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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott Jurek, one of the greatest runners of all time, has claimed multiple victories in the historic 153-mile Spartathlon, Hardrock Hundred, Badwater 135-Mile Ultramarathon, and Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, which he won a record seven straight times. He has been named a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year and one of Sports Illustrated’s Fittest 50. The New York Times bestselling author of Eat and Run, Jurek was featured in the book Born to Run and has appeared in the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Time, and ESPN The Magazine, and on CNN. A passionate vegan, he lives in the mountains of Boulder, Colorado, with his wife, Jenny, and their daughter, Raven.

ABOUT THE BOOK

2,200 MILES. 47 DAYS. ONE REMARKABLE ATHLETE.
SCOTT JUREK TAKES ON THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL.

Scott Jurek is one of the greatest ultramarathon runners of all time and a living legend. North tells the story of his biggest challenge, undertaken at the end of a career full of glittering achievements: breaking the speed record for the Appalachian Trail, the famous path that runs for nearly 2,200 miles between Georgia and Maine, almost the entire length of the United States.

An ordeal of torturous physical exertion, debilitating sleep deprivation and unimaginable psychological pressure, the run required Jurek to reinvent himself at an age when lesser athletes would have been winding down. Battered by the elements and nearly beaten by an agonising injury, he ran, hiked and stumbled for forty-six days, eleven hours and twenty minutes, covering nearly fifty miles every single day. Always unsure whether he was going to make it to the finish, he was pulled north in pursuit of a lifelong dream.

Filled with Jurek’s unique insights into running, as well as compelling descriptions of the awe-inspiring landscape of the Appalachian Trail and its rich history, North will delight runners and non-runners alike and will inspire anyone striving for their personal best.

For Jenny, my true north

Remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, lonely for contemplation, it beckons not merely north and south, but upward to the body, mind and soul of man.

—Harold Allen, early Appalachian Trail planner

PROLOGUE

He should have emerged from the sea of trees and met me at this road crossing more than an hour ago. It’s been pouring all day, a bona fide deluge, and I’m not sure if he’s twisted his ankle in the mud or taken a bad fall and is sitting on a rock waiting for me to find him. I call him “Big Thump” for a reason—he’s constantly catching his size 11½ feet on some root or rock, sending his six-foot-two frame crashing to the ground with a resounding thud. Somehow, maybe thanks to his twenty-five years of trail-running experience, he always manages to avoid serious injury. But maybe his luck has finally run out.

I last saw him at a parting between two mountains, which out here in the Deep South they call a gap. Being from the West, I had never heard the term before. What Southerners call a gap is what I call a pass and the French call a col; the lowest point of a ridge, or a saddle between two peaks. At Sams Gap, I noticed he had the slightest limp, but I shrugged it off because he started every morning stiff as a board until his muscles loosened up around midday. According to our calculations, he should be able to cover the 13.4 miles of trail to Spivey Gap in just over three hours. But what I’ve come to realize over the past seven days is that every section is taking a lot longer than we expected and that a steady pace of four miles an hour is surprisingly hard to maintain, even for him.

On the Appalachian Trail he goes by El Venado, Spanish for “the deer.” It’s the spirit animal bestowed on him in the Copper Canyon by the late Caballo Blanco for the style of his running gait. But almost everyone knows him as Scott Jurek, one of the greatest ultramarathon runners ever, they say. To me, he’s always been Jurker, starting way back in 2001 when we met in Seattle. That’s what his friends called him, a play on his last name and a jab at his stereotypical Minnesotan niceness. He has accomplished things that no other male runner has even attempted, like winning the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run seven years in a row. One year he sprained his ankle mid-race; one year he chased a bear up a tree; and one year, less than two weeks after he won, he set a course record at the Badwater 135. He ran laps on a one-mile loop for twenty-four hours straight to set an American record. He won the Hardrock Hundred on a sprained ankle, and he holds three of the fastest times (behind only the great Yiannis Kouros) in the 152-mile Spartathlon race. But now he’s taking on a challenge that could permanently damage his body, not to mention our marriage. He said he wants this to be his masterpiece, but secretly, I wonder if he means it.

DEEP SOUTH

465 MILES

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

—Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

CHAPTER 1

GIVE AND TAKE

And out past the place where forever ended, beyond the hazy horizon where sky and earth commingled, I knew the desert kept going: more rolling mountains, more vast valleys, more everything. West meant the Pacific Ocean and my old stomping ground in the Cascade Mountains outside Seattle; east meant my childhood home, back in the woods of Minnesota and beyond. South was more desert, more sun, more sand, less water.

