by Scott Jurek
Not long after I arrived, Jurker came running in with a few local runners in tow. He was moving great, the best I’d seen him do in days. It was early but already hot and humid, so we all jumped in the creek to cool off. Jurker thanked his local companions and then we headed off on the trail while Horty walked with us. Luis followed along snapping some photos but turned back quickly—he was going to drive the van so I could run the next stretch alone with Jurker.
Horty followed us up the switchbacks. I wasn’t sure why he’d gone out of his way to pick up Luis and drop him off on the trail, adding to his already long drive out west. But I think he wanted to get his eyes on Jurker, to gauge for himself how he was holding up. Jurker was enjoying Horty’s company but it was slowing him down. He went from running at a great pace to walking. Horty was rattling off a bunch of stats, telling Jurker what he could expect to see in the next few days and giving some trail-worn advice.
“Hey, you guys got the right attitude, you’re really embracing the trail and the other hikers. Doyle always asks me, ‘But how’s his head?’ I think he’s hoping you’ll crack like Karl.” Horty looked Jurker in the eye. “I told him your head is right where it needs to be. I think you’re gonna get that record.”
We said our good-byes and wished Horty luck, and after a few minutes of running, Jurker and I were alone. I could tell Jurker was pleased with how well he was recovering from his injuries. He was almost giddy with his running progress. He was fired up by all the naysayers, the Warren Doyles commenting online and saying he was done. He told me, “JLu, I’m gonna show them. I’m going to crank this out in under forty days.”
I followed his footsteps in silence. I was happy he was so confident. “All I care about is that we’re back in time for my birthday.”
He laughed. “Oh, don’t worry, we are gonna finish this on the Fourth of July and be back by the eighth.” My birthday was July 12, so at least he was giving himself somewhat of a cushion.
It seemed doable, but we would need to hustle. I got on his case. “Just try not to waste too much time talking to people!”
I could tell I’d touched a nerve. Very calmly and full of conviction, he said, “JLu, if it comes down to hours, then you can get mad at me.”
Famous last words.
Chapter 8
Nickels and Dimes
Day Sixteen
I woke up in a daze, rolled over, looked through the windshield, and saw a dozen runners milling about outside the walls of Castle Black. I slid open the door to go do my morning business. A running group from Roanoke would be joining me on the way to picturesque McAfee Knob. It was becoming my new routine: smile, greet, talk, run.
Jenny and I had come to the AT with visions of the two of us, mostly alone, out in the elements. But after seven hundred miles, the trip had become something else entirely. Our journey was taking on a life of its own. Perhaps I had let it happen. Perhaps I should have drawn stricter boundaries.
That’s not to suggest that it was all bad, because it wasn’t—not by a long shot. We were positively impacted by others and could tell they were inspired by the breadth of our jouyous struggle. Even as it became routine, I never stopped being amazed that people made such an effort to find us, support us, help us, run with us. That’s what makes the AT one of the most magical trails on the planet. I loved the feeling of running in the world and with the world. I didn’t want to be locked into the Green Tunnel all by myself, chasing some abstraction.
Still—we had a record to set. I knew I should’ve taken a couple of quick pics with the group and then headed out, but I ended up spending thirty minutes there taking photos and enjoying their company. It’s a beautiful setting, and if you know people who’ve hiked that part of the AT, they’ll almost certainly have pictures from there. It’s one of the most photographed landmarks along the whole twenty-two hundred miles.
As I posed for photos and chatted, JLu started encouraging me to get going. I was spending too much time talking. She was right.
Last night had been another late finish. It was nearly midnight when I’d finally stopped. I was moving well again after my injuries, but the miles were taking longer than they had when I’d first started out. The late nights were tough on JLu too—she had to wait up for me, which meant she was getting the same five hours of sleep I was.
There was no question: I needed to be more efficient.
