Eat and Run Part 1

Eat and run: my unlikely journey to ultramarathon greatness.

Scott Jurek, with Steve Friedman.

To my parents, who first taught me to dig deep, and to all those who taught me to dig deeper.

Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.

-WILLIAM JAMES.

Prologue.

I was a shy kid with high blood pressure. I grew into a skinny adolescent whom other kids teased and called "Pee-Wee." I wasn't the fastest kid in my school, or the strongest, or even the smartest. I was common as gra.s.s, longing for something I couldn't even name. I was like everyone else, the same. Then I found something.

I'm not going to offer gauzy parables about inspiration and belief. I'm not going to promise you that if you want to achieve your dream, all you need is faith. No, I am going to show you-in concrete terms-how I transformed myself from the inside out and how you can do it too. Whether you're a marathoner or weekend jogger, swimmer or cyclist, young or old, fit or fat, you can do this. I know because I did it.

The story of my life is going to sound very familiar. Not in the details (unless you've found yourself face down in Death Valley, that is), but in the desire. It's the tale of everyone who has ever felt stuck, of anyone who has dreamed of doing more, of being more.

I was stuck like that a few years ago in one of the lowest, hottest spots on the planet. That's where I'll start my story. That's where I'll start your story.

1. Somebody.

BADWATER ULTRAMARATHON, 2005.

The best way out is always through.

-ROBERT FROST.

My brain was on fire. My body was burning up. Death Valley had laid me out flat, and now it was cooking me. My crew was telling me to get up, that they knew I could go on, but I could barely hear them. I was too busy puking, then watching the stream of liquid evaporate in the circle of light from my headlamp almost as fast as it splashed down on the steaming pavement. It was an hour before midnight, 105 incinerating, soul-sucking degrees. This was supposed to be my time. This was the point in a race where I had made a career of locating hidden reservoirs of sheer will that others didn't possess, discovering powers that propelled me to distances and speeds that others couldn't match. But tonight, roasting on the pavement, all I could summon was the memory of a television commercial I had seen as a child. First there's an egg in someone's fingers and a voice says, "This is your brain." Then the owner of the hand cracks the egg, and as it sizzles and crackles onto a hot skillet, the voice says, "And this is your brain on drugs." I saw that image in the scorching nighttime sky. I heard the disembodied voice. But what I thought was: "This is my brain on Badwater."

I had just run 70 miles through a place where others had died walking, and I had 65 more to go. I reminded myself that this was the point in the race where I was supposed to dust anyone foolish enough to have kept up with me in the first half. In fact, I had started this race intending to shatter its record, never mind worry about winning it. And now I didn't think I could finish.

There was only one answer: Get up and run. Whatever the problem in my life, the solution had always been the same: Keep going! My lungs might be screaming for oxygen, my muscles might be crying in agony, but I had always known the answer lay in my mind. Tired tendons had begged for rest in other places, my flesh had demanded relief, but I had been able to keep running because of my mind. But not now. What had gone wrong?

Running is what I do. Running is what I love. Running is-to a large extent-who I am. In the sport I have chosen as avocation, career, obsession, and unerring but merciless teacher, running is how I answer any challenge.

Technically speaking, I am an ultramarathoner. So I compete in any footrace longer than the marathon distance of 26.2 miles. In point of fact, though, I have fashioned a career from running and winning races of at least 50 miles, most often 100, and every so often 135 and 150 miles. Some I have led from start to finish; in others I have stayed comfortably back until the point when I needed to find another gear. So why was I on the side of the road vomiting, unable to go on?

Never mind my success. People had warned me that this race-this 135-mile jaunt through Death Valley-was too long and that I hadn't given my body enough time to recover from my last race-a race I had won just two weeks earlier, the rugged and prestigious Western States 100 Mile. People had said that my diet-I had been eating only plant-based foods for seven years-would never sustain me. No one had voiced what I now suspected might be my real problem-that I had underestimated the race itself.

Some ultras curve through level virgin forest, next to melodious streams, past fields of wildflowers. Some ultras occur in the cool melancholy of autumn, others in the invigorating chill of early spring.