Deserts have always been a mystifying and spiritual landscape for me. I didn’t set foot in a desert until I was twenty-two, and two decades later, deserts have retained their wonderful otherworldliness. I can see why many a spiritual seeker has chosen to walk through the desert for purification and reflection.

The still and barren Anza-Borrego Desert in Southern California could coax anyone toward enlightenment.

As I marveled at the measure of eternity, I realized it was possible that I wasn’t feeling enlightenment so much as mild heat mania. It was ninety-five degrees and only getting hotter. Almost every other living thing had taken refuge either belowground or in whatever meager shade could be found. The only creatures out and about were two bipedal mammals hiding under portable shade, rhythmically striding along the trail. Many Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) thru-hikers take a break during the heat of the day, but we were short on time. We could get away from work and life for only a week, and we wanted to hike as much as possible.

Light and smooth was the name of our game. Quick, but easy. Desert hiking demands that you submit to paradoxes. You must move hastily through the sun and the heat, yet slowly enough to avoid producing too much heat of your own. You need to ration the water you haul on your back but not so much that you are burdened by its weight. Move too fast under the scorching sun and you’ll go through your water so quickly that you’ll wind up with dehydration and heatstroke. Carry too little water and you’ll shrivel up like a raisin, and the desert floor will swallow you whole. Out there, balance isn’t just a beautiful idea; it’s necessary for survival.

It can also look silly. We were the wacky-looking ultralight-weight hikers—what Jenny calls outdorky—wearing long-sleeved cotton shirts and hiding under umbrellas in the bone-dry heat. We were also carrying what could pass for daypacks, each filled with only twenty pounds of gear, food, and water. We had stripped down to the bare essentials so we could move efficiently, cover more miles, and enjoy them without being dragged down by huge packs. We had even left our camp stove at home. We rehydrated our meals while we hiked.

I’d always dreamed of doing a long trail, of hiking for weeks and months on end with no specific schedule. I’d walk all day, camp where I wanted, live in the moment, feel the flow of unrestricted movement. I felt an urge to live close to the land and forget what society thought was normal. To transcend like Thoreau and Muir, with the Christopher McCandless ideals from Into the Wild, chasing a romantic goal to “move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.”

I especially loved daydreaming about the ultralight-hiking approach pioneered by Ray Jardine and outlined in his 1996 bible on the subject, The Pacific Crest Trail Hiker’s Handbook. Now, fifteen years after I first borrowed Jardine’s guide from the Seattle Public Library, I was finally here, out on the PCT. It was everything I’d wanted.

But I already wanted more. We hiked the trail in sections, a week at a time, so at this rate it would take us about twenty years to finish the 2,600-mile trail. The more we hiked and hung out with the PCT thru-hikers, the more we both yearned to put our lives on hold for three months and keep walking all the way north.

I turned around and looked south for my umbrella-carrying companion. Sometimes hours and miles passed without us talking. We didn’t need to. We were immersed in the rhythm of our strides and in the wildness around us. Like the ancient Taoist philosophy wu wei, we were doing without doing. More of that desert paradox. Often, we both did our own things, lost in our own thoughts or our own thoughtlessness, only to return to ourselves and suddenly strike up a conversation as if no time had passed. I loved it either way. I loved walking with her stride for stride, telling stories of our pasts and passing the arduous miles with silly games, like quizzing each other on runners’ nicknames and Instagram handles and reciting movie dialogue and song lyrics. And then we would lapse into deep silence again, calmed by the desert.

This was one of those times we were beating our PCT drums alone, separated by a quarter mile of mesquite bushes and sand.

Her maiden name is Jennifer Lee Uehisa, but I call her JLu (pronounced “jay-loo”), like her climbing buddies coined from her initials. She calls me Jurker. People sometimes can’t believe we call each other by those casual nicknames that get hollered over canyons and campfires, but I think it’s fitting. No sappy, lovey-dovey endearments, no traditional “sweetie” or “dear.” We are buddies to each other first and foremost. Sometimes adversaries, but always best friends, even through the deep canyons and high summits of life. We are a team, and we know each other better than anyone else on the planet knows us.

