by Scott Jurek
A pause, and then his voice: “Oh, wow, we found you! I cannot believe it!”
I knew the voice. And when he shifted in the light, I recognized the face. It was the man from back in the Smokies who’d brought his son out to find Scott shivering in his towel. Team Father Son; what were they doing here? Hadn’t they gotten their fill of Scott?
“Tomorrow is my birthday and I really want to run with Scott on my birthday!” the man explained, perhaps sensing that he was freaking me out. I thought that was sweet, and I relaxed and let my guard down. Just then, another set of headlights pulled up behind us. I waved at that other car to pass, but, again, this one pulled over to the side of the road.
“Oh, he’s with us. I recruited a local to take us to all the trail crossings. We’ve been looking for you for days!” Suddenly, I felt myself stiffen up again.
It wasn’t just that it was a little creepy. It was also deeply inconvenient to have to play tour manager to excited fans. I had a long list of tasks to do before Scott came in for the night. But it wasn’t in me to turn them away. So we all took off and drove to the parking lot. By this time, the fog was lifting and the orange-purple light of sundown imbued the air around us.
Team Father Son started to suit up and get ready for a run and I told them if they started heading south, they’d run into Scott. It was a win-win situation: They would get some trail time with Jurker and I’d get some peace and quiet to clean and organize the van before he got here. Also, I wasn’t sure if he had a headlamp with him, so it made me feel better knowing that TFS could offer him some light on the trail.
They asked their guide where the trail was and he said, “Oh, it runs right through here, goes along by this parking lot.” He pointed them in one direction and they disappeared into the woods. It was a little strange because I didn’t think the AT crossed here, but he was the local, so I shrugged and went on with my chores.
I parked Castle Black and filled my plastic washbasin with water from the bathroom. I was almost done washing all the dishes when I saw two headlamps bounding toward the parking lot. It was Team Father Son. They couldn’t find the Appalachian Trail and they’d been looking for almost thirty minutes. I saw them huddling up with the local while I continued organizing. Had their guide sent them the wrong way by mistake?
After a few minutes, they took off again, this time in a new direction. Their guide stayed behind and seemed to be relaxing and taking in the sunset. I walked to the far end of the parking lot and searched the trees where he’d sent the father and son into the woods. No signs of white blazes anywhere. I jogged along the perimeter and didn’t see any white blazes. “Hey, where did you say the trail comes out?”
He said, “The AT doesn’t run through here; it avoids this parking lot.”
I didn’t even respond. This was too weird. I slammed the sliding door to Castle Black and peeled out of that lot as quickly as possible—and then I saw him hurry to his car and follow me out. What the heck? Why had he sent the runners on a wild-goose chase? More important, why was he following me? I sped up; he sped up. I took a hard left into a parking lot. He followed me into the lot. I backed out, and he backed out.
I thought about the one cast-iron skillet I still had in the van. It was within reach. I parked on the main road in front of the Carvers Gap sign. He pulled up next to me. I turned off the engine and locked the doors. He stayed in his car.
I started to panic: What if I’d missed Jurker while I was up there listening to this clown? I studied my atlas. I guess I wasn’t killing the map game after all.
Suddenly, I saw a faint orb of illuminated fog. It got bigger and brighter, but it was moving too fast to be Jurker, especially on two bad legs. Was it Team Father Son? Why was there only one headlamp?
“Whoop-whoop!”
It was my Jurker! He’d come to save me!
Or maybe I was supposed to save him. When he got within a few steps, I unlocked the doors and yelled, “Get in! Get in!” He got in and I locked the doors again. I explained that I was being followed and he could tell I was freaked out. Then he did the Jurkiest thing possible. He got out of safe Castle Black, walked over to the creep’s car, talked to him, and…posed for a picture with him. When he came back, he said he’d taken care of it.
I was so confused. I had no idea if that guy was a guide or a superfan or both. Maybe he meant well, maybe my loneliness was feeding into my paranoia. Whatever the case, everything was better when Jurker was with me. It meant he was safe and we had covered our respective distances correctly.
