by Scott Jurek
My crew and close friends told me to close my eyes and relax. Instead, I stared at the stars. Everyone and the desert disappeared. Loss of peripheral vision was one manifestation of dehydration and passing out. Was that what was happening? It was as if I was looking through a tunnel at a small circle in an infinite, glittery sky.
My crew told me to take some little sips of water, but I couldn’t. I was thinking, “I don’t think this is gonna happen,” and then I heard a noise, and it was my voice saying what I was thinking: “I don’t think this is gonna happen.”
The stars didn’t care. That’s another pleasure of running an ultra: the absolute and soothing indifference of the land and the sky. So I made a mistake? It wasn’t the worst thing in the world; the constellations weren’t gossiping about me. Maybe this would help me with humility. Maybe dropping out and being defeated would renew my spirit. Maybe cutting one race short was a good thing.
If only I could have made myself believe that.
Should I have listened to the trainers and doctors who said that athletes needed to fill their bodies with animal protein? Should I have trained less? I had thought I was invincible. I closed my eyes.
I had been schooled by nuns, raised by a mother who had been sprinkled with holy water from Lourdes, hoping it would help her rise from her wheelchair. Now it was me who couldn’t rise.
I hadn’t always been the fastest runner, but I had always considered myself one of the toughest. Maybe acceptance of my limits was the toughest thing of all. Maybe staying where I was wasn’t weak but strong. Maybe accepting my limits meant it was time to stop being a runner, to start being something else. But what? If I wasn’t a runner, who was I?
I looked again at the stars. They had no opinion on the matter.
Then, from the desert, a voice, an old familiar voice.
“You’re not gonna win this fucking race lying down in the dirt. C’mon, Jurker, get the fuck up.”
It was my old friend Dusty. That made me smile. He almost always made me smile, even when everyone around him was cringing.
“Get the fuck up!” Dusty yelled, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.
“Sweeney is out there dying, and you’re gonna take that dude. We’re gonna take that dude!”
I looked at my friend. Couldn’t he see that I wasn’t going to take anyone?
He squatted, folded himself until our faces were inches apart. He looked into my eyes.
“Do you wanna be somebody, Jurker? Do you wanna be somebody?”
Rice Balls (Onigiri)
I first saw these seaweed-wrapped rice packets when I asked a Japanese runner to show me what was in his race pack. I’m grateful I did, because white rice is a great food for cooling your body, especially in hot climates like Death Valley. It’s packed with carbohydrates, it’s not too sweet, and it’s soft and easy to digest. A great source for electrolytes and salt (via the seaweed), rice balls have always been a portable pick-me-up in Japan. These days, you can even find them at convenience stores in Asia. For a soy-free variation, substitute pickled ginger or umeboshi paste for the miso.
2 cups sushi rice
4 cups water
2 teapoons miso
3-4 sheets nori seaweed
Cook the rice in the water on the stovetop or using a rice cooker. Set aside to cool. Fill a small bowl with water and wet both hands so the rice does not stick. Using your hands, form ¼ cup rice into a triangle. Spread ¼ teaspoon miso evenly on one side of the triangle. Cover with another ¼ cup rice. Shape into one triangle, making sure the miso is covered with rice. Fold the nori sheets in half and then tear them apart. Using half of one sheet, wrap the rice triangle in nori, making sure to completely cover the rice. Repeat using the remaining rice, miso, and nori.
MAKES 8 ONIGIRI
2. “Sometimes You Just Do Things”
PROCTOR, MINNESOTA, 1980
The only line that is true is the line you’re from.
—ISRAEL NEBEKER OF BLIND PILOT
I sat on a stool in our kitchen. My mother thrust a rough wooden spoon at me and told me to stir, but the batter was too thick. She told me to use both hands, but still I couldn’t move the spoon. Suddenly it moved and kept moving. She had put her hands around mine. We made spirals of pale yellow out of sugar and butter, and I pretended I was doing it all by myself. It’s one of my earliest memories.
I thought my mom was famous. She worked for the Litton Microwave company, showing women how to cook bacon and make chocolate cake with the new invention. The Minnesota Egg Council hired her to go on the radio to talk about eggs and that led to television commercials and that led to her own cable cooking show. Her motto (which I still believe): “You don’t have to be a chef to cook great food.” For her family she roasted pork, baked chicken, broiled steak, and whipped up mashed potatoes from scratch. In the childhood of my memory, there was always a pie cooling on the kitchen windowsill, the scent of pastry and fruit stealing into our kitchen, enveloping my mother and me in its thick embrace.
I don’t remember anyone talking about a primal connection to food, or how by eating the vegetables we grew we were connecting ourselves to the place where we lived and each other. I don’t remember anyone remarking that the act of catching and cleaning and frying and eating walleye together was akin to a family sacrament. At my mother’s insistence, we did sit down together for a full hour at dinner. If someone had praised her for baking cookies from scratch rather than using a mix, she would have thought they were nuts. I didn’t know it, but I was learning a lot about food and its connection to love. When we cooked together, she told me stories about when she was in college, and said she knew I would go to college, too. When my dad wasn’t around, she would ask me to grab my baseball bat, and she’d take me into the backyard, next to the garden, and she’d pitch underhand to me. She told me she was proud of what a hard worker I was and not to let Dad’s grouchiness bother me. He just worried a lot.
My father wasn’t the only disciplinarian in the family. When I misbehaved, my mom would spank me—with the same wooden spoon with which we stirred batter. She was the one who limited my television watching to 5 hours a week. If I wanted to watch a football game, she made me choose between the first or second half. I always chose the second half.
I can’t remember the first time I saw her drop a jar. I must have been about nine. After a while, it was hard to remember when she didn’t drop things. Knives trembled in her once-sure fingers. Sometimes, just standing by the counter, she would wince. If she saw me watching, she’d wink and smile.
Here’s another memory: When I was six, stacking firewood outside, a car pulled up to our house. I knew it wasn’t a neighbor; we lived on a dead-end road at the edge of a woods, 5 miles from Proctor, Minnesota, which was another 150 miles from Minneapolis. I knew all the cars on our road, who was driving, and which brothers and sisters were probably sitting in the back seat punching one another. This car belonged to a friend from Proctor. His mom had driven him out to play with me. I yelped and ran toward the car, but a stern voice stopped me.
“You can play when we’re finished stacking wood. From the looks of it, we’ve got two more hours to go.”
It was Dad, and I knew better than to argue. So I whispered the news to my friend and he told his mom. She gave me a look, then gave my dad a look, and then they drove off. I went back to stacking wood.
When I was done with chores, on rare occasions my dad would take me for a walk in the woods. Once, when I was seven and my mom was taking a nap—she had been getting tired a lot—he picked up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his thick fingers. He told me about the day that two of the smartest scientists in the world were walking in the woods—maybe woods just like these, right here in Minnesota—and God strolled up, right out of the trees. And God said, “If you guys are so smart, can you make dirt out of thin air, like I can?” I remember my dad smiling when he told me that story, but it was a sad smile. I think he was trying to tell me that no matter how h
ard a man thought or worked, some things in life would remain unknowable, and we had to accept that.
By the time I was eight, there were fewer walks in the woods with my dad. I was helping around the house a lot. I was pulling weeds from the big garden we had out back, or picking out rocks, or stacking wood, or helping in the kitchen, or making sure my sister, Angela, who was five, had a snack, or that my brother, Greg, who was three, wasn’t getting into mischief. By the time I was ten, I could cook a pot roast in the oven by myself. Whenever I complained that I didn’t want to pick rocks or stack wood, I just wanted to go play, my dad would growl, “Sometimes you just do things!” After a while, I stopped complaining.
He tempered his discipline with compassion and a sense of fun. He would challenge me to see how much wood I could haul into our “wood room” in 10 minutes or how many rocks I could pick out of the garden in the same time. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but he was teaching me that competition could turn the most mundane task into a thrill, and that successfully completing a job—no matter how onerous—made me feel unaccountably happy.
When I was ten my dad bought me a .22-caliber rifle with a polished walnut handle and a barrel made from burnished steel. He told me to kill any animal I wounded, to skin and gut it, to always eat whatever I brought home. I already knew how to catch a walleye and gut it and clean it.
I was a great blueberry picker, too. It was a rite of passage in my family that when you turned six, you got to go blueberry and cherry picking with Grandma Jurek. My older cousins had told me stories about the great adventure and I couldn’t wait. My cousins had forgotten to mention the clouds of mosquitoes, or stinky bogs, or the beating sun, or the ladder, which I fell off. I cried and said I wanted to go home, but that didn’t happen. Grandma Jurek had raised my dad. When you went cherry picking with her, you were picking for hours. And when you went fishing with Grandpa Jurek, if you got bored, too bad, you were gonna stay and fish. I learned patience while doing the tedious tasks, but more important, I learned to find joy in repetitive and physically demanding work.
I didn’t always feel happy or patient, of course. I was a kid. But those were the times I kept going. Why?
Sometimes you just do things!
My dad was working two jobs then—during the day as a pipefitter and during the night in maintenance at the local hospital. I knew that the coupons Mom was using when I went with her to the grocery store were really food stamps, that we were getting government cheese, and that Dad was having trouble making ends meet. When our television broke, we didn’t replace it for a year. We had two cars, but one was usually not working at all, and sometimes both. I knew that Mom was tired more and more and our garden next to the house was getting smaller while the list of chores my dad put on the fridge for us—a piece of paper with grids and the names and duties for me, my brother, and my sister—was getting bigger and bigger. I knew that none of my friends had to weed the garden and cut grass when it was 90 degrees and humid or haul and stack wood for 2 hours before they could play. My mom stopped pitching to me behind the house. I learned not to ask her.
The worse my mom got, the more I had to help. The more I helped, the more I wondered why things were the way they were. Why was my mom sick? When would she get better? Why couldn’t my dad be less grumpy? Why did the school nurse always single me out for a second look at our regular head lice inspections? Was it because we lived in the country? Or because she thought we were poor?
Things got much worse the summer after third grade. It was a hot, clear Minnesota day. My dad had gotten off his shift, and he and my mom were coming to see me play baseball. I was in left field, and I had just caught a fly ball. I flung the ball toward the infield, and that’s when I saw the Oldsmobile station wagon pull up and my father get out. The passenger door opened and my mother got out too, but something was wrong. The door was opening in slow motion. Then I saw her stumble and my father rush around the car to help her. He had to help her walk the 30 yards to the bleachers, and I watched each slow step. I missed two batters, and when the inning was over, I was still in left field, watching.
The chore list got bigger. We knew Mom was sick, and she took more and more naps. One day when I was in sixth grade my dad told us Mom was seeing some specialists. Maybe he said “multiple sclerosis,” but if he did, they were just words. It didn’t change who my mom was or what was happening to her. If I thought about it at all, it was along the lines of “Multiple what?” She would stay in Minneapolis for treatment from time to time. Dad said there was always hope.
One day, a physical therapist came to help Mom. It was an acknowledgment that her condition wasn’t going to go away or be cured. She didn’t see specialists after that.
I was cooking meatloaf and potatoes by then and chopping wood before I stacked it. I made lunches for my brother and sister and helped Mom get around the house. Sometimes I helped her with the exercises the physical therapist showed me.
I wish I could say something different, that I was grateful to be of service, that I appreciated the opportunity to help the woman who loved me, but the truth is, I hated the chores. I hated what was happening to my mom. None of us could say anything, though, because of my father, who had served in the Navy and believed in military discipline, and I know now that he was more stressed out than ever. Don’t ask why. Sometimes you just do things. So my brother and sister, and especially I, basically lived in fear. Once, after I spent an hour stacking the wood, he said it was sloppy and knocked it down. Then I had to start over.
I began spending more and more time in the woods. I built trails and passageways to hidden tree forts with scrap wood left over from my father’s projects. I took my rifle out every chance I could get, my fishing pole every other chance. Much of the time I went empty-handed, just me, and I walked under the cool green canopy until I knew every foot of those woods by heart.
I don’t think they knew it at the time—and I certainly didn’t—but my parents were training me to be an endurance athlete. By the time I started running, I knew how to suffer.
IN THE BEGINNING
Running efficiently demands good technique, and running efficiently for 100 miles demands great technique. But the wonderful paradox of running is that getting started requires no technique. None at all. If you want to become a runner, get onto a trail, into the woods, or on a sidewalk or street and run. Go 50 yards if that’s all you can handle. Tomorrow, you can go farther. The activity itself will reconnect you with the joy and instinctual pleasure of moving. It will feel like child’s play, which it should be.
Don’t worry about speed at first or even distance. In fact, go slow. That means 50 to 70 percent of your maximum effort. The best way to find that zone is to run with a friend and talk while you’re doing so. If you can’t talk, you’re running too fast and too hard. Do a combo of running and walking if needed. Don’t be afraid to walk the uphills. Over time, add distance. Your long, slow runs will strengthen your heart and lungs, improve your circulation, and increase the metabolic efficiency of your muscles.
Minnesota Mashed Potatoes
As a child, I had a glass of milk with every meal and could pile mashed potatoes higher than anyone in my family. I still love the dish, but now I use homemade rice milk, which is just as creamy and rich as the stuff from cows, much less expensive, and doesn’t produce any plastic container waste. There’s no better comfort food.
5-6 medium red or yellow potatoes
1 cup rice milk (see recipe, below)
2 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon sea salt
½ teaspoon crushed black pepper
Paprika (optional)
Wash the potatoes; peel or leave the skins on as you prefer. Place in a pot and add enough water to completely cover, 1 inch above the potatoes. Bring to a boil, covered, over high heat. Lower the heat and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes. Check the potatoes with a fork. If the fork goes into the potatoes easily, they are ready.
Remove from the h
eat and drain. Mash the potatoes with a potato masher or hand mixer. Add the remaining ingredients and continue to mash until a smooth, fluffy consistency is reached. Season with a dash or two more salt and pepper and paprika if desired.
MAKES 4-6 SERVINGS
Rice Milk
1 cup cooked brown or white rice
4 cups water
⅛ teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon sunflower oil (optional)
Combine the rice, water, and salt in a blender. If you want a creamier milk, add the oil. Blend on high for 1 to 2 minutes, until smooth. Pour into a container, cover, and refrigerate. Rice milk will keep for 4 to 5 days.
MAKES 5 CUPS
3. For My Own Good
CARIBOU LAKE INVITATIONAL, 1986
You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.
—ANONYMOUS
I was just a fourth-grader, and I was trapped.
There were fourteen runners ahead of me and only twenty-five in the field. I was panting, cramped. Runners on either side of me swung their elbows, boxing me in. Others were on my heels, shoving. It was autumn, chilly. Leaves, deep red and orange, were carpeting the banks of Caribou Lake. Yellow flags marked the ¾-mile course, two laps around the baseball and soccer fields of Caribou Lake elementary school. I could see the puffs of warm air from the other runners clouding in the chilly north woods evening. I was wearing my maroon and gold St. Rose T-shirt and my long blue cotton pants, with shiny gold stripes down the side and elastic hems that my mother had sewed.
I couldn’t play Little League anymore because that would have required a ride into town, and my dad was working too many hours to drive me. I couldn’t play football because we couldn’t afford the equipment. So I ran. I was tall and lean, and I didn’t complain, so my school said I would be their representative in the school district meet. But I had never run as far as a mile before, and I wasn’t fast. That’s why, by the halfway mark of the race, I had fallen back to twentieth, out of twenty-five.