Uehisa is Japanese for “perpetually rising” or “always up.” The name fits; she’s got a positive attitude no matter the situation, and, like the desert sun, she’s always rising. Hiking twenty miles a day with twenty pounds on your back isn’t typically how people recover after emergency surgery, but JLu isn’t your typical gal. Behind that cute, high-pitched voice is an absolute lion that roars past every challenge.

I’m sure she inherited some of that strength from her family. Her Japanese grandparents lost their home and farm in California and were sent to internment camps during World War II. Her mother emigrated from the barangay of Manila to the United States at age eighteen. Nothing was handed to JLu, and the only thing she knew how to do was go out and earn things the old-fashioned way. That drive is what made our lives compatible. I always chuckle when people assume I turned JLu vegan and made her into an ultrarunner, because she became a vegetarian when she was thirteen and she started running before I ever met her. And she’ll let people know it too! I don’t blame her. She has scratched and clawed her way through life, and she’s done it with grace and wit. She’s also got a hard edge, and that hard edge can be razor-sharp. She comes across all sweet and nice, but she can hang with the toughest guys. She says that she isn’t competitive, but watch out when it comes to table tennis, crossword puzzles, board games, card games, or, really, any game at all.

I’d never felt more helpless. In the middle of the night, I’d caught her when she passed out and held her when she vomited on our kitchen floor. She slipped in and out of consciousness as I pleaded with her, “Don’t leave me now, don’t leave me now.” She didn’t.

Neither of us knew what was going on, so I drove her to the ER. After hours of testing and waiting, we finally had an answer.

“You’re pregnant,” the ER doctor said. We sat in stunned silence. “But it’s in the wrong place, so we need to terminate it.”

Unbeknownst to either of us, she was approximately seven weeks pregnant, but the embryo had been growing in her left fallopian tube. When it got too big, it ruptured the tube, and now she was bleeding internally.

After the diagnosis, everything went into hyper-speed. Before we knew it, she was signing liability waivers, being counseled on the potential risks of blood transfusions, and then getting wheeled into the operating room. I remember her in a semiconscious state asking the on-call ob-gyn, “Will I be able to get pregnant again?” The doctor replied, “The next time you see me, I’ll be delivering your baby.” JLu half smiled and closed her eyes, and then they took her away.

After hours of me pacing in the waiting room, she was back. We drove home at 6:00 the next morning and took stock of the damage. We’d lost a baby, but thankfully we still had each other.

Never being one to take the easy route, she’d refused to let me carry the bulk of our gear on the trail, even though she was still recovering from surgery. At least I’d managed to convince her to let me carry all the water—and there were long stretches without water caches on the PCT. During thru-hiker season, local “trail angels” selflessly set out hundreds of gallons of water to make the Southern California desert sections slightly more hospitable. Otherwise, in drought years, thirty- to forty-mile stretches without a drop of water would be commonplace. So would bodies, probably.

As the mercury rose and heat waves rippled off the immediate horizon, my thoughts evaporated and drifted up and away from JLu. The desert too had its hard and soft parts, its own equilibrium. Scorching afternoon heat melted into cool, pink sunsets. The apparently lifeless landscape secretly teemed with radically adapted plants and animals. Back when I was an altar boy, I often heard people repeating the verse “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Back then, I understood it as a kind of observation.

But out here in the desert, it felt more like a law than an observation. Giving and taking. A rule of existence that people often failed to acknowledge except when out here in the marginal spaces, out where they’re confronted by it. I welcomed the give-and-take of the desert. I welcomed what it required of me. Somewhere in between was balance, and nature always encouraged me to find that stability. What would water be without the arid desert floor, and what would lightness be without the weight? And maybe that’s why JLu and I were out here; maybe we were trying to chase that balance through the desert.

I was free at that moment to contemplate the mysteries of the desert because we’d had a little flare-up a few miles back and I needed the space. The good thing about the desert and the PCT is there is plenty of open space and miles of trail to let things calm down. It all started when she asked me the age-old question “Where are you and where do you want to go?” Actually, it was more like “What are you doing with your life?” It escalated a bit after she provoked me with “I thought you retired; why do you keep saying you still have some races left? You always said you’d be done at forty, so why are you backpedaling? I’m tired of you spinning your wheels, saying you’re going to train for this race and that race. You say you have the drive, but I don’t see it.”

So I made the mistake of going after her with “Well, what are you doing with your career? I don’t see you being the next Coco Chanel. I don’t see you winning Project Runway!” Of course she burst out laughing. What was I thinking, Project Runway? As if every designer’s dream was to make it on a reality-TV show. I’m never a match for her in these blowouts.

She ate me alive the rest of the argument, and it ended in us screaming at each other in the middle of the solitude of the desert. It’s not all peace and wu wei.

Part of the problem was that I knew what she meant. Maybe I was spinning my wheels. Maybe I’d convinced myself I wanted something I used to have. It’s true that sometimes I felt washed up, and I vacillated between feeling content and feeling that I needed to do something more—or be something more. I didn’t know how much of this was my own personal yearning and how much was, frankly, keeping up appearances. Everyone wants the champ to continue winning. We all want our heroes to be immortal; we don’t want to watch them slow down or become weaker. It was hard for me to deal with the incessant questions: “What’s next for you? So what race are you gearing up for?” As JLu nudged me in the desert, “Maybe it’s time to transition from athlete to ambassador and let go of the glory days. I can’t watch you fake another half-hearted effort. It’s not the Jurker I know. Don’t you want to be somebody?”

I was fuming because she was right. And she was asking the right questions, exactly the kind that made me flail around mentally. My sensation of enlightenment dried up and fell away like some molted snakeskin. Later, I would be grateful to her. She was doing the thing I loved her for: being a great partner, a challenging partner. She didn’t just pat me on the back, stroke my ego, and tell me how amazing I was. JLu can give me tough love like no one else.

That’s not to say that I rushed back down the trail to thank her. All in good time.

Besides, she really had kindled a line of thinking that was burning me up. Maybe racing and winning wasn’t the challenge I needed right now, or ever again. If that was the case, I really didn’t have a good answer to the question of what I wanted. What would come next?

More trail, for starters. We were a mere twenty miles through our planned hundred-and-fifty-mile section. I didn’t want to finish. I just wanted to keep hiking toward forever. JLu made me realize I didn’t know what I wanted next, but the desert reminded me what I wanted now. Give-and-take.

I have always been fascinated with multiday adventure runs and thru-hiking. As a kid in Minnesota, I never traveled beyond a handful of neighboring states, so I was in awe of people who rode their bikes along the shore of Lake Superior and of the cross-country cyclists I saw. Later, I heard stories about people walking and running across the country. The idea of powering myself across the country—an expanse I could barely conceive of—was overwhelming. I vowed that I would do it someday, somehow. Then the rhythm and patterns of life got in the way—school, summer jobs, internships, college, work, grad school, more work. When I got into ultramarathoning, I read about the great Trans American Footrace and of records being set on long national scenic trails and on trails that crossed famous landmarks in national parks. But then my new focus on ultraracing took over, and I promised myself I would do the multiday and “really long stuff” toward the end of my career.

And then, in 2003 on a run on this same trail, twenty-two hundred miles north in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, I told my buddy David “Horty” Horton that I thought I was ready to tackle the speed record on the PCT. He said, “You were made for this, boy! But wait a little bit, do some more racing, you have time. Let me do it first, then you can break my record!” That’s old Horty for you; he’s always got some half-sage advice to offer with a little something in it for himself. He had already set a speed record on the Appalachian Trail earlier in his career, so he knew what he was talking about. I really didn’t care when I did it, and he was probably right. I had plenty of time to blow away whatever slow record he set on the PCT. Back then, I always had plenty of time left.

I also couldn’t forget what another veteran ultra buddy of mine, Rob “Hollywood” McNair, had told me when I was tempted to run the Trans American Footrace after listening to his stories. “Scotty, you run that race and that will be the last race you’ll run!” he said. “Stick to fifty and hundred milers.” Now I knew what he’d meant.

So maybe it was JLu that did it. Maybe it was her brutally honest reminder that my career was coming to a close. All of a sudden I didn’t have much time left. There weren’t years stretching out in front of me, far-off days where I could stick a dream and wait for time to bring me to it. The only thing that stretched before me now was the rock and dirt and brush of the Anza-Borrego.

We had a week out here, but I wanted more. We had only started scratching the surface of our big life questions. I wanted more miles and a firm answer to “So what’s next?” One that didn’t involve hemming and hawing and halfheartedness. I wanted to go back to those woods in Minnesota where I’d fallen in love with the idea of life-altering adventures and trails that went on forever.

It took only a few moments to piece together a plan. I would run one of the National Scenic Trails. There were three big ones, and we were on one of them, the PCT. We knew parts of it like the backs of our hands. The Continental Divide Trail, the longest, at thirty-one hundred miles, followed the Rockies right through our new home state of Colorado and seemed like a good choice. But something about it didn’t feel right.

As soon as the idea came to me, it started to roll downhill and gather momentum: Why not try to beat the Appalachian Trail speed record? It was perfect. I wanted a completely new type of challenge, and I’d barely ever been on trails east of the Mississippi. JLu was right; ultramarathons weren’t doing it for me anymore. After a hard twenty years of competing, that wasn’t a surprise. But a speed record in the woods and mountains, a monthlong adventure to crack myself open once again? I’d lost the passion to push my body and bend my mind to chew up miles in ultraraces. But I still loved to run and explore my surroundings on foot. I loved being out here.

Even the unfamiliarity attracted me. I instantly loved the idea of running somewhere totally new, totally unexplored, and totally unplanned. As my grandfather liked to tell me as we rambled over his back forty acres in Wisconsin, “The best way to know your land is to walk through it.” Every twist and turn of the trail, every vista and boulder, and every road crossing and trailhead, would be completely foreign to me. A new, undiscovered world around each corner.

Of course, I wouldn’t be rambling. I’d be chasing the speed record. Horty had done it years ago. I knew I could. Maybe it’s what I needed to rekindle the flame that JLu had noticed dying out.

Later on, I would work out the details, but my mind almost immediately started running through the calculations. I would run and hike an average of fifty miles or more a day for about forty-five days along one of the most rugged trails on the planet. I would cover 2,189 miles while climbing and descending a million vertical feet. Over the course of about six weeks, I would cover the entire length of the Appalachian Trail faster than anyone before me.

We’d preserved our postfight silence for miles when I stopped on a switchback and let out the guttural kraa of a raven. That’s her trail name, Raven, like the color of her hair and the smartest birds around. JLu kraaed back, and when she caught up, I blurted out my plan.

“I think I want to do the Appalachian Trail, go after the record. It has lots of road crossings for you to meet me so we can hang out throughout the day. We can have lunches together and you can run sections with me. It will be a vacation, a fun adventure for both of us!”

JLu stopped dead in her tracks with a look of dismay and a wince of confusion. She had heard me talk about speed records and thru-hiking, but that had been idle daydreaming. And there was a trail that was much closer to us than the Appalachian, a trail that we both loved. We’d lived in Seattle for years, so the Pacific Crest Trail felt like our backyard. I had covered most of the trail in the state of Washington and parts of it in Oregon, and I’d run races on sections of it in California. JLu loved playing “find the Pacific Crest Trail crossing” with me as we made weekend road trips when we lived in Southern California. The PCT had been my home course, and then it became ours.

“The Appalachian Trail …” JLu said with a look that I knew all too well. “Why?”

Then there was silence, a deafening silence that even the eternally still Anza-Borrego Desert couldn’t match.

Because I’m forty and I need to feel what it’s like to go to the edge again, and then go farther.

Because I’m so thankful for everything I have, and for just a little while I need to remember what it feels like to have none of it.

Before I agreed to go on this trip, I made Jurker promise me that we would rehearse. Not for him—all he had to do was run—but for me. I was the one who was going to have to drive a van to remote meeting locations and serve as a roving aid station several times a day. Even though I had plenty of experience, I was worried. I had been running ultramarathons for thirteen years, including two one-hundred-mile mountain races, so I knew what kind of logistics were involved. But this wasn’t a race or an event; it was more of a multiweek vision quest than anything else, and it was going to be much more complicated than anything either of us had done before. So I wanted to practice.

It wasn’t really Jurker’s fault—or anyone’s fault, for that matter. I’d had my second miscarriage in April, right when we were supposed to be on a three-day trial run on the Arizona Trail, and then D and C surgery on April 30, nine days before we were scheduled to pick up our cargo van in Chicago. We had hoped to buy the van a month earlier, but given the added medical bills, the refinancing on our house took longer than we’d anticipated. Setbacks, not deal-breakers, but they left us scrambling to put all the pieces in place and there was no time for a rehearsal. Our departure date grew closer, and we were not only way behind schedule but also way underprepared. Every Appalachian Trail record holder had hiked the entire trail or at least significant sections of it before starting his or her fastest-known-time (FKT) attempt. We’d never even been to half of the fourteen states it crossed. Nevertheless, I can’t claim that we were complete AT newbies. A few years ago, Scott was speaking at a running event in Pennsylvania near an AT crossing, so we drove the rental car to the trail. We ran out three miles and back. Those three miles, 0.14 percent of the trail, were the entirety of my Appalachian Trail knowledge.

