 2017, Kilian Jornet crabbed across Mount Everest’s North Face, alone, delirious, at nearly 27,000 feet, and far off route. He was descending from the 29,029-foot summit, his second trip to the top without supplemental oxygen in seven days. But now he was lost and couldn’t recall how he’d gotten there; his memory from the past hour was blank. It was snowing, the slope growing icier and more precarious with every move. “I thought maybe I was having a nightmare,” Jornet told me recently, “and that I would wake up in Base Camp. I dropped a rock to see how steep it was, and I realized it was not a dream and that I needed to wait until daylight so I could see before making any more decisions.”
At first light, he discovered that he had strayed more than half a mile from the North Ridge, the route that would take him to the North Col and down to the relative safety of advanced base camp (ABC), at around 21,000 feet. That left him perched dangerously near the top of Everest’s soaring 7,000-foot north wall. Eventually he was able to navigate using GPS waypoints on his watch, traversing slowly back to the route. He had no radio or satellite phone, and no way to alert his lone teammate, the filmmaker Sébastien Montaz-Rosset, or the handful of friends he’d made since being on the mountain. Far below, at ABC, they peered anxiously through a spotting scope in search of Jornet, now hours overdue.
Everest was the culmination of the Summits of My Life project, which Jornet began in 2012 in an attempt to establish speed records on a collection of iconic peaks, including Mont Blanc, the Matterhorn, Elbrus, Denali, and Aconcagua. By then, at age 24, racing had lost its luster. He continued to compete—he liked meeting people, enjoyed the milieu—but he’d already won everything there was to win, often multiple times, including marquee pain parties like Colorado’s Hardrock 100, the 106-mile Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB), and Alaska’s brief but brutal Mount Marathon. Summits was a chance to pursue more imaginative, independent projects, moving how he liked, fast and free, on his own schedule. It had a tragic start. While attempting the first objective, the Mont Blanc traverse, his partner, world-champion ski-mountaineering racer Stéphane Brosse, was skinning beside Jornet above the Argentière Glacier when a large cornice broke off between them, pitching Brosse 2,000 feet to his death. They had been separated by only a few feet. For months, Jornet could not understand why it had not been him.
Despite the tragedy, Jornet went on to flash up and down the other peaks, setting records, traveling light, deploying his bohemian brand of mountain endurance, and often doing in hours what took other experienced climbers days. With support from his main sponsor, Salomon, and help from his friend Montaz-Rosset, Jornet produced impressive documentation of each mission: photos, blog posts, data, and several films. By the time he arrived at Everest in 2017, his third trip there in as many years, he was one of the most recognized athletes in adventure sports, with a robust social media following, including nearly 250,000 on Twitter and more than half a million on Instagram. Some fans even referred to their Salomon running shoes as Air Jornets.
Many people, myself included, had tuned in to his feeds during the Everest expedition, only to find them frustratingly quiet. When the news emerged, on May 28, that Jornet had climbed Everest not once but twice in a single week, and that he was claiming a new speed record, it seemed extraordinary to the point of confusion. Two ascents, back-to-back? Without oxygen? By himself?
I was intimately familiar with Everest’s north side. In 2007, I’d climbed to the North Col, at 23,000 feet, while working on a book about the mountain. I knew the perils of Jornet’s route via the Northeast Ridge and had written about the disturbingly high number of people who’d died there. I’d never heard of anything remotely like Jornet’s achievement—four trips above 8,000 meters in less than a month—which quickly made headlines around the world. There was some predictable grumbling. “The public only understands velocity, they don’t understand climbing,” said Himalayan gadfly Reinhold Messner, dismissing the feat as merely racing, not mountaineering. But the occasion was largely celebrated as a historic milestone.
“I can’t imagine trying to recover and climb again five days later, physically and emotionally,” says alpinist and guide Adrian Ballinger, whose own oxygenless ascent of Everest coincided with Jornet’s. “I climb at altitude and recover pretty well, but this is a whole different level.”
That summer, Jornet went on to notch a string of performances that were, even for him, astonishing. Two weeks after Everest, he set a blazing pace in a road half marathon in Norway that ascended more than 5,500 feet, cranking out miles in under six and a half minutes on an 8 percent grade and winning in 1:30. By August, he had won Hardrock, the Marathon du Mont Blanc, Switzerland’s ultracompetitive Sierre-Zinal, and the Glen Coe Skyline trail race. In early September, he placed second at UTMB, 15 minutes behind his Salomon teammate François D’Haene, a veritable photo finish after 106 miles. Jornet won, or nearly won, everything he entered.
The Everest feats, meanwhile, started coming under scrutiny. Where was the proof, critics demanded—the summit photos, the GPS track, the witnesses? Why did arguably his greatest accomplishment, in a career strewn with meticulously documented accomplishments, remain fuzzy? Forums like LetsRun hosted heated threads dissecting the issue in granular detail. In early 2018, the Spanish climbing magazine Desnivel ran a cover story calling Jornet out, stating, “He did not show definitive evidence of what he had done.” When I reached out to Himalayan Database, the Kathmandu-based organization that has been verifying Himalayan mountaineering since 1991, it had not confirmed either of the climbs. It was impossible not to wonder, in a post–Lance Armstrong fake-news world, if something was amiss.
* * *
Most people know Jornet as a runner, but that is only half the story, maybe less.
“I don’t like to put tags on things,” says the 30-year-old. “I like to move on mountains in different ways. In summer it’s logical to go on foot. In winter, in snow, I go on skis.”
It’s January, and I’ve come to Romsdal, on the western coast of Norway, to go on skis with Jornet. He and his fiancée, the Swedish ultra-runner Emelie Forsberg, moved here in 2015 to escape the maddening sports crowd of France’s Chamonix Valley, where they previously resided and are huge celebrities. To friends he is Kiki, to fans he is the Extraterrestrial, but in Norway, he gets to simply be Kilian. Their home, a renovated farmhouse, loca
ted on three scenic acres surrounded by mountains, that they call Moon Valley Farm, is quiet and private, the way they want it. They don’t go out much. You can count the restaurants in nearby Andalsnes, the town of 2,300 where I’m staying, on one hand. The closest bar is 30 miles away. “Sometimes after climbing, my friends take a beer,” Jornet says in fluent but heavily accented English, “but I am like, why?”
In person it’s easy to see how Jornet is so fast. At five-foot-six and 128 pounds, he’s like a jockey with keg-size quads built from years pistoning up steep slopes. His upper body is slight, streamlined. He does “a little stretching,” he tells me, but largely eschews lifting weights or other types of cross-training. I ask him, half jokingly, what he can bench-press.
“Zero! Nothing!” he says. “I have no absolute strength.”
He’s joking, sort of, but point taken: Jornet has spent most of his life developing the physiology he needs for mountain terrain. Anything else was a waste of time.
I’d first learned of Jornet through my own inexplicable midlife addiction to ski-mountaineering racing—aka skimo—an Alps-born sport that entails hauling ass up and down wintry mountains on featherweight touring gear while dressed in a skintight onesie. Jornet is a world champion; I’m a flailing amateur who cuts a lumpy profile in Lycra. Jornet rarely slows down long enough to accommodate journalists, but last October he underwent surgery on both shoulders to address chronic dislocations, and was straightjacketed in matching arm slings for weeks. He’d just started training again when I showed up, and the prospect of chasing the very best around the Norwegian mountains made me as giddy as a teenager.
One morning I join Jornet and two of his local friends on a mission he tells me will last “a couple of hours.” Deep into hour three, there is no end in sight. There is no Jornet in sight either. He has vanished, far ahead, leaving only a skin track that, in the squally weather, is disappearing fast. Eventually, worried that I could get lost forever in the whiteout, I bail. I don’t hear from Jornet for another four hours. “Still up,” he texts, “but will be back in town in an hour.”
Forsberg laughs when she hears the story. She calls this Kilian Time.
“Friends will visit and ask about a route, and Kilian will say it takes three hours, but for them it’s like 15,” she says. “You learn with him that you have to make your own calculations. If we’re going to the mountains and he estimates seven hours, I pack food for ten.”
Sometimes, Kilian Time turns sketchy, like in 2013, when he and Forsberg ended up on the Frendo Spur outside Chamonix, a technical route of rock, ice, and snow, in running shoes, and required a rescue from the gendarmerie. I ask Forsberg if she worries about her partner.
“Of course,” she says. “I’m not afraid because of his capacities; things that look like risks to others are within his experience and knowledge. But I’m afraid of nature. He’s out there a lot, and I know things can happen in the mountains.”
* * *
For all of Jornet’s impressive performances, my record-scratch moment was his appearance in a 2013 documentary about steep skiing called T’es Pas Bien Là? (Downside Up). The film, by Montaz-Rosset, centers on Vivian Bruchez, one of France’s most skilled extreme skiers. But there is Jornet, right next to him, scritching out turns on 55-degree blue ice, downclimbing Class 5 rock and snow, slipping across knife ridges so narrow and airy that his skis stick out in both directions. I’ve watched the film dozens of times, and it never fails to leave pools of sweat under my palms.
“His versatility as an athlete is unparalleled,” says Mike Foote, who has twice finished second to Jornet at the Hardrock 100. “I don’t think there’s anyone who brings his level of imagination and creativity to the sport. I think that’s how he keeps things fresh, how he doesn’t burn out.”
Jornet’s origin story is mythological. He grew up in Refugi Cap del Rec, a backcountry hut in the Spanish Pyrenees, where his parents, Eduoard and Nuria, worked as caretakers and mountain guides. No TV, no Xbox, no internet, just his year-younger sister, Naila, for company and the wild peaks outside the door. At three, he competed in his first cross-country ski race, the 12-kilometer Marxa Pirineu. At 10, he completed a 42-day through-hike of the Pyrenees with Nuria and Naila. His parents had split by then, and Eduoard had moved into a neighboring hut, but soon, Jornet says, it seemed normal, he and his sister rotating each week between the two parents.
At 13, Jornet applied to the Center for Mountain Skiing of Catalonia (CTEMC)—a kind of Spanish version of Vermont’s Burke Mountain Academy, but for skimo racing. In other countries, skimo is a fringe sport, but in Spain, it is more popular than either cross-country or alpine skiing. Jornet was two years too young for the program, but he didn’t quite fit into a typical high school. Nuria worried about him. “There was a moment when he was a teenager that I saw his attitude had a destructive point,” she told me. “That’s the reason why I look for help at the school.”
She believed CTEMC would provide an outlet for his irrepressible energy. The school agreed. “I remember perfectly when he was explaining to us his projects of great mountain crossings,” recalls Jordi Canals, Jornet’s coach at CTEMC. “When he talked, he had a special shine and determination. We decided to admit him because we thought it was better that he was in our group than just alone in the mountains.”
Athletic training at CTEMC was carefully prescribed and supervised, but Jornet was hard to restrain. He would routinely ride his bike to school, work out all afternoon, and then ride home—25 miles each way. When the snow melted, he began running mostly as a way to stay in shape for skimo. Once, to see how his body would respond, he stopped eating altogether, continuing with his workouts while subsisting only on water. He lasted five days before he passed out, midrun.
Early on, Jornet’s unique qualities amazed and perplexed his coaches, most notably his “extraordinary recovery from strenuous trainings,” as Canals described it. “He has this resistance to osteoarticular and muscular lesions”—the bone contusions and muscle strains commonly triggered by demanding exercise. “A lot of athletes with smaller training loads have lots of trouble.”
When I spoke to Canals on the phone, I asked him what was the most amazing thing he’d seen Jornet do. He thought for a moment, then told me about the vertical kilometer event at the 2014 Skyrunning World Championships in Chamonix. Kilian had just returned from setting a fastest known time on Denali (11 hours and 48 minutes), where he had spent a month “eating poor meals, sleeping in a tent in snowy and cold conditions, doing long alpine routes.” In other words, not training for an event that is essentially a 30-minute all-out uphill sprint. “When he won, I said to him, ‘You didn’t deserve to win this race.’ And he said, ‘Yes, I’m very surprised too. But I felt very well.’” Canals recalled. “That is Kilian.”
* * *
The downside of excellence is that it invites skepticism, something Jornet encountered early on. In 2008, at age 21, he showed up at his first UTMB having never raced in anything longer than a marathon. He pulled away at mile 40, en route to vanquishing a field of older and more experienced vets. The French organizers were not happy. Ten miles from the finish, at the last checkpoint, they detained him for more than an hour. They accused him of cheating—of using a pacer (he wasn’t) and not carrying the mandatory gear (he was). Despite the delay, he crossed the finish line first, by more than an hour, but was not declared the winner until the next day.
“I was just going to get in my car and go home,” Jornet recalls. “I was like, Fuck you, fuck the race and everything.”
He was still a student then, studying exercise physiology in Font-Romeu, France, living in shared housing, stretching what little money he had to keep him in pasta and olive oil. He’d learned enough at CTEMC, he believed, to be able to coach himself. He lived to race but didn’t race to live. There was little money in his sports: purses were skimpy, and there was no Olympic skimo or trail running. Even after his UTMB win, when Salomon signed him to a full-time cont
ract, it only meant bigger bags of pasta and, at events, an occasional hotel room instead of the back of his car.
He couldn’t know at the time that ultra-running was poised to take off, particularly in the United States, where Christopher McDougall’s 2009 book Born to Run, about the Mexican Tarahumara and the Copper Canyon Ultramarathon, sparked a trail-running boom. Between 2007 and 2016, the number of races in the United States exceeding 26.2 miles more than tripled, according to UltraRunning magazine, from 480 to 1,473, and a new cast of stars emerged: Scott Jurek, Krissy Moehl, Anton Krupicka, Jenn Shelton, and others. Jornet would soon eclipse them all.
His rise to fame not only inspired many runners and skiers but invited study and emulation. Some have speculated that the early commitment to skimo built the machine that powered his mountain-running dominance. Splitting his year between the two disciplines helped stave off the overtraining and burnout that has plagued so many talented runners—a strategy that’s now employed by top competitors like Krupicka, Foote, and Rob Krar.
Even among elites, Jornet appears special. In 2012, his VO2 max was recorded at 92, one of the highest values ever seen. He has a near-miraculous ability to recover quickly from workouts and races. Until his recent shoulder trouble, he seemed impervious to injury. Echocardiograms revealed that his heart has adapted to the stress of training with very little malformation, such as thickened ventricular walls, that often affects other elite athletes’ performances. And he has cultivated a monklike devotion to training, technique, and equipment that he deploys through 1,200 hours of yearly practice.
“If genes dictating performance are like a row of light switches, all of his are flipped on,” says Eric Carter, 31, a member of the U.S. ski-mountaineering team. “I’ve trained with him, working as hard as I can, soaked in sweat, and the guy is still in his down parka, chatting away.”
The Best American Sports Writing 2019 Page 26
