by Scott Jurek
I wanted more. I wanted to push myself, to crack myself open and discover something fresh. I wanted a new challenge.
Tamari-Lime Tempeh and Brown Rice
The big concern I hear from people about a plant-based diet is difficulty. It takes too long. It requires too much focus. For those folks I make this dish, which—if you cook the rice beforehand—you can have on the table in less than 20 minutes. The brown rice gives the dish a nutty texture and provides essential amino acids. Tempeh contains 3 grams of protein for every gram of fat, which makes it one of the leanest, most protein-heavy of the soy products (which was invaluable when I was cranking up my training, looking for more protein). Better, it’s fermented and easily digestible, even for people who have trouble with most soy products.
4 cups uncooked brown rice
2¾ cups water
1 teaspoon coconut or olive oil
8–12 ounces tempeh, sliced ⅛- to ¼-inch thick
Juice of 1 lime or lemon
1 tablespoon tamari or shoyu mixed with 1 tablespoon water
Red Curry Almond Sauce (see recipe, [>])
Add the brown rice and water to a pot and bring to a boil. Simmer over low heat for 30 to 40 minutes, until the water evaporates and the rice is tender. Fluff with a fork and cool.
Coat a large skillet with the oil and heat over medium-low heat until a drop of water sizzles when it hits the pan. Saute the tempeh for 3 to 5 minutes on each side, until lightly browned. Remove from the heat. Squeeze the lime or lemon over the tempeh and sprinkle with the tamari or shoyu.
For each serving, place a cup of brown rice on a plate or in a bowl. Crumble several pieces of tempeh on top and drizzle with 1 to 2 tablespoons Red Curry Almond Sauce. Enjoy with a side of Indonesian Cabbage Salad (see recipe, [>]).
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
14. A Hot Mess
BADWATER ULTRAMARATHON, 2005
Fall down seven times, get up eight.
—JAPANESE PROVERB
On August 3, 1977, the hottest day of that year, a fifty-year-old named Al Arnold tried to run from Badwater, California, through and across Death Valley to the summit of 14,000-foot Mount Whitney. Six-foot-five and 200 pounds, he had tried the feat twice before, failing both times. This effort would be his last. He succeeded (and thus was born the Badwater Ultramarathon) and said, regarding the last 40 miles or so: “It was like all tranquility that can exist . . . existed for me.” He said that photographs taken of him after mile 100 show an unearthly glow coming off his body.
Today, the 135-mile course starts in Death Valley, at 280 feet below sea level, and arrows on a paved road straight to the portal of Mount Whitney, at 8,300 feet. It was the crazy race Rick Miller had told me about four years earlier.
The Badwater Ultramarathon (or simply the Badwater) is big overseas and has been the subject of more than one documentary film. Part of the reason is that the race director, Chris Kostman, is something of a publicity genius. The press material calls it “the world’s toughest foot race,” which I seriously doubted, as it was on roads and (for ultrarunners) relatively level. Most untough of all, the cutoff time was 60 hours. You could walk the thing and finish. I had run in hot weather before, at the Western States. I had climbed (and descended) 10,500 feet on my training runs on the Twelve Peaks. I caused despair in others, not the other way around, so the Badwater didn’t scare me, but it did intrigue me. It was not as obviously difficult as other events I had won, but there was something perversely challenging about it. I aimed to find out what. Most serious runners wait at least a month between ultras. But less than a week after winning my seventh Western States, I flew to Las Vegas. A lot of people said I was crazy to enter another race, especially this race, especially so soon.
When I arrived in Death Valley, I took a training run that singed my nose hairs. I felt as if a branding iron were pressing on my skull—from the inside. I drove to a Home Depot and purchased an industrial-strength sprayer. I helped Rick and Barb Miller rig up a coffin-sized cooler, which would be filled with ice water. I had, of course, asked Dusty to pace me. (When he felt the heat, he said he would do it only if I promised to take him to Las Vegas for a few days afterward, strippers included.)