I was worried. Jurker … wasn’t. He didn’t seem to feel the pressure of our prep time running out. He wasn’t cranking out spreadsheets or studying previous record holders’ splits. He wasn’t obsessively checking the blogs and trip reports of past attempts. Then again, even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t. The most recent supported attempts had all been southbound; we were going north. It would be a completely different run.

The extent of Scott’s planning boiled down to this: He made one single-sided spreadsheet with approximate daily mileage, bought The A.T. Guide: A Handbook for Hiking the Appalachian Trail, Northbound 2015, and called it a day. I bit my tongue.

To be honest, our lack of logistical planning didn’t worry me as much as Jurker’s indifference to physical training did. He wasn’t out running long back-to-back days in the mountains with a heavy pack like he’d said he would. He also hadn’t hired a strength coach or done any overnights on the trail. But whenever I grilled him about training, he gave me the same answer.

I couldn’t argue with that. My version of training is casual. I mostly run solo with my iPod full of hip-hop and electronic tunes; sometimes I run with friends, but always without a watch. Once, after missing a Boston Marathon qualifying time by two minutes, I asked Jurker in frustration, “Why can’t I run fast?” He said, “You can, but you don’t like to hurt.” Which is absolutely true. I prefer to run with ease, and it means I’ve never dropped from a race, even if I’ve never won one. I’d seen Jurker drop (or nearly drop) from seven big ones over the past six years. He always gave the same reason, one that I didn’t recognize: his heart wasn’t in it.

I wasn’t going to give up my spring and summer for some halfhearted effort. And I knew what it looked like when he faked it. The Leadville Trail in 2013 was a perfect example. He’d convinced himself that this was going to be his big comeback, that he would win this race that was steeped in ultrarunning folklore, a race in which he’d finished second ten years prior. And he went through the motions. He looked the part, said the right things, did everything to a T—everything except the running. I’m not sure if he was banking on muscle memory or if he was planning to will himself to the podium, but he just didn’t compete. Even I could tell that much. On race day, he looked like he was struggling just to stay in the top ten. And then, finally, when he had about twenty miles to go, I saw him give up. He didn’t fake an injury; he didn’t drop out. I just saw him relax. He stopped fighting; he was running like I do, running with ease. I guess he didn’t want to hurt anymore.

With three miles to go, he was jogging it in. But when the finish line came in view, he perked up and yelled, “JLu! Run with me! Let’s run it in together!” I cringed. I was embarrassed for him, but how could I tell him that? Yes, I was proud of him for finishing, proud of him for cheering the runners who passed him, but I was sad for him too. I knew this wasn’t what he was looking for. At the finish area, Jurker hung around and chatted with everybody, seemingly unfazed to take the L. Maybe he was getting used to losing, or maybe it no longer mattered to him. Jurker actually seemed happy.

I’m not as gracious or as nice as Jurker. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

I’ve known Jurker for fifteen years and he’s always been that way, extra-nice. I moved to Seattle on March 26, 2000. I remember the date because it was the day the Kingdome imploded and everybody was in a kind of civic mourning. I had never been into running, but since I didn’t know a single soul in town, I started doing local 5K races in hopes of meeting people. Scott worked at my local running store, the Seattle Running Company, and even at the height of his career, he was so approachable that I didn’t realize he was a celebrity in some circles. I remember seeing him after I finished my first half marathon; he congratulated me as if I’d run an Olympic qualifying time.

I caught the running bug and two years later ran my first 50K ultramarathon. My main training buddy was a guy named Charlie who was also a friend of Jurker’s. In 2004 Charlie decided to run the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, and I volunteered to crew and pace him. Around thirty-eight miles before the finish line, we heard that Jurker had won the race and broken the course record. At the awards ceremony, people swarmed over Scott, and someone asked, “How long do you want to keep doing this?” It was his sixth consecutive win. He was on top of the world. To this day, I remember his answer; it was immediate and confident. He said, “There are still a few things I want to do but I won’t be doing this forever. I’m going to retire by the time I turn forty.”