Then there were the ultras like the one that had felled me. Its proper name was the Badwater UltraMarathon. Compet.i.tors called it the Badwater 135, and a lot of people knew it as "the world's toughest foot race."

But I hadn't taken such talk too seriously. I thought I had run more difficult courses. I thought I had faced much faster, tougher compet.i.tion. I had raced in snow and rain, won events in far corners of the earth. I had scrambled up loose rock, over peaks of 14,000 feet. I had hopscotched down boulder fields, forded across icy streams. I was used to trails that caused deer to stumble and falter.

Sure, the Badwater flat-lined through Death Valley at the hottest time of the year. And yes, according to Badwater legend, one year when a shoe company handed out its product to all entrants, many of the soles supposedly melted on the scorching pavement.

But that was just a story, right? And though the Badwater did sizzle and though it was longer than I usually race, its brutality was unidimensional. I was used to forbidding terrain, climate, and compet.i.tion. Other ultras inspire not just reverence but fear. The Badwater? The truth is, a lot of the most accomplished and well-known ultrarunners had never run it. Yeah, Death Valley made it sound ominous, if not fatal, but among elite ultrarunners, tales of danger and death aren't uncommon. Ultrarunners liked the stories but didn't dwell on them. We couldn't.

It wasn't that I hadn't prepared; in my line of work, lack of preparation was tantamount to self-abuse. I had purchased an industrial-sized sprayer so that I could be hosed down at regular intervals. I had worn specially designed heat-reflecting pants and shirt by Brooks Sports. I had guzzled 60 ounces of water (the equivalent of three bicycle bottles) every hour for the first 6 hours of the race. But those precautions were designed to shield my body. No industrial sprayer was going to protect my mind. And an ultrarunner's mind is what matters more than anything.

Racing ultras requires absolute confidence tempered with intense humility. To be a champion, you have to believe that you can destroy your compet.i.tion. But you also have to realize that winning requires total commitment, and a wavering of focus, a lack of drive, a single misstep, might lead to defeat or worse. Had I been too confident, not humble enough?

Early in the race, after 17 miles, a marine who had dropped out saluted me as I ran past him because he knew my reputation. Another runner, a desert race veteran, dropped out about 30 miles later, right about the time he realized his urine was flowing dark as coffee. He knew my reputation, too. But my reputation wasn't helping me now. Neither was my earlier confidence.

The leader was a fifty-year-old ship pilot and cliff diver named Mike Sweeney, whose high dive training had included smacking himself on the head. Trailing him was a forty-eight-year-old Canadian baggage handler named Ferg Hawke, who was fond of quoting Friedrich Nietzsche.

Journalists in the running press called me "the Real Deal." But was I? Or was I a fraud?

Moments of questioning come to us all. It is human nature to ask why we put ourselves in certain situations and why life places hurdles in our path. Only the most saintly and delusional among us welcomes all pain as challenge, perceives all loss as harsh blessing. I know that. I know that I've chosen a sport stuffed with long stretches of agony, that I belong to a small, eclectic community of men and women where status is calibrated precisely as a function of one's ability to endure. Hallucinations and vomiting, to me and my fellow ultrarunners, are like gra.s.s stains to Little Leaguers. Chafing, black toenails, and dehydration are just the rites of pa.s.sage for those of us who race 50 and 100 miles and more. A marathon is a peaceful prologue, a time to think and work out kinks. Ultrarunners often blister so badly they have to tear off toenails to relieve pressure. One ultrarunner had his surgically removed before a race, just in case, so he wouldn't need to bother later on. Cramps don't merit attention. Unless nearby lightning makes the hair on your arms and head stand up and dance, it's nothing but scenery. Alt.i.tude headaches are as common as sweat and inspire approximately the same degree of concern (the death by brain aneurysm of one runner in a Colorado race notwithstanding). Aches are either ignored, embraced, or, for some, treated with ibuprofen, which can be risky. Combined with heavy sweating, too much ibuprofen can cause kidney failure, which usually results in ghostly pallor and, if you're lucky, an airlift by helicopter to the nearest hospital. As an ultrarunner buddy and physician once said, "Not all pain is significant."

