Run or Die
Authors: Jornet Kilian
Copyright © 2013 by VeloPress
Translation copyright © 2013 by Peter Bush
First published as Córrer o Morir by Ara Llibres SCCL, copyright © 2011 by Kilian Jornet
All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America by VeloPress, a division of Competitor Group, Inc.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed editor as follows:
Jornet, Kilian, 1987–
[Correr o morir. English]
Run or die / Kilian Jornet.
pages cm
Translation of the author’s Correr o morir.
ISBN 978-1-937715-09-0 (pbk.); ISBN 978-1-937716-35-6 (e-book)
1. Jornet, Kilian, 1987– 2. Long-distance runners—Spain—Biography. 3. Skiers—Spain—Biography. 4. Mountain running. 5. Ski mountaineering. I. Title.
GV1061.15.J675A313 2013
796.42092—dc23
[B]
2013017508
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Cover design by Oceana Garceau
Cover photograph by Damien Rosso,
droz-photo.com
Back cover photograph by Jordi Saragossa
Interior design and composition by Anita Koury
Version 3.1
To Núria, for showing me the way
and lighting it when it gets dark
CONTENTS
1 | What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?
2 | Adrenaline Comes with a Number
3 | It’s Not Only About Competing
7 | Running a Long Way to Find Yourself
8 | We Celebrate a Peak When We’re Back Down
9 | What I Think About When I Think About Running
Kiss or kill.
Besa o mata.
Kiss glory or die in the attempt. Losing is death; winning is life. The fight is what decides the victory, the winner. How often have rage and pain made you cry? How often has exhaustion made you lose your memory, voice, common sense? And how often in this state have you exclaimed, with a broad smile on your face, “The final stage! Two more hours! Go, onward and upward! That pain only exists inside your head. Control it, destroy it, eliminate it, and keep on. Make your rivals suffer. Kill them.” I am selfish, right? Sport is selfish, because you must be selfish to know how to fight on while you suffer, to love solitude and hell. Stopping, coughing, feeling cold, not feeling your legs, feeling sick, vomiting, getting headaches, cuts, bleeding … can you think of anything better?
The secret isn’t in your legs, but in your strength of mind. You need to go for a run when it is raining, windy, and snowing, when lightning sets trees on fire as you pass them, when snowflakes or hailstones strike your legs and body in the storm and make you weep, and in order to keep running, you have to wipe away the tears to see the stones, walls, or sky. The strength of mind to say no to hours of partying, to good grades, to a pretty girl, to the bedsheets against your face. To put your soul into it, going out into the rain until your legs bleed from the cuts when you slip on the mud and fall to the ground, and then get back on your feet and continue uphill until your legs cry
out, “Enough!” and leave you marooned in a storm on the remotest peaks, until you die.
Leggings soaked by snow, driven on by the wind that sticks to your face and freezes your sweat. Feeling the pressure from your legs, the weight of your body bearing down on the metatarsals in your toes, pressure that can shatter rocks, destroy planets, and move continents. Legs suspended in the air, gliding like an eagle, or running faster than a cheetah. Running downhill, slipping on the snow and mud before driving yourself on anew, and suddenly you are free to fly, to shout out in the heart of the mountain, with only the most intrepid rodents and birds hidden in their nests beneath the rocks as your confessors. Only they know your secrets, your fears. Because losing is death. And you should not die before you have given your all, have wept from the pain and the wounds. And you cannot surrender. You must fight on to the death. Because glory is the greatest, and you can either aspire to glory or fall by the wayside. You cannot simply not fight, not suffer, not die.
…
Now is the time to suffer, the time to fight, the time to win. Kiss or kill.
Pinned on the door of an old flat, these were the words I read every morning before I went out training.
I
want to count lakes when I grow up. I want to be a counter of lakes!”
The teacher turned around from the blackboard, where she was chalking up a list of the professions we wanted to enter when we grew up, and stared at me.
“That’s right, a counter of lakes. But I don’t just want to count how many there are. I want to walk in the mountains, and when I find a lake, I will find out how deep it is by throwing in a stone attached to a piece of rope. I want to find out how long and wide it is. I want to find out if it has fish, frogs, or tadpoles. And if the water is clean or not.”
The teacher looked even more taken aback, since that isn’t the job most 5-year-olds want, but I was really very determined. It was to be my destiny.
Add to that the fact that I always, as long as I can remember, came back from every climb and hike with, at the very least, a stone from the peak or the highest point we reached—a custom I still keep. I collect all types and colors of stone: volcanic rock from Mount Kilimanjaro and the Garrotxa, granite from the Alps and the Pyrenees, ocher from Morocco and Cappadocia, blue stone
from Erciyes, slate from Cerro Plata…. I think I must have been predestined to be a geologist or a geographer. Predestined to discover the secrets of the earth by searching for stones on every peak and in every cave, to explore its landscapes and reveal how the earth had been able to raise constructions as complex as sierras, with their mountains, valleys, and lakes, all of it working together perfectly, like a Swiss watch, and nothing or no one, not even the most powerful of men, able to stifle their rhythm and power.
I think that occasion was one of the few when I have said, “I want to be.” I’ve always been the kind of person who prefers to say, “I’ll try.” I have always been shy and have always thought it best to let time go by, that in the end things will find their rightful place. And in the end, they have.
I enjoyed a normal childhood. I spent my time out of school playing near my parents’ house by myself or with my sister or school friends. We played tag and hide-and-seek, built huts and fortresses, and transformed our space into imaginary scenes from films or comics. I have never been one to like being shut inside and was lucky that my parents lived in a mountain refuge, which my father managed, 6,500 feet above sea level, on the northern slopes of Cerdanya, between the mountain frontiers with France and Andorra. My playground was never a street or a backyard; it was the woods on Cap del Rec, the cross-country ski runs and peaks of Tossa Plana, the river Muga, and Port de Perafita pass. That was where I began to discover the fascinating world of nature.
When we got home from school, we didn’t even take time to drop off our backpacks in the dining room because we immediately started climbing rocks or hanging off the branches of a tree in summer or leaping over snow-covered fields on cross-country skis in winter.
Every evening before going to sleep, my sister, mother, and I would go out in our pajamas for a walk in the woods in the dark, without headlamps. We deliberately kept off paths, and thus when our eyes adapted to the dark and our ears to the silence, we were gradually able to hear how the woods breathed and to “see” the ground through our feet. We overrate our sense of sight, and when we lose it, we feel unprotected and exposed to the dangers in the world outside. But what danger can you encounter in the woods in the Pyrenees at night? The only natural predators—wolves and bears—have been few and far between for years. As for other animals, what danger is there if you walk by a fox or a hare, given that you are an animal 10 or 15 times its size? And what about the trees? Your ears learn to hear the wind rustling their leaves, and that is how you are able to see them. And the ground? Your feet tell you if there are branches, grass, mud, or water, if it goes up or down, or if there’s a sudden rush of water.