Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness (31 page)

I did the only thing I could—I gave him space. I didn’t call or write, didn’t ask him to help me at races. I didn’t visit. And I missed him.

I arrived in Cleveland on a cold, wet October weekend, and I dropped out of the race at 65 miles. My legs were still tired from UTMB. My heart and soul were weary from just about everything else.

Five months later, at the nursing home, I called Jenny, and she flew to Minnesota.

“Mom,” I said, “this is Jenny, the girl I’ve talked about so much.” My mother didn’t say anything—she couldn’t—but I knew she understood. Jenny and I spent my mother’s last three days with her. While I took care of my mom, Jenny was taking care of me, making sure I got food, sleep, and fresh air from time to time. We played my mother’s favorite Celine Dion CDs and sang along.

I slept in the chair by my mom, and Jenny slept in a makeshift apartment in the nursing home basement.

The first night, I saw how frightened my mother was. She had always told people not to worry. “I’m tough,” she always said to anyone who asked if she was feeling all right. “I’m tough.” But before she slipped into unconsciousness, it was as if she was reminding herself that she could do this one last thing, that she could move through this, that she could do the thing we all fear.

She died on March 22. Those last hours I didn’t stop stroking her hair or telling her, “Don’t worry, I’m here.” I told her that I was a good cook because of her. I told her I ate fresh fruit and vegetables because of her. I told her I ran because of her. I told her I could still picture the little garden on our dead-end road. I could feel the rough wooden spoon, my hands clutching it, hers covering mine. I told her I remembered that, how warm her hands felt. I told her I loved her and that she would always be with me.

I didn’t tell her I was lost.

Carob Chia Pudding

I started making this pudding during my first years at the Western States. I knew I would be camping in the mountains and I wanted to have a ready-made protein source after evening training runs and something sweet to complement my dinner. The sweet, chocolate-like flavor comes from the raw carob (if you think you hate carob, you have probably been eating only the roasted variety). After spending time in the Copper Canyon, I added chia seeds to the recipe, which gave it a tapioca-like texture. When people taste this pudding, they can’t believe it contains tofu.

Place the tofu, maple syrup, carob, miso, and vanilla in a blender and blend for 1 to 2 minutes, until smooth. Transfer to a serving bowl and stir in the chia seeds. Refrigerate for 10 to 20 minutes, then serve in small cups or bowls, garnished with the mint.

MAKES
4–6
SERVINGS

20. Secrets of the Dark Wizard

YOSEMITE VALLEY, 2010

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water.

—BRUCE LEE

Trees and cliffs swayed in front of me, and I knew that one misstep would send me plunging to earth. My arms were out, my right foot a foot in front of my left, and I was trying to balance on an inch-wide piece of climbing webbing, tied to a Ponderosa pine in front of me and, 30 feet behind me, an old gnarled oak.

For most of my life, a misstep preceded a stumble. Here, it would lead to a fall. Here, balance didn’t mean improved performance. It meant success or failure.

“One step at a time. One step.”

The ground swayed.

My teacher regularly walked over chasms thousands of feet deep. He scaled terminal granite rock faces with no safety equipment. He pioneered the sport of freeBASE climbing (free solo climbing with a parachute as the only means of protection) and at the moment was trying to figure out a way to dive off a cliff, soar through the air, and land without a parachute. He said it was merely a matter of physics. Because he practiced “dark” arts, they called him the Dark Wizard.

His real name was Dean Potter. Jenny introduced us in January 2010, and he invited us to the small cabin he rented in Yosemite Valley. He called it “the shack.”

I had heard—and read—about Dean, how he sought to alter his consciousness through feats of extreme athleticism and challenge. He had read
Born to Run
and saw me as a kindred spirit.

Yosemite was Jenny’s favorite place on earth. I loved the outdoors. It seemed like a perfect place to go after my mother died. Dean’s shack was clean and neat. His refrigerator was stocked with chia seeds, young coconuts, and spirulina powder. On his wall hung an old advertisement, yellowed with age, for Eagle Electric. In small print, it read:
PERFECTION IS NOT AN ACCIDENT
.