Now, at forty-one, he wasn’t so confident anymore. I heard it in his voice, saw it in his manner. When people asked him if he was done racing, he got defensive. Eleven years ago he was planning on hanging it up at this point, but now it seemed like he was having a hard time letting go. I got it; he’d built his whole career winning races around the world. But he’d always told me he looked forward to sleeping in, to slowing down and spending more time at home.

I didn’t have time to ponder that question. We had less than two weeks to convert our black cargo van, which we named Castle Black, into something we could live in, and then we had to load it up with everything we might need for 2,189 miles of running.

I cut out pieces of reflective bubble wrap and duct-taped them to the walls for insulation.

We transformed those sixty square feet of bare metal into a home on wheels … kind of.

To me, the sooner we left, the better. I had RSVP’d yes to a friend’s wedding in South Carolina on May 23. Jurker had insisted we go—he knew how much it meant to me, and he promised we would make it on time. We worked on the van around the clock, and it seemed to rain around the clock. It was one of the wettest Mays on record in Boulder. We couldn’t build our bed frame in the rain. The first time it let up was at 11:00 one night. I didn’t want to wake the neighbors but time was running out, so we drilled and sanded into the wee hours of the next day.

The longer we stayed home, the more Jurker overpacked. Every day he dug up dusty old gear from our garage and loaded it in the van. “Should I pack these mosquito head nets? Better bring them just in case.” Two minutes later: “Do we need this cast-iron griddle? What if you want to make me pancakes? Better bring it.”

“JLu! Do you understand that my feet are the most important thing out there? I have to keep them dry!”

The timing was stressful but the work was fun and it took my mind off the things I was looking forward to leaving behind in Boulder. The pain, the frustration, the needles, the doctors, the surgeries. Friends stopped by to help with the van build-out and we often stayed up until 2:00 in the morning getting everything dialed in.

One afternoon my phone rang but my hands were covered in duct tape so I didn’t answer. My friend Timmy O’Neill left a message. “JLu, bad news from the Valley. Dean Potter died yesterday.”

I crumpled to the floor. Dead? I had just talked to him ten days ago. We’d had plans to visit him in Yosemite in April but my miscarriage had gotten in the way. I was devastated. Dean had lived far out on the edge, so perhaps it seems naive that I was shocked by his death. He was a master of the dark arts, devoting almost three decades to a series of high-risk, all-or-nothing pursuits, like free-solo climbing, some of the most towering, difficult rock faces without a rope or partner. And wingsuit flying, where he leapt from those same overhanging walls and glided not only downward but also as close as possible to the rocks he aimed to avoid.

Contrary to having a death wish, he sought to push himself to and through the impossible. He was the most meticulously precise and calculated guy I’d ever known, even more than Jurker. Razor-focused with a bird’s-eye detail for everything, Dean was the Dark Wizard—in tune with the wind, wildlife, and the trees, and the last person I’d expected to die.

Suddenly, our adventure made much more sense and I felt an urgency to disappear into the mountains. That’s where Jurker and I go when we need to clear our heads, to reprioritize and reexamine our lives. I was still concerned about being underprepared, but now I couldn’t wait to get in Castle Black and drive east.

We locked up the house and pulled out of our driveway at 1:20 a.m. on May 23. My friend was getting married in fifteen hours. I’d been giving Jurker the stink-eye for days. He knew we were late and offered to drive through the night on the off chance that we might make it there in time. I tried to act mad, but I was too excited. I queued up my power song, cranked the volume, and woke the neighbors one last time. We were finally on our way.

CHAPTER 2

LIVE WHAT YOU LOVE

VAST, OPEN PLAINS ripped by us at seventy miles an hour. As Boulder, home, and the Rockies sank into the horizon behind us, our worries and disappointments seemed to recede as well. We were finally on the road. And that road would eventually become a trail.

Heading east from the center of the country is one long downhill ride. The Martian-looking sand dunes of eastern Colorado fade into the rolling fields of Kansas and then turn into the flatlands by the mighty Mississippi. It’s land made for road trips. And I loved it—even though I was already exhausted.