Before we left, JLu found a trio of Fleet Feet Sports Roanoke locals to accompany me for the next fifteen rough and remote miles. She seemed to be saying that if I was going to socialize, at least I could do it on the go. We shared vegan wraps and burritos they’d brought. Sharing a meal is one of my favorite things, even if I have to do it on my feet. It was a mobile smorgasbord of lunch, laughs, and musings on current events and the new season of Game of Thrones (which I was missing). The pop-culture conversations gave me a funny feeling; they brought me back to the real world while simultaneously reminding me of how very far away from it I had gotten. Perspective is always enlightening.
In the afternoon, my new running buddies disconnected from my northbound train and wished me well. I wanted to follow them—the humidity had just descended on the Virginia woods like a hot, wet blanket, and I was wilting. It was the kind of humidity that’s wicked into your bones and drags you down from the inside out. While I was making my way through an exposed stretch of the trail that carved through a mowed and manicured field, I decided to take a walking break. I needed to get my mind off the elements, so I pulled my phone out and checked the comments on my most recent Facebook post. JLu had told me that there were a lot of remarks, and I needed a distraction.
I didn’t get quite what I was looking for. One of the first messages I saw was from my mom’s sister.
Your mother would be so proud of you was all it said.
I found my eyes welling up with tears. I was totally alone and exposed in the middle of a Virginia field, and a deep sadness gripped me in a matter of seconds. My emotional defenses must have melted down in the heat.
I had begun to notice that same phenomenon in other, less dramatic moments. In the course of two and a half weeks of running, I felt like my physical senses were increasingly finely tuned; I was becoming an intuitive animal. At the same time, my emotional equilibrium was tipping way out of whack, which had happened before. When you’re pursuing hard challenges, emotions rise to the surface, and I was so much more fragile than I’d been back in Boulder. The two things seemed related; I was becoming stronger and weaker.
It was like the polarities of my mind and body were reversing. It wasn’t a clean process—things were getting knocked loose in the flux. Memories, mostly. As I shuffled forward along the smooth winding trail, my mind went on a backward journey. Way back.
I’m sixteen years old, a sophomore in high school, and I run the household. I cook, I wash clothes, I split wood, I take care of my brother and sister. I’ve been looking after them since I was seven years old, when my mom first started showing symptoms of MS, back when I stood in left field in Little League and watched as she stumbled out of the car and made her way up into the bleachers with the help of my dad. After that, I was in charge at home. My dad tells me that every time he goes off to work.
But today is different. Today I get a break. Today I’m taking my siblings out in the car to pick up our great-grandmother, and then we’re all going to the Miller Hill Mall in Duluth. It’s beyond exciting to just get to be a teenager for a bit.
Dad’s at work, so my mom will be alone at home. She knows how excited I am. She probably feels guilty for keeping us around all the time. She tells us to have fun and not to worry about her. She’s on the couch; she’ll be fine.
We set off in our Dodge Grand Caravan, and I drive with the special kind of joy only a sixteen-year-old with a newly minted driver’s license knows. When we pick up our great-grandmother, she’s as excited as we are. She relishes any opportunity to leave her apartment, and a trip to the mall is a big deal for her. We’re hap
py she’s there with us, not least of all because we know she’ll give a twenty-dollar bill to each of us and tell us to go buy something nice. She’ll pass the time in her own special heaven: JCPenney.
At the mall, we scatter. I’m off to look at clothes. New jeans! Twenty dollars goes a long way at Miller Hill Mall, and pretty soon I’ve got a couple of sale items picked out. I’m a teenager and options are everywhere.
It’s getting kind of late, but I’m not too worried about my mom. She can get around with a walker when she needs to. She’s a little shaky these days, but she’s able to transfer herself from couch, bed, and toilet.
I can’t help feeling great. I’m free. I’m not in charge of anyone. No one depends on me. I’m just another teenager at the mall.
On the way home, I gas up the car because my dad is a stickler for things like that. Everything has to be just so or he’ll let me have it. When we get back, we rush in, still saturated with excitement from our shopping trip, and I yell out to my mom. She doesn’t respond. She’s not on the couch or in her room.
I hear a low moaning from the bathroom. I try to push open the door but it hits something and gets stuck. I push harder. It’s my mom.