My main competition would be last year’s second-place finisher, a Canadian baggage handler named Ferg Hawke, who said things like: “The first half of the Badwater is run with the legs, the second half with the heart.” He sounded interesting. Not a threat, but interesting. There was another guy, a fifty-year-old named Mike Sweeney. He had brought vests of synthetic ice packets that he had duct-taped together. He had also stored—on dry ice—small Tupperware bowls inside larger Tupperware bowls, anchored by an inch-thick layer of ice between the two. He planned to wear the device (he had three) on his head, duct-taped around his chin. Sweeney dove off cliffs for fun and smacked his head a lot. He said it made him and his skull stronger.
Also competing would be a trio of large German men wearing floppy garden hats, who, recognizing me before the race, chanted, “Vee vill overtake you!”
Ultramarathons tend to attract obsessive people. To undertake a race of over 50 miles requires training that can occupy 3 hours a day, a routine that involves cramps and pain and loneliness, not to mention the inevitable moments of doubt and maybe even a little self-loathing. Ultras seem to attract seekers of all kinds, including recovering addicts and alcoholics, seers, sages, some very wacky engineers and poets, and assorted windmill-tilters. Not to mention the monks and holy men.
Consider Sri Chinmoy, who, after arriving in New York City in 1964, taught meditation and a lifestyle of personal transformation in which athletics featured heavily. He attracted thousands of followers, among them Carlos Santana and Carl Lewis, and maintained a center in Queens. He demanded that his followers practice celibacy and vegetarianism and abstain from drugs, alcohol, and smoking. Many of them worked for Chinmoy in his associated businesses, such as the Smile of the Beyond Luncheonette in Jamaica and the Oneness-Fountain-Heart in Flushing.
The Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, founded in 1977, has gone on to promote and compete in numerous ultras. The most famous is the 3,100-mile Self-Transcendence Race, the longest footrace in the world, held on a city block in Queens—164th Place to Abigail Adams (84th) Avenue to 168th Street to Grand Central Parkway. The 3,100-mile distance honors the year (’31) of Sri Chinmoy’s birth. Runners must complete 5,649 laps of the .5488-mile course in fifty-two days (extended to fifty-four in 2011 due to extreme heat). It is tantamount to running two marathons a day. Many run for 17 or 18 hours a day. The experience is so grueling and repetitive that few even undertake, much less complete, the race. In 2011, ten runners competed and eight finished.
But the most famous (and infamous) contemporary band of allegedly spiritual long-distance runners is probably the group known as Divine Madness. Members make a monthly financial “commitment” to the group. Its founder and leader, Marc Tizer, aka Yo, encourages communal living, ultrarunning, and free love. He will tack on extra miles in the middle of the group’s training runs to keep them “adaptable.” He has runners hold out their arm and he presses against it, then diagnoses their problems, what kind of running shoes they need, and who they should sleep with. They eat and sleep on the floor and work at subsistence jobs. Two former members of the group filed a civil lawsuit against Yo in 1996, joined in 1997 by a third, alleging mind control through sleep deprivation, fasting, and isolation. That case was settled out of court. One woman lodged a sexual assault case with the police. Mark Heinemann was an apparently healthy group member who dropped dead of pneumonia after a 48-hour race. He was forty-six.
Mike Sweeney passed me at mile 15, but I wasn’t worried. Even if he hadn’t been a head-smacking, ice helmet–wearing cliff diver, I wouldn’t have been worried. I was looking forward to the uphill at 40 miles—that’s when I would reel him in. That’s when I would claim the Badwater as mine.
A few miles later I dropped from second to fourth place. Ferg had passed me, and a guy I
never heard of named Chris Bergland did, too. I felt as if I might puke. One of my crew members said to slow it down, to take it easy, but I was getting my ass kicked by a bunch of underdogs. I was hearing reports that Sweeney was ahead by 25 minutes.
It was the heat. My training runs had helped, but nothing could have helped me enough for this. Imagine a sun so pitiless that it seemed to want to personally torture you. Imagine that every time you inhaled, the air was so hot that it seared your already parched throat and stung your lungs. Now imagine that a tall, cool, iced bottle of water was waiting for you, along with an aquamarine swimming pool and giant puddles of shade under oversized umbrellas and that fans were wafting cool breezes your way as you lay down on crisp, chilly sheets. Now imagine that all that relief was only another 110 miles away, and you had to run there, through heat every bit as awful as what you had just endured—maybe worse.