We drove down the road a few miles and tucked the car into a tiny, hidden pullout. I was glad he was done for the day. We caught up while I made him dinner. He was feeling better and walking well, which was a huge relief. We started cleaning up and getting ready to eat when suddenly headlights slowly rolled by.
“Turn off the lights!” I said. “Do you think he saw us?”
Before he could answer, the car made a U-turn and pulled in right next to Castle Black. This time Jurker had had enough of the guy. He put his shoes back on to read him the riot act, but when he opened the door he saw it was Team Father Son. They’d never found the AT and had been looking for Scott in vain.
This was all too weird and too much for me to deal with. I just wanted everybody to give us some space so we could eat in peace. But Jurker had a solution. He told them they could sleep at the trailhead and he would meet them there at 6:00 in the morning, ready to run.
Happy birthday.
Virginia
540 miles
What matters most is how you walk through the fire.
—Charles Bukowski
Chapter 6
It Never Always Gets Worse
Day Ten
The morning sun was beaming down over the bald expanse atop mile-high Hump Mountain, and I felt as free as the grassy fields rolling beneath me out to the Blue Ridge horizon. However, I wasn’t free of pain, or of hobbling, or of doubts. I had spent the morning miles that day sorting things out. I had come face-to-face with the question that always, eventually, meets everyone on the trail (or on the highway, or in the office, or in class) as the initial thrill wears off and the rewards start coming less frequently.
What’s the point?
The record seemed out of reach, so why was I still out here? Why keep tottering and anguishing along at two miles an hour?
There was a silver lining, though. JLu and I had wanted to get away and be together in the mountains, and now it looked like we’d have plenty of time for that. If it was going to take me two extra weeks to get to Katahdin, we’d have lots of time together. Maybe it was a sign that I should finally slow down and limp into retirement. Maybe a casual pace was my destiny now. Slow and steady, side by side with JLu—this could be the new normal. A couple on vacation in their camper van; JLu reading a book at a campground while she waits for her slow-ass husband to lumber in from another forty-mile trail day. No more of her stressing out trying to meet me at road crossings. I’d just become a happy AT slack-packer.
The only problem with that carefree vision was…JLu. There was no chance she would let me just walk it in.
We’d talked to our buddy and free-solo climber Alex Honnold before we left, and he’d said, “Well, if things don’t go as planned, you can always call it a recon trip.” And Speedgoat had made a similar comment when he’d called during our drive out and said, half jokingly, “Dude, if something happens, you can come back next year and we’ll go head to head at the same time. You go NoBo and I’ll go SoBo.”
JLu just said three words: “One and done.” No dry runs, no first drafts. There was no next time in her mind. And that had better be how I was thinking too. She hadn’t sacrificed her summer to watch another “My heart wasn’t into it” performance from me.
When I was with her, I fed off that energy. But on day ten, I was alone, high up on Hump Mountain. And the more I tried to screw my head on straight, the more it spun. Maybe I just need to let go of the glory days and
accept that the fire is gone.
And yet…despite the swirling doubts, despite the stories I told myself of decline and retirement, somewhere deep inside, I still felt some of that drive, that old ego.
You have to have some ego.
I wish I could say that I was just channeling the vibrations and energy of the wilderness through my body, mind, and soul, that it was all beauty and joy. But at the end of the day, you have to want it. Plain and simple. The ego doesn’t have to be destructive, and it doesn’t have to make you lose sight of the real reasons you do what you do. It doesn’t have to go to your head. But when push comes to shove, nothing motivates like winning does. I remembered that electricity. I still felt the young athlete inside me who thrived on winning. I’d gotten wiser over the years, and that wisdom had made me a more complete person, a better partner—but it also made me slower. There was no way around it. The more perspective I got, the more disconnected I became from the pure drive to win and dominate. Without that drive, the discomfort and pain that racing took didn’t seem worth it.
I needed to find a bit of that old self if I was going to stick this thing. I had to tap into the fighter who came back from the dead to surge into first place, the young champ who won races with shredded ankle tendons and after vomiting in the desert. The long-haired hippie who explored the limits of his body for a mother who couldn’t walk or even feed herself.
I needed a few drops of that elixir—or I needed to quickly find a new balance between running to win and running on wisdom.
JLu must have sensed this tug-of-war between me and my younger self because as we’d hiked together yesterday, she told me stories El Coyote had been telling her, stories about me that even I didn’t remember. He had told her about a time back in 2005, at Badwater, when he was pacing his buddy Mike Sweeney, who was leading the race until halfway through. That’s apparently when I showed up. Luis said that when I came up from behind, it was like I was in a different world. I remembered enough to acknowledge that I almost was; I’d bounced back from dehydration delirium, from puking my guts out, and I was keeping an eight-minute-mile pace again. I’d come back from damned near dead. Luis said that when I took the lead, I didn’t pass Sweeney and his pacer on the right but ran straight between. Did I intentionally try to crush his spirit? Not sure. I can barely remember it.
That wasn’t exactly the type of ego I was searching for in the woods of Appalachia, though. Perhaps I was asking for too much from my old body and mind, but what I really wanted was a kind of drive—a faith—that would carry me to push beyond what I thought was possible.
After Hump Mountain, the going got a lot harder. Long gone were the pine ridges and lofty, grassy balds of the Roan Highlands. Now it was the swampy, root-infested rhododendron lowlands of the South’s interior. When the weather threw a thunderstorm my way, I was inspired to coin a nickname for my new biome: the Bayou. At least there were no water moccasins or alligators in this bayou.
My speed had taken a major hit from the injuries at the end of the first week. I’d gotten in thirty-six miles on day nine, and I hoped to get to forty today. It was still mostly walking, but I was optimistic that I could push forward and run for a few miles today. Last night’s test-run mile down Roan Mountain had given me a sliver of hope. Maybe my body was remembering something. I couldn’t believe that crazy Horty was right, once again.
The pain was still there; on day ten, I woke up, if anything, more beaten up than when I’d gone to sleep. But not all pain is the same. Pain can be high or low; it can be deep or shallow. Pain has more than one axis. As I wrestled through the Bayou, I checked in with my own pain load. It was increasing in intensity, no question, but decreasing in effect. My pain was getting less painful—which might sound ridiculous, but you’ll know what I mean if you routinely push yourself in the gym or if you have the misfortune to live with a chronic illness or disability. Some of us are familiar with a whole bouquet of pains, each with its own special meaning and impact.
Pain is a biological fact, and there’s nothing short of drugs that can wipe it away. But we do have some control over how much one fact or another will consume our thoughts and attention. Think about the first date you went on with your current partner, or the night you brought your dog home from the shelter. The love was all-consuming. The world felt like it revolved around your partner (or your dog). Do you love him any less than you did then? Of course not. It’s just that when affection becomes predictable and routine, it loses its sharpness. And in the case of pain, perhaps the one we know hurts us less than the one we fear.
A few things were helping me manage my own pain. The first was the unexpected joy of Team Father Son. The second was sheer experience; I knew this pain wasn’t the end of the world—or the end of my legs—because I’d been here before (or close enough to it). The third was based on a kind of faith: I knew I was healing. Well, I didn’t know it know it; I couldn’t get an X-ray out there or pull over next to a log and sit down for an MRI. I knew I was healing through the pain because I felt it at a molecular level. It’s a kind of gut feeling, a distant but unmistakable sense from a part of your body you have only intermittent communication with. But I’d learned over the years to listen to my body. I could speak its language. Maybe it was pseudoscience; maybe it was a hopeless tautology (I was healing because I felt like I was healing?); maybe it was a placebo effect. It didn’t matter to me. It was working.