In a bit of worrying foreshadowing, we’d hit the road a lot later than we’d wanted to. Actually, it was early. Very early. and after a couple of hours on I-70, we pulled over at a truck stop to sleep. Unfortunately, our undisciplined start time meant that we were going to miss our first goal. I had promised JLu that we’d make a detour to her friend’s wedding in South Carolina. We were already too far behind schedule to do that. Besides, we probably would have fallen asleep during the ceremony. The past two weeks had been sleepless while we rushed to make sure the van was ready and to prepare for the drive.

So we were 0 for 1 on the goal list. However, we were still on track for our ultimate destination and schedule. And better yet, we were on the open road.

Sharing the American love affair for long unbroken stretches of pavement and mile markers, I loved seeing the country unfold and deepen as we headed east. I yearned for that feeling of being in-between: no longer rooted at home and not yet fastened to the destination. Both physically and spiritually loosened. Like Kerouac: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” I was in road-trippin’ heaven.

JLu glanced at my phone and said, “It’s Speedgoat,” not disguising the anxiety in her voice.

I didn’t even need all the fingers of one hand to count the number of times Karl “Speedgoat” Meltzer had called me over the years. It was hard for me to imagine him using a phone or even owning a cell phone. It meant only one possible thing: He’d found out. How had he found out?

JLu fiddled with the phone and the new radio system we’d installed in the van, a concession I’d happily made for her entertainment on what would likely be long, lonely stretches of driving. And suddenly Karl was there with us.

I respect Karl. I admire him. We’re longtime running buddies but also fierce competitors. I think the Speedgoat has been good for the sport, an old-school legend who isn’t afraid to follow his own playbook. Nobody has won more hundred-milers than the Goat. But I was hesitant to hear his thoughts on my trail attempt. I focused on the road and let his question linger against the hum of the freeway.

“Okaaaaaay,” he said. “First of all, you’re going backward! Why the hell are you going north?”

Here we go. Karl had run the Appalachian Trail before—he’d taken two cracks at the speed record, to be precise—and been on countless missions to recon the twisted path. He knew it way better than I did; that was indisputable. But I didn’t want to go in having studied the CliffsNotes. I didn’t want to get schooled or steal un-earned beta. I wanted challenge. I wanted adventure.

I didn’t worry that the current record was set going south and that nearly all the other recent records and attempts were too. I knew I was running in an arguably slower direction. Karl was going to tell me I was doing it wrong, right from the beginning. And he wasn’t incorrect. He had a lifetime of knowledge and experience with the trail. He’d have facts, figures, stories. The only rationale I could offer for running north was almost embarrassingly whimsical: I wanted to run with the spring. The way most thru-hikers do. The way the visionary Earl “the Crazy One” Shaffer did in 1948, becoming the first person to continuously hike the AT; he penned a memoir about it, Walking with Spring. I was worried that if I admitted that out loud, it might sound like I was attempting the FKT without 100 percent laser focus. Maybe aesthetic pleasure was not a sound rationale. Was I screwed before I’d even started?

Luckily Karl had other things to talk about. Namely, all things AT. He yapped on like an excited puppy. I loved that about the Speedgoat. The AT was his baby. And pretty soon he was promising to come out in a couple of weeks and help Jenny crew in Virginia. He had an ulterior motive: He wanted to do some recon for his own record attempt next year, and he needed to drive his van out to the East Coast so it would be ready for a five-hundred-mile training run from Katahdin to Mount Washington. Southbound, of course.

JLu and I had set out on an adventure for the two of us. We had these romantic ideas about supporting each other, about hacking our way north without anyone else’s help, rediscovering the very best in each other. But we were already behind schedule and taking on extras.

In Tennessee, we pulled over where the AT crossed I-40. We ran on it southbound, stretching our legs from the drive, knowing we would be retracing those steps in just a few days. I got back in the van and made one more phone call—to Jennifer Pharr Davis. When she set the current AT speed record in 2011, I was immensely impressed. I knew she was one of the strongest thru-hikers out there and she didn’t run a single step during her attempt. I respected her record and I wanted her to know.

She left a voice mail in return, saying, “The Appalachian Trail is very different than a lot of other places,” adding that she hoped we’d have a “really transformative experience out there” and wishing us all the best. I didn’t ruminate on the way her voice hung on the words different and transformative, but I knew she’d been through the fire.

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE BOOK

PROLOGUE

DEEP SOUTH

465 MILES

CHAPTER 1

GIVE AND TAKE

CHAPTER 2

LIVE WHAT YOU LOVE