I wanted to spend time in the valley grieving, healing from my mother’s passing. I also wanted to understand why I ran and to decide whether I wanted to continue. To help me understand and to help me decide, I would walk on webbing between trees. Slacklining is a discipline that requires extreme focus, yet your body has to remain fluid and relaxed. You must calm the instinctual fear that has allowed humans to survive. It teaches you to let go of your fears and forces you to trust the power of your mind—to trust a power somewhere else. Dean had started me 4 feet off the ground. Learning took time. When I stepped on the line, it would shake uncontrollably from side to side, making it impossible to balance. It was a challenge in itself to stand up on the line, let alone take a step. Progress was slow; time after time the line bucked me off until I realized that I was causing the line to shake and learned to calm it with my body and mind in sync.

I considered quitting before. I talked about it once to a nonrunner I had met a few years earlier. We were at an aid station on a ridge line 3,000 feet above Ojai, California, welcoming runners, offering them bananas, filling their water bottles, and telling them they were doing great. It was November 2008, the Rose Valley 33-Miler, and I didn’t realize it, but I must have been telling the guy about my doubts.

The guy had fixed me with an odd glare.

“Dude,” he said, “you had better take advantage of what you’ve accomplished. You’re not going to be Scott Jurek forever.”

There are ultrarunners who don’t question why they do what they do, but I’m not one of them. Why did I run? Is ultramarathoning crazy? Is it hopelessly selfish? Can I have solitude and also love? Is there any value in winning? Competition drives me, but I know that losing myself is the real key to fulfillment. How can I win without ego?

Was I too focused on winning? Had I lost the capacity for being in the moment that had—paradoxically—brought me my greatest recognition? Or were my doubts and loss of motivation merely chemical?

Countless studies have pinpointed the source of “runner’s high” as being elevated levels of endorphins and endocannabinoids, naturally occurring substances that affect the brain, produced in large amounts by exercise. This might explain the apparently large number of recovering addicts in the ultrarunning community.

I met a runner named Bill Kee when I was in Southern California in 2001, training for the Angeles Crest 100. He had long gray hair and a gray handlebar mustache. He wore cutoff shorts with flames painted on both sides. Running from one pocket to a belt loop was a heavy metal chain, holding his wallet. This was the uniform he ran in. He carried two 48-ounce Gatorade bottles and when he finished a race, he put them aside and put on his leather jacket, with its Team Death insignia, got into his big black Chevy van, and drove toward the horizon.

Kee told me that he started drinking and doing drugs when he was eighteen, and he didn’t stop till fourteen years later, when he decided that life as a drunk and an addict—with its jail time, three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day, and other wonders—wasn’t working. He was living in Ojai, California, right next to the foothills of the Topatopa Mountains, and every night, jonesing for a cigarette, he’d hike into those hills. One cold night, he parked his car at the bottom of his driveway and decided to run the quarter mile to his house. Then, on a dare, he ran up a 3-mile hill, 1,700 feet of ascent. Marathons followed. He didn’t know what he was doing, bonked often, learned fast. He didn’t even know what an ultramarathon was until he read about it in a magazine.

He ran his first one in 1999. He’s fifty-four now. He lost a kidney in a motorcycle accident in 1980. He’s been suffering from Lyme disease since 2005. But he’s been sober and smoke-free since he started running. “Scott,” Kee told me in 2001, “running is my new drug.”

Kee has plenty of company. The mohawked, tattooed, reptile-toting Ben Hian didn’t become an ultrarunning legend until he kicked his addiction to mood-altering drugs and trained his obsessive focus on running long distances. And many of the runners I have encountered in my career have talked about their struggles with marijuana, as well as eating disorders, and a general difficulty finding peace anywhere but on the trail.

Can running become its own addiction? One gruesome study showed that rats love running so much, they can actually run themselves to death. When offered food for only one 90-minute period per day, the rats in the control group (without an exercise wheel) soon learned to adapt, taking in all the calories they needed during that meal. Rats with running wheels, however, ran more and more every day while eating less and less. They eventually starved to death.