My distance from the finish line also helped, surprisingly. Back in Boulder, I might have predicted the opposite—that the unimaginably long way to go would make the pain more acute by making the journey feel impossible—but that wasn’t what happened at all. Instead, I was freed from thinking about the finish line altogether. It remained a faraway thing, an abstraction. My mind didn’t have to whirl through calculations about whether or not I could withstand all this punishment for the next X or Y hours. I had to forget about how many hours or days I had left. Why bother calculating? So I thought about the step in front of me, and the step in front of that one. The scope was overwhelming. There was nothing to do but keep going.
It was at that moment that another prophecy from the Seer of Liberty University echoed in my mind. Before he left, Horty had told JLu, “Make sure you tell that boy: It never always gets worse!”
Horty was back home hundreds of miles away, but his deranged words of twisted wisdom were making guest appearances in my thoughts. It never always gets worse.
We’ll see.
Even if it was going to take a miracle for me to get the record, JLu and I still needed to strategize, plan road-crossing meet-ups, set a daily schedule, and keep the battleship running as if we were going to war (and as if the record was still a possibility). I had to fuel my body each day, make sure I was consuming enough calories, grab water at creeks and springs, remember my headlamp for the last stretch of the day. As long as I stayed focused on the small goals—getting to the next road crossing, the next peak or even the next white blaze—I could continue moving forward. I could keep the FKT within sprinting distance, and I could keep the larger goal (just barely) alive.
I forgot about Katahdin being eighteen hundred miles away, about the FKT, about the loss of normalcy, about everything. I felt how sweet life could be when I wasn’t looking at it through a prism of doing, but just being. That was enough for now. It was enough to start running again.
I took a few tentative steps, felt the same stabbing pains…and kept going. I was back running. Not elegantly, not with fierceness, not with anything near the speed I’d eventually need. But I was running. If I could just let life happen, everything could work. I didn’t have to win, not yet. I just needed to let myself run.
Like all epiphanies, that one was great while it lasted.
When I wasn’t connecting to a cosmic flow, I was stumbling forward and worrying about JLu. She had given me so much already. The astonishing capacity for suffering and perseverance she’d displayed through her miscarriages and subsequent health crises had pla
yed a big part in inspiring me to come out here and test myself. I hadn’t thought that crewing for me would be such a test for her.
The guy from the night before—the bizarre stalker—had been odd. And I had to assume more weird scenarios were coming. It was no longer just strange; it was scary, especially when I thought about the fact that for the vast majority of time out here she’d be separated from me. How many more weirdoes were out there? How many were prowling around? How many might feel bold enough to mess around with a petite Asian-American woman roaming alone in the backwoods of the Deep South? We’d both noticed the flags down here, but Horty assured us it was a symbol of “Southern pride” (in other words, a “Leave us alone” attitude).
But it wasn’t just Deliverance-inspired paranoia; I’d heard stories from people who’d been here. Former AT record holder Andrew “Trail Dawg” Thompson told me about an encounter his buddy Trav had had while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina. Trav and his friends were hitchhiking on a remote dirt road and desperately needed to get to town for a resupply. After they’d walked toward town for a good bit, a beat-up pickup pulled up alongside them and a scraggly shirtless guy in bib overalls rolled down his window. In classic mountain-hillbilly fashion, he growled, “Git in!” Trav and his buddies all gave one another the same look, but hospitality is hard to turn down in the South. So they hopped into the truck, Trav and one of his buds in the cab, the other friend in the back. So far, so good. But then, as they were rolling down the road, their chauffeur grabbed a bottle from the floor, took a big swig, and passed the bottle to Trav. He declined—politely. “Thank you, sir, but we’ve got another ten miles to do before nightfall.” The mountain man insisted: “Take a drink!” Trav declined again. The bearded driver then reached down below his seat, grabbed a .45, and pointed it at Trav. “Now, I said take a drink!” No hesitation this time; Trav took a big tug of the clear liquor, and the driver set down his gun and cackled. He dropped them off where he’d said he would and drove on to find some more drinking buddies or maybe other thru-hikers to scare shitless.