We’re at the hospital. I don’t know if my dad came home and packed us all up or if an ambulance came. I don’t remember anything—except one image. I remember my dad looking at me like he hated me and saying, “If you’d been around…if you’d been around like you were supposed to be…”
She never walks again after that. Not even with her walker. The broken hip sets off a negative chain reaction. I know whose fault it is.
Her muscles atrophy. She’s confined to her wheelchair. I change too. I’m no longer careless, not even for a second. I become a state-ranked Nordic skier and valedictorian. I privately dream of Dartmouth College after requesting an application, but I stay in Minnesota to help take care of my mom. I study physical therapy. I live at home. My mom is in terrible pain, but I’m never far away.
I resolve to make things better.
I kept trudging over the rolling terrain and sprinting through a lifetime of memories. I’d screwed up that day, and the guilt was heavy. What’s more, compared to my mom, I’d had it easy—I could walk. I would have taken her place in that wheelchair if I could, taken the disease on myself so that my mom could have her life back.
I felt like that teenager and that angst-ridden young adult.
When I grew out of the guilt, I found myself seething instead. I wasn’t angry at the disease alone—although, God knows, I could rage and rage and rage at it—but at my mom too.
After I moved out west, started to make a life for myself, it became harder and harder to get back to Minnesota to spend time with her. So every time I did, I wanted to make the most of it. I wanted to get her outside, make her happy, break her out of the institutional sameness of the nursing home.
I took her to movies and restaurants. Her legs would spasm as I moved her from the wheelchair to the rental car. Even though it was ten degrees below freezing outside, even though the nurses were increasingly reluctant to sign her out, I still took her. I just wanted her to get some pleasure somewhere. To taste something again. And I could tell she liked it. Her eyes would light up in the movie theater before closing as she inevitably fell asleep. And the joy she got from restaurant food—anything, even the junkiest stuff—was incredible. I’d mash up some French fries and she’d be over the moon.
Then I’d ask her how she was doing, if she was having any pain. She’d invariably reply: “I’m tough, I’m tough.”
I’d nod. I’d apologize for not getting back home more often. It was hard to get from Seattle to Minnesota. She would cut me off.
“You have to live your life. Don’t worry.” And: “I’m tough, I’m tough.”
She was repeating herself a lot by this point. The MS was ravaging her central nervous system, and she was losing more and more of her short-term memory. I knew that. But still, it grated on me. It sounded like she was covering up how she was really feeling. I would respond, “I know you’re tough! But you need to tell me how you’re doing. You need to tell me what’s going on.”
She wouldn’t. It wasn’t just me. She never complained about pain to anyone—doctors, nurses, PTs. She never, ever complained. Even when her muscles twisted and cramped and her face contorted from discomfort and pain. Even when she couldn’t operate the buttons on her remote control, and even when swallowing became so painful that her food had to be pureed down to the consistency of baby food. Cooking had been her passion and profession, and now her doctors wanted to put in a feeding tube. Still no complaints.
“I’m tough, I’m tough.” It felt like a cop-out. I imagined her raging with me against the disease, or at least acknowledging what was going on. Instead, she used those words like a kind of magic spell. She wouldn’t admit what I wanted her to: that she was suffering, that her life sucked. Why wasn’t she mad? Why was she rolling over and letting this disease win?
Why wasn’t she struggling like I was?
Maybe I was still an adolescent, raging at lack of control.
It was only years later, well after her passing, that I began to understand what she had been doing. Certainly as I limped in pain and doubt along the Appalachian Trail, I was giving myself a crash course in the power of a mantra, in the power of single-mindedness, of stubbornness, of codes, of real toughness. When I was a younger man, I was angry, and I’d wanted my mother to be angry too. But she wasn’t. She was reminding herself that despite the hideous disease that was stealing everything else from her, she still had her toughness. Because she said so, and because she could say so. And did. Often. Her physical strength was gone. But her toughness only got tougher; it became her essential feature. If she hadn’t been a tough old lady, she would have had to just be a bitter teenager like me.
She was still teaching me things, still reminding me what toughness looked like.