Some of ultrarunning’s greatest champions seem to have burned out or just given up at a certain point. Cautionary tales abound in the ultra community, passed from runner to runner at prerace breakfasts and postrace award ceremonies like the story of Icarus and his doomed wax wings was whispered among ambitious, worried Greeks.

My hero Chuck Jones ran his last ultra in 1988, when, after watching a UFO hover over Death Valley during the Badwater Ultramarathon (he suspects it was a hallucination brought on by dehydration), he passed out.

“Now I’m a sunset runner,” he says. “I work all day in the sun [laying asphalt] and then I just want to run, relax, and recover, to see what the body can do.”

The great Ann Trason, who won fourteen Western States and almost beat the Tarahumara in a widely publicized Leadville 100 in 1994 (the Indians called her
Bruja,
or “the witch”), has suffered numerous injuries, and though she hasn’t stopped running, she hasn’t entered an ultra for several years. She lamented to a reporter, “I just wish I could go out and run every day. I think I took it for granted. I knew I’d slow down and get older, but I didn’t know there’d be a cliff.”

The summer after he showed me around the San Juan Mountains, in 2007, Kyle Skaggs returned to Silverton to run the Hardrock 100. He set a new clockwise and overall course record by almost 3 hours. He also set speed records for the Wasatch Front 100, circumnavigating Mount Rainier on the Wonderland Trail, and running the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim.

Then, at the age of twenty-four, he quit. He now grows organic vegetables on his farm in New Mexico. He hasn’t run a competitive step since 2008.

Had I reached my cliff?

I had always been careful to rest when I needed to, especially when hurt, conscientious about treating my body right. But was burnout—or apparently happy abstinence—the inevitable price of intensely focused training like mine? Could I succeed
without
my focus? Had I been lying to myself by thinking I was living a life of balance?

Jenny thought we should take a break to process the recent events in a peaceful place. A week after my mother died, we drove the 6 hours to Yosemite.

We spent three days with Dean.

I saw that he was a balance of yin and yang: There’s exquisite sensitivity and softness in his movements when he’s walking a line or free soloing a granite wall. He seems to work with rock and sky, as though he’s able to sense—and surrender to—currents of air that are invisible to the rest of us. At the same time, he climbs with ferocity and maintains a crushing training routine. You need that kind of ego strength to overcome fear.

Dean was married for eight years before divorcing in 2010. It was one of the things we bonded over. Another thing we had in common was our age. Like me, Dean was nearing the peak of his physical ability. At thirty-eight, he was starting to talk wistfully about the rising generation of whippersnappers with intact joints and the fearlessness of innocence—he called these climbers “monkey children”—who made everything seem so easy. I liked the way he was handling his transition. He lived in a simple cabin in Yosemite with his little dog, Whisper. His life was minimal, lit up by solitude and nature.

We talked about nutrition, and about the deaths of my mother and his father years earlier. He said he was so focused when he was on 20-hour link-up climbs of big walls that he went into a trance and was convinced he heard radio frequencies. We talked about God, the limits of technology, how in order to win, one had to realize that winning didn’t matter.

I didn’t think I could make it to the tree in front of me. I anticipated a fall.

“One step at a time,” Dean said, as I faltered and swayed. “Stay present.”

Connecting with Others

If you’re an ultrarunner and you spend hours and hours alone on a daily basis, training in remote, unpopulated areas, running can be a solitary undertaking. It’s ironic, then, that some of the greatest and deepest joys in my running career have come from the people I have met and the things we have shared. You don’t have to be an ultrarunner to take advantage of the social rewards of running. Try running—at least on some of your routes—with a friend. Join a running club or weekly group run. Enter a 5K or 10K race. Do something for running that doesn’t involve running. Working at the finish line or at an aid station or joining trail work parties—all of which I’ve done—provided great ways for me to participate, to give back to the sport that’s given me so much. Running can be a lonely activity. It can also introduce you to people worlds beyond your imagining.