Ultrarunners take off at sunrise and continue through sunset, moonrise, and another sunrise, sunset, and moonrise. Sometimes we stumble from exhaustion and double over with pain, while other times we effortlessly float over rocky trails and hammer up a 3,000-foot climb after accessing an unknown source of strength. We run with bruised bones and sc.r.a.ped skin. It's a hard, simple calculus: Run until you can't run anymore. Then run some more. Find a new source of energy and will. Then run even faster.

Other sports take safety precautions, but in ultramarathons, we have death-avoiding precautions baked into the enterprise. Most ultras are dotted with aid stations, where runners are tracked, sometimes weighed, and provided with snacks, shade, and medical checkups. The majority of races also include pacers, who are allowed to accompany runners in latter sections of the course (but only for advice and to keep them from getting lost, not for carrying food or water). Ultrarunners can-much of the time-bring support crews, men and women who provide food, water, updates on compet.i.tors, and rea.s.surance that you can, in fact, continue when you are sure you will collapse.

Nearly all ultras are run continuously, meaning that there is no point at which the clock stops and everyone gets to retire for a large plate of pasta and a well-deserved night's sleep, like compet.i.tors in the Tour de France do. That's part of the challenge and appeal of the event. You keep going in situations where most people stop. You keep running while other people rest.

But that was my problem-it was other people who stopped to rest. Not me. But now it was me. I simply couldn't go on.

My buddy and support crew member Rick was telling me he knew I could do it. He was mistaken. What had I done wrong? Was it my training and lack of recovery? Was it my race schedule? Had my mental approach been wrong? Was it what I had been eating? Was I thinking too much?

Ultramarathons give you plenty of time to think-that is, when you're not watching out for mountain lions, avoiding sheer drops, or responding to grinning rocks and gibbering trees (which your mind can't believe are mere phantasms). Stopping in an ultra, quitting, gives you even more time to ponder. But perhaps I wanted time to stop. Maybe I was meant to lie here on my back in the desert to question why I was running through an oven. Why was I subjecting myself to this torture?

I started running for reasons I had only just begun to understand. As a child, I ran in the woods and around my house for fun. As a teen, I ran to get my body in better shape. Later, I ran to find peace. I ran, and kept running, because I had learned that once you started something you didn't quit, because in life, much like in an ultramarathon, you have to keep pressing forward. Eventually I ran because I turned into a runner, and my sport brought me physical pleasure and spirited me away from debt and disease, from the niggling worries of everyday existence. I ran because I grew to love other runners. I ran because I loved challenges and because there is no better feeling than arriving at the finish line or completing a difficult training run. And because, as an accomplished runner, I could tell others how rewarding it was to live healthily, to move my body every day, to get through difficulties, to eat with consciousness, that what mattered wasn't how much money you made or where you lived, it was how you lived. I ran because overcoming the difficulties of an ultramarathon reminded me that I could overcome the difficulties of life, that overcoming difficulties was life.

Could I quit and not be a quitter?

"You've done it before," Rick said. "You can do it again."

I appreciated the optimism. I also appreciated its idiocy.

At another time, on another summer night, in another race, I might have gazed in wonder at the stars glittering against the velvety black night. I might have swiveled my head to peer at the snowy Sierra Nevada peaks looming like grouchy sentries on the edge of the endless desert and seen, not scowling defeat, but majesty. I would have moved toward the mountains' dark, disapproving bulk until it had transformed to welcome.

"My stomach," I moaned. "My stomach." A couple of my crew members suggested I should crawl into the coffin-sized, ice-filled cooler they had lugged up the road to get my core temperature down, but I had tried that already. Rick told me to put my feet in the air- that might help me feel better. He told me I should do it on the side away from the road so the other crews wouldn't be able to see me, because their reports would only embolden their runners. Didn't he realize that the other runners didn't need emboldening? The guy with the reputation wasn't going anywhere.

Not moving was actually pleasant. It wasn't nearly as shameful as I had imagined. It allowed me to ponder my hubris.