I ran (mostly uphill) to the aid station at Stovepipe Wells, 20 miles away, where my crew had prepared the giant coffin cooler. Dusty was jumping up and down in the parking lot, barefoot, wearing a black down expedition jacket, shouting “Hot potato, hot potato!” He was doing it to amuse me, I’m sure, to take my mind off the difficulties ahead. If I hadn’t felt like my internal organs were liquefying, I might have chuckled.
I took off my sun pants and long-sleeved sun shirt—both specially designed by Brooks—and wriggled in. I thought I heard my crew discussing Sweeney’s lead, and I remember thinking that I should get out, that if sometimes you just do things, then that moment would be certainly be an auspicious time to start. My body thought otherwise. I don’t think I ever felt so good. Dusty suggested it was time to go, but I demurred.
When—finally—I climbed out, I wanted to immediately climb back in. After 2 miles, I told my crew I needed it again. Two more miles, one of them said, but they drove 3 miles. When I arrived, I told them I was ready, but again they said 2 more miles. And again they drove 3 miles. Rick Miller told me to stop thinking about the giant cooler, and he sprayed me down with the contraption I had bought at Home Depot.
There’s something profoundly lonely about any ultra, but the Badwater is the loneliest of all. Ancient sand dunes roll over the valley floor like waves. Huge boulders lounge in the middle of emptiness. The salt flat shimmers and beckons with its treacherous beauty.
The wonderful thing about ultramarathons is that, no matter how awful things get, how searing the pain you’re in, there’s always a chance to redeem yourself. If you’re willing to work, salvation awaits. Sweeney was still a good 5 miles ahead, and I had 10 miles to go before I got to the top of Town’s Pass, mile 59 of the race. Those 10 miles—with their choking heat and blowing dust and the murderous incline and altitude—were popular among automakers. They used the stretch to test their latest models for performance under rigorous conditions. It had gotten too hot even for the desert rat Rick Miller, so Dusty joined me and ran me up the next 10 miles. “You da man. Yeah brotha’, that’s how you do it, Jurker, hell yeah!” the Dust Ball hollered. We crested the pass just as the sun set. Dusty peeled into the twilight to get some rest for the night shift, and my friend Justin Angle took over.
I learned how to run downhill on Mount Si, and I put those lessons to use on the descent to Panamint Valley. I felt as if I was floating. I flew by Ferg and yelled, “Free speed!” I found out later that I was clocking 5:00-minute miles. I blazed into the valley at dark. Night had not just fallen, it had thudded and crashed and the air had cooled—to 105 degrees. But that was all right because out of the blackness jogged the jester of the dark, the rogue prince of the cake eaters. We blazed into the night. We might as well have been back on the game trails of Duluth. What could go wrong?
I found out at mile 70. One minute I was flying, the next I was dying. I started looking for a sidewinder in the desert. If one bit me, I could quit without shame.
Ferg passed me a few miles out of Panamint Springs. I sat by the side of the road. Then I puked. And puked some more. My crew joined me. They told me to put my feet in the air, and my crew moved me to the desert side of the van so Ferg’s crew, who were always sneaking up on me or back to me to see where I was and how much Ferg needed to worry, couldn’t learn anything. Leah and Barb and Rick huddled over me, telling me I had beat longer odds, that I’d run tougher races. I was dry heaving. I heard a voice say, “I don’t think this is gonna happen,” and I realized it was my voice.
I had studied enough nutrition and physical therapy to know that what was happening should not have been happening.
In some ways, an ultra isn’t even as hard as a marathon. My heart rate was lower and my lungs were less taxed than they would have been during a shorter, faster race. Sure, most marathons don’t go through the heart of Death Valley, but I had done my homework on that front, so my body should have been primed. All those runs through the heat at Rick and Barb’s had made my sweating and circulation more efficient. The time spent training at altitude had sparked adaptations such as an increased network of capillaries, bigger energy-producing mitochondria, and elevated levels of the enzyme 2,3-diphosphoglycerate to help oxygen reach my tissues. The body’s ability to adapt is truly astounding. That’s why I say that, with the right training and support, anyone can do an ultra.