My pain was voluntary; I’d brought it on myself. But if I wanted to do it justice, I would have to be tough. I would have to get tougher.
As I struggled through these memories—an unexpected side effect of the dreaded Virginia Blues—I drew resilience from memories of my mother. I also drew strength from JLu, who embodies that same “I’m tough” attitude. Knowing all that she had been through—the surgeries, the invasive medical tests, and almost bleeding to death—I could surely handle the pain and fatigue out here on the Appalachian Trail.
Those days in Virginia passed in an almost surreal rainbow of miles and memories. I was crossing some kind of mental/physical threshold, one I’d never crossed before, and I felt like I had passed a nondescript yet profound test of my resolve.
On day eighteen in the woody hollows of Virginia, JLu and I reached the Tye River Suspension Bridge. We hadn’t planned on stopping, but there were a bunch of people swimming and lying on the rocks, and we had no choice but to jump in and cool off. As we walked across the bridge, we overheard a thru-hiker say to her friend, “Is that Scott Jurek?” Her friend looked up and nodded. “Shouldn’t he be running?” I probably should have been, but an opportunity to cool down and escape from the stifling muggy air was too good to pass up. For fifteen minutes, life wasn’t heavy and our minds weren’t occupied with the past or our current struggles.
Then, on day nineteen, I was shocked out of my cogitating and lazing about by the arrival of a mythical creature.
Jenny had been trading calls with the Speedgoat over the past few days, and somehow, using that special goat magic, he found me deep in Shenandoah National Park.
The smile on his face couldn’t have been bigger. On the AT, he was like a kid in a candy store. He lived in Sandy, Utah, but out here he was home. He was unquestionably already plotting his own FKT, but I didn’t mind. It was great to have him there. Like Horty, he was an old hand at this, and he could relate to my experiences in ways that almost no one else could.
He was usually a man of few words, but when it came to the AT, he
gushed multiple sentences. “Yep, just get on the AT treadmill and go three and a half miles an hour. That’s how you get the record, dude.”
Right after he joined me on the trail, he pointed out a nondescript spot that we passed. “Dude! Right here, yeah, this was where I almost fuckin’ called it quits! First time I took a crack at the old AT speed record. Damn, feels like yesterday.”
After we’d run for a mile together, I pulled off the trail for a pit stop. After a few minutes, I returned to the trail, where Speedgoat was waiting. He snapped at me: “You gotta button that shit up, be quicker! How many dumps you taking a day? Is it all that vegan shit you eat or what?”
I wasn’t at all surprised. I knew the Speedgoat was in rare form when he was in his element.
The Speedgoat was built like his ungulate namesake: a compact, wiry 130 pounds. But when his deep, foghorn voice boomed, you’d swear he was a giant. Like Horty, Karl Meltzer loomed large in the ultrarunning community. So did his nom de trail, Speedgoat, and everything that the name connoted. In 1993, while he was driving home from Pikes Peak, a jackrabbit crossed the road. Karl randomly said, “Hey, it’s a speedgoat.” And the name stuck. Tough, crazy, ornery, unique. A nimble climber, like a goat, but speedy. Not only had the Speedgoat won the “Wild and Tough” Hardrock Hundred five times, he had also won more hundred-mile races (thirty-eight) than “anyone else on earth.” (That’s a direct quote from his website.) And he’d set the 2,064-mile Pony Express Trail (Sacramento to St. Joseph, Missouri) speed record in 2010, completing the run in forty days. Of the hundred-plus ultras he’d entered, Speedgoat had won sixty. For sixteen years he’d won a hundred-miler annually.
But despite all those accomplishments, Meltzer was obsessed with the AT, particularly the speed record. He had chased the AT FKT twice—in 2008 and 2014. On his second assault, he’d pulled the plug in Virginia with nine hundred miles left to go. The day before he quit, he had logged sixty miles, and on the day he quit, he said, “Yesterday I was on fire, felt like I could do a hundred, but today I can’t go a step more than nine miles. I’m done. What the hell, dude?”