If it had been a movie, this was the place where I would close my eyes and hear the faint, strangled voice of my bedridden mother, telling me she loved me and that she knew I could do whatever I wanted, and I would have flushed with shame, and then I would have heard the authoritative voice of my father, telling me, "Sometimes you just do things!" I would have risen to my elbows, shut my eyes, and pictured all the middle school kids who had called me Pee-Wee, and they would have melted into all the naysayers who had questioned me at the beginning of my career, who said that I was nothing to worry about, I was nothing but a flatlander. In that movie I would have risen to my knees and suddenly remembered who I was-I was a runner!-and I would have pulled myself up, stood tall, and started walking, then loping, into the thick desert night, chasing down the two seasoned veterans in front of me as a wolf chases doomed field mice.

I tried to puke some more, but it was all dry heaving, the type that is excruciating with every empty pump of the stomach.

My crew and close friends told me to close my eyes and relax. Instead, I stared at the stars. Everyone and the desert disappeared. Loss of peripheral vision was one manifestation of dehydration and pa.s.sing out. Was that what was happening? It was as if I was looking through a tunnel at a small circle in an infinite, glittery sky.

My crew told me to take some little sips of water, but I couldn't. I was thinking, "I don't think this is gonna happen," and then I heard a noise, and it was my voice saying what I was thinking: "I don't think this is gonna happen."

The stars didn't care. That's another pleasure of running an ultra: the absolute and soothing indifference of the land and the sky. So I made a mistake? It wasn't the worst thing in the world; the constellations weren't gossiping about me. Maybe this would help me with humility. Maybe dropping out and being defeated would renew my spirit. Maybe cutting one race short was a good thing.

If only I could have made myself believe that.

Should I have listened to the trainers and doctors who said that athletes needed to fill their bodies with animal protein? Should I have trained less? I had thought I was invincible. I closed my eyes.

I had been schooled by nuns, raised by a mother who had been sprinkled with holy water from Lourdes, hoping it would help her rise from her wheelchair. Now it was me who couldn't rise.

I hadn't always been the fastest runner, but I had always considered myself one of the toughest. Maybe acceptance of my limits was the toughest thing of all. Maybe staying where I was wasn't weak but strong. Maybe accepting my limits meant it was time to stop being a runner, to start being something else. But what? If I wasn't a runner, who was I?

I looked again at the stars. They had no opinion on the matter.

Then, from the desert, a voice, an old familiar voice.

"You're not gonna win this f.u.c.king race lying down in the dirt. C'mon, Jurker, get the f.u.c.k up."

It was my old friend Dusty. That made me smile. He almost always made me smile, even when everyone around him was cringing.

"Get the f.u.c.k up!" Dusty yelled, but I couldn't. I wouldn't.

"Sweeney is out there dying, and you're gonna take that dude. We're gonna take that dude!"

I looked at my friend. Couldn't he see that I wasn't going to take anyone?

He squatted, folded himself until our faces were inches apart. He looked into my eyes.

"Do you wanna be somebody, Jurker? Do you wanna be somebody?"

Rice b.a.l.l.s (Onigiri) I first saw these seaweed-wrapped rice packets when I asked a j.a.panese runner to show me what was in his race pack. I'm grateful I did, because white rice is a great food for cooling your body, especially in hot climates like Death Valley. It's packed with carbohydrates, it's not too sweet, and it's soft and easy to digest. A great source for electrolytes and salt (via the seaweed), rice b.a.l.l.s have always been a portable pick-me-up in j.a.pan. These days, you can even find them at convenience stores in Asia. For a soy-free variation, subst.i.tute pickled ginger or umeboshi paste for the miso.

2 cups sushi rice 4 cups water 2 teapoons miso 3-4 sheets nori seaweed Cook the rice in the water on the stovetop or using a rice cooker. Set aside to cool. Fill a small bowl with water and wet both hands so the rice does not stick. Using your hands, form cup rice into a triangle. Spread teaspoon miso evenly on one side of the triangle. Cover with another cup rice. Shape into one triangle, making sure the miso is covered with rice. Fold the nori sheets in half and then tear them apart. Using half of one sheet, wrap the rice triangle in nori, making sure to completely cover the rice. Repeat using the remaining rice, miso, and nori.

MAKES 8 ONIGIRI.

2. "Sometimes You Just Do Things"

PROCTOR, MINNESOