by Scott Jurek
I kept running, though. I didn’t ask why. I knew it was a useless question. Sometimes you just do things! And a couple of the elbow swingers next to me slid out of my peripheral vision. I kept running, and I didn’t feel anyone shoving me from behind. My cramps got worse and my panting turned to gasps, but I kept running and then smacked into a clot of kids in front of me, and a couple of them yelled, “Hey!” and then I broke from the pack. Then there were only five kids ahead of me. A quarter of a mile to go, and now there were four kids, then one.
I didn’t win. The guy in front was way too fast. I couldn’t envision ever being that fast. It would be a long time before I even thought about winning a race. But on that chilly afternoon I realized something. I realized that while most kids my age slowed down during a race and fell back, I made up ground. I seemed to gain strength.
By the time I entered middle school, sixth grade, I knew how to hold an egg between my forefinger and thumb so I could crack it with one hand. I could separate a load of white clothes from colored clothes, wash them, dry them, and fold them without a wrinkle in 60 minutes. I could do a hundred sit-ups in a row and run up and down the road three times without stopping (my brother and sister helped by sitting on my feet for the former and counting for the latter). I could cook spaghetti and pork chops and tuna noodle casserole and make wreaths from ground pine. (My brother and sister and I sold them for holiday money. We’d get five bucks for each one.) I could burp a baby and change a diaper, and I knew the principles of a basketball zone defense and the different motions needed to throw a perfect curveball. The first two I’d practiced on my brother and sister. The second two I knew from reading books in the library. I couldn’t really play a lot on those teams—no transportation—but just in case, I wanted to know how to play.
At the beginning of seventh grade I wanted to be perfect. Part of that was because I saw my mom getting weaker and weaker and working harder and harder—on her exercises, on making sure all of us got nutritious meals, on creating little fun things for us to do around holidays: We had Mexican wedding cakes and Christmas spritz cookies that came out of a cookie shooter that we would form in different shapes, dye with food coloring, and decorate with sprinkles. When it was my turn to dry the dishes, I wanted to be the fastest dryer in the family. When I rolled fresh walleye in breadcrumbs and fried it in butter, I wanted it to be the most delicious walleye anyone had ever tasted. I got good grades and worked hard for them, but that wasn’t enough. I wanted the best grades, and even that wasn’t enough. We had multiple-choice reading proficiency tests every month, and I wanted to be the first one finished. So did one of my best friends, Dan Hamski. He beat me every single time and it drove me crazy. It took me a while, but finally I figured out what was going on. He’d rip through the tests, and when he got to a question he couldn’t answer, he just skipped it and moved on. If the same thing happened to me, I’d bear down and work on that question until I had figured it out, even if it took the rest of the allotted time. I never got anything wrong . . . but I never beat Dan. I had to get everything right, no matter what it cost.
The only place I didn’t have to try so hard was the woods. There I could run, walk, or do whatever I wanted. The trees didn’t care how hard I worked, whether I stacked wood the right way, or how fast I was. The sky wasn’t depending on me to make sure my mom didn’t get worse. The ground wasn’t testing me. It was just me and the sighing wind and the silence. In the woods I was alone with my questions of why and the utter lack of answers. The lack didn’t seem so frightening in the woods. I wanted to be a game warden. Years later, my parents showed me something I wrote that said I wanted to be a doctor, but I don’t remember that. More likely, I just wanted my mom to get better.
We all did. But what could we do? It would have been nice to take my mom out for dinner, but meals out were only for birthdays or when dad got a raise. It would have been great for Mom to have a computer, and every year my dad would talk about buying one, but we never did. It wasn’t until I was in eighth grade that he sprung for an Apple IIe.
I tried to help. I entered poster and coloring contests where the prize was twelve gallons of ice cream from Bridgeman’s. I won that ice cream, and later I won poster contests sponsored by the state department of fish and game. That made my dad and mom happy. She was happy, but she was still tired all the time. “Mom has the flu,” Dad would say, or “She really needs to rest today.”
I had learned in school that if you put a frog in a pot of water, then gradually heat the water until it’s hot enough to kill the frog, the animal won’t move because he doesn’t pay attention to gradual changes. That’s how it was with me. It’s not like one day my mom was great and then, after she got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, everything sucked. Maybe even with a healthy mother and gentler father, I would have worried a lot. I’ll never know.
At my annual checkup when I was twelve, the doctor took a deep breath when he read my blood pressure. He took it again and breathed even deeper. Then he told me to go sit in the waiting room and he whispered to my dad. After that, my dad took me to a specialist who took my blood pressure at least three times, sitting down, lying down, and standing up. He asked me how I was sleeping and if I ever felt faint, and I told him the truth, that I felt okay. But by the time I left I was scared—mostly because my dad looked scared, too.
When I got home, my dad told me to go outside and play—and that was particularly frightening because he never told me to play—while he and my mom talked. Then he called me in, and they told me that I was going to have to start taking some pills every morning.
“Why?” I hadn’t said the word out loud in years.
“Your blood pressure is high,” my mom said. “This might help.”
I knew what taking pills meant because my mom took them every day. I said I wasn’t going to take them, that I could lower my blood pressure myself. I would read some books on it. My mom smiled at that. I don’t think I ever saw my dad look so helpless.
It wasn’t just pills, they said. From now on, no more salt. That news was as bad as the pills. I loved Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup, and that was out. I loved mounds of butter and piles of salt on mashed potatoes. Nix on that, too. (I hated vegetables, with a few exceptions, notably canned corn, raw carrots, and potatoes.)
I insisted. Really, I would study up, I could beat this thing. I pleaded for them to give me a chance. Of course they said no.
The next night after dinner, I saw the big white bag from the pharmacy with my name on it. It was sitting in the bathroom cabinet with all my mom’s pills, and when my dad reached up for the bag and handed it to my mom, I started crying.
“Scottie,” my mom said, “you have to take these. It’s for your own good.”
Sometimes you just do things! But why? I kept bawling and then I started screaming. She took the pills out of the bag and looked at me, then sighed and put them back.
“We’ll try to figure something out, Scottie, but you have to cooperate a little bit.”
The next week, my dad took me to another specialist. This doctor turned off the lights in his office and told me I should imagine somewhere where I was happy. I thought of the woods in the summer, the great green hush. He told me to close my eyes and to stay where I was—in the woods—and then after a while he turned on the lights and called my dad in.
“Your son can get his blood pressure down by himself,” the specialist said. “If he can do it again, at his pediatrician’s office, we can wait on the medication.”
That night my dad told me I didn’t need to be so “wound up.” He told me I should relax more, that I was just a kid, that I couldn’t save the world. My dad, Mr. Sometimes you just do things!, was a complicated guy. He also told me that he had confidence in me, that I’d always been a good worker, and that he knew I could get my blood pressure down when we visited the pediatrician’s office. I wasn’t so sure. He promised that afterward he would buy me my own skis.
The next afternoon, at my
pediatrician’s office, I walked back into the woods, toward the green trees and the dirt and the quiet. Afterward, the doctor told my dad that he should hold on to the medicine but that I didn’t need to start taking it. Not yet. He didn’t say anything about stress or meditation or controlling your body with your mind, but I figured it out. Every week my parents would take out the inflatable blood pressure monitor they had bought and wrap it around my arm, and every week I would close my eyes and imagine trees and quiet. I learned that I could control my blood pressure with my brain. I remember thinking that talent might come in handy some day for something other than avoiding pills and getting to eat what I wanted.
I knew downhill skis were for rich kids, the kids who went to Duluth East, the ones whose parents were doctors and lawyers and who boarded planes to go on ski vacations. In my school, we called the people from that side of town “cake eaters.” But my dad bought me those skis—used red, white, and blue K2s, used boots, and new poles—and even then I knew what a sacrifice it was.
That summer, my dad announced one night at dinner that the next week we were all going up to northern Minnesota to stay in a lodge. A lodge! He might as well have said we’d be going to Chicago to have a steak dinner. And not only that, but we would be at a lake and we could swim—in the lake next to the lodge or in the swimming pool—and fish and ride our bikes. There would be pontoon boat rides, too, and we could go by ourselves and paddle boat wherever we wanted on the lake. Angela and Greg and I felt as though we had won the lottery.
What my dad didn’t tell us is that there would be other families there, and other kids, and professionals who would talk to all the kids while the adults met somewhere else.
The grownups brought the kids all together and asked us a series of questions. Questions like “How do you feel about your mom having MS?” And “What’s it like at home? How do you feel about your friends and schoolmates visiting?” And “Do you feel different?” I was already reading a lot then—about blood pressure and soccer and even cooking. But I hadn’t read anything about multiple sclerosis. I knew all I needed to know about it. Angela and Greg didn’t say anything to the social worker—they were shy, anyway, and I think they were scared. I didn’t say much either. No one in my family talked much about things like that. What good would it have done? What would it have helped? I had learned by then that all the whys in the world wouldn’t change what was happening to my mother. I didn’t start crying or anything, like some of the other kids there. My sister just stared at the social worker. My little brother, who was already becoming a handful, kept tugging at me, asking when we were going to go back to the paddle boats. He was a badass even then.
The truth is, I don’t remember feeling much at that moment. It was like, “Mom has MS, tough luck, that’s the way it is. You just keep going.”
Lentil-Mushroom Burgers
For any reluctant vegan who worries that nothing will ever replace the taste or texture of a juicy beef patty, consider the lentil burger. It might not matter so much that lentils are an excellent source of protein, that they are one of the fastest-cooking legumes, or that they are consumed in large quantities all over Europe, Asia, and Africa (even Idaho!). What will impress you is how tender, juicy, and “meaty” they taste. I grew up grilling over campfires, and I know burgers. These are as delicious as they come. Sometimes I’ll even take a few patties with me on long training runs and races.
1 cup dried green lentils (2¼ cups cooked)
2¼ cups water
1 teaspoon dried parsley
¼ teaspoon black pepper
3 garlic cloves, minced
1¼ cups finely chopped onion
¾ cup finely chopped walnuts
2 cups fine bread crumbs (see Note)
½ cup ground flax seed (flax seed meal)
3 cups finely chopped mushrooms
1½ cups destemmed, finely chopped kale, spinach, or winter greens
2 tablespoons coconut oil or olive oil
3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
1 teaspoon sea salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
½ teaspoon paprika
In a small pot, bring the lentils, water, parsley, 1 garlic clove, and ¼ cup of the onion to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, partially covered, for 35 to 40 minutes, until the water is absorbed and the lentils are soft.
While the lentils are cooking, combine the walnuts, bread crumbs, and flax seed in a bowl. Add the nutritional yeast, salt, pepper, and paprika and mix well.
Sauté the remaining onion, remaining garlic, the mushrooms, and greens in the oil for 8 to 10 minutes, then set aside. Remove the lentils from the heat, add the vinegar and mustard, and mash with a potato masher or wooden spoon to a thick paste.
In a large mixing bowl, combine the lentils, sautéed veggies, and bread crumb mixtures, and mix well. Cool in the refrigerator for 15 to 30 minutes or more.
Using your hands, form burger patties to your desired size and place on waxed paper. Lightly fry in a seasoned skillet, broil, or grill until lightly browned and crisp, 3 to 5 minutes on each side. Extra uncooked patties can be frozen on wax paper in plastic bags or wrapped individually in aluminum foil, making for a quick dinner or wholesome burger for the next barbecue.
MAKES A DOZEN 4-INCH DIAMETER BURGERS
NOTE: To make the bread crumbs, you’ll need about half of a loaf of day-old bread (I use Ezekiel 4:9). Slice the bread, then tear or cut into 2- to 3-inch pieces and chop in a food processor for 1 to 2 minutes, until a fine crumb results. The walnuts can also be chopped in the food processor with the bread.
4. “Pain Only Hurts”
TO ADOLPH STORE AND BACK, 1990
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
—LAO-TZU
It turned out those secondhand skis would take me places.
I liked sports but had avoided the school teams in middle school. Only twelve of us had graduated from the sixth-grade class at St. Rose, and even though I would have liked to play football or basketball on the middle school team, the thought of getting on the late bus with a whole lot of older, athletic kids scared me. I was shy and I was skinny, and other kids called me “Pee-Wee.” Kids pushed and shoved me and challenged me to fights on the school bus. I think it was because my mom always made me wear a button-down shirt to school. Probably because word got around that I did well in class, too. Studying hard at a northern Minnesota redneck school was not cool. If they had known how much I hunted and fished, it might have been different. But they didn’t, and it wasn’t.
Once a guy on the bus spit in my face. But I didn’t fight. I knew no matter what happened—whether I won or, much more likely, got beat up—I would get it worse from my dad when I got home.
I played basketball in our church league when I was in seventh and eighth grades because the travel and uniforms were taken care of (and church league teammates aren’t exactly known for stealing anyone’s lunch money), and even though I knew all about trapping zone defenses and backdoor picks, I wasn’t anything special. What I remember most about those basketball games is how my mom needed help getting to the bleachers. I hated seeing that. It sounds awful to say, but I hated how slow she moved. I felt as if we were a really odd family and I was a really odd kid because of that. At church, we all sat up front. My dad would drop us off and say, “You kids go up and get seats and I’ll bring Mom in.” So everyone in the church got to watch our mom shuffle to the front of the church.
By the time I was a sophomore, I had good grades, a part-time job at the Dry Dock Bar & Grill (where I had been promoted from dishwasher to short-order cook), and not a lot of friends. I could cook shrimp and French silk pie, chili, burgers, clam chowder, and a kick-ass Philly cheesesteak. Something was burning in me, but I don’t think I’d call it ambition. It was too vague, too shapeless. I still wanted to know why things were happening the way they were. I wanted to
know what I would become. Concentration had helped me in every activity of my life, but it didn’t help me find those answers. I wasn’t sure what would.
It was the skis. My high school formed a boys cross-country ski team when I was a sophomore, and because I liked being outside and figured I wasn’t going to be a star point guard or tailback, I joined. The coach, a tough Norwegian named Glen Sorenson, showed us some fundamentals, took us to meets where we piled up losses, and ordered us to spend the summer before our junior year building our endurance. He said that he didn’t care how we did it as long as we did it. I didn’t own a road bike or inline skates, so I ran.
If my shift at the Dry Dock started early, I’d run in the afternoon. If I had to help my mom in the afternoon, I’d run at night. I’d go a little farther each day. One day I made it 4 miles out and 4 back, and my dad said, “You ran out to Adolph Store!” He and my mom were both blown away.
I didn’t run because it always felt good. My muscles ached, I had blisters, and I was having to go to the bathroom on the run—that was the summer I learned about the runner’s trots (cramps, gastrointestinal distress, and the urgent need to move your bowels). That was the summer I got honked at and run off the roads of northern Minnesota. I enjoyed the sense of movement and progress, discovering that I could reach places on my own without anyone driving me. But that’s not why I kept running. I ran because I wanted to ski.