Yet there’s a reason why top marathoners aren’t flocking to the sport, and it’s not just the lack of cash and prizes. Although the pace of an ultra is slower, maintaining that effort for hours and hours can leave the best of us huddled at the side of the road, dry heaving. For one thing, there’s the cumulative loading on the muscles and bones. Every time the foot hits the ground, the quadriceps and calf muscles have to lengthen to absorb the shock of the impact, and that adds up when you go a hundred miles, whether you’re barefoot or in Brooks, running or walking, slapping your heel or landing on your toes. Downhills are the worst of all. When you see runners shuffling across the Badwater finish line, it’s not because they’re too tired to push off, it’s because they’re too sore to land.
Even if you’re able to keep food down under these conditions, you’ll eventually hit the famous “wall” where the glycogen energy stores in your liver and muscles are depleted. In a marathon, the wall comes at the tail end of the race, but in an ultra, it’s not even at the midpoint and it happens many times. You’ll have to spend hours in the catabolic state where your body is forced to burn fat, protein, and even its own muscles to ensure adequate energy reaches the brain.
A cascade of stress-related hormones floods the body in response to the sustained exertion. Blood tests after ultras have shown elevated cardiac enzymes, renal injury, and very high levels of the stress hormone cortisol, the proinflammatory compound interleukin-6, and creatine kinase, a toxic byproduct of muscle breakdown. That’s a lot for the immune system to handle. Approximately one in four runners at the Western States gets a cold after the race, and this is in the height of summer!
Most of all, the ultra distance leaves you alone with your thoughts to an excruciating extent. Whatever song you have in your head had better be a good one. Whatever story you are telling yourself had better be a story about going on. There is no room for negativity. The reason most people quit has nothing to do with their body.
Was my mind failing me? Could I have done something differently?
“You’re not gonna win this fucking race lying down in the dirt. C’mon, Jurker, get the fuck up.”
I got up, tried to run, and almost fell.
“C’mon, Jurker,” Dusty said. “We’re just gonna walk. We’re just gonna take a little walk in the desert.”
We walked, and after a little while, Dusty said, “Let’s run 20 feet. It’ll be just like Nordic ski training. It’ll be like ski walking.” He said “valking,” imitating our old Russian coach, and I couldn’t stop chuckling. But I managed a sip of water.
Sweeney was miles ahead. I couldn’t even catch the crazy Canadian. What was I doing? I might have said this to Dusty.
“We’ll just take this piece by p
iece,” he said. “Piece by piece.”
I forgot about catching anyone. I forgot about finishing. I forgot about everything except making it up the next switchback. Dusty saw the expression on my face. He told me this wasn’t life and death, I didn’t need to kill myself.
Piece by piece. Switchback by switchback. We crested a lonely hummock freckled with Joshua trees. My stomach felt better. I started to run. Dusty started to run. I picked up speed. So did the Dust Ball. “Rhythm and form, Jurker. Rhythm and form. C’mon, stretch it out! C’mon, you want to fucking be somebody? Let’s do this!”
We ran. I had traveled 85 miles. We ran over a rolling plateau on the border of Death Valley National Park. A crew member told us Ferg had passed Sweeney and that the cliff diver was cracking. Dusty and I flew. We ticked off an 8-minute mile, then a 7:30 mile, then another 7:30. I felt as if I could run forever.
If you’re an athlete and you’re fortunate, you’ve felt it. Being “in the zone,” tasting satori—the sudden, Zen-like clarity that comes when you least expect it, often when your body is pushed to the limit. Running backs speak of the game slowing down until all the other players are moving with almost cartoonish sluggishness as the running back in the zone darts among and between them. Basketball players testify that the hoop at which they’re shooting not only seems larger but is larger. Runners speak of feeling absorbed into the universe, of seeing the story of life in a single weed on the side of the road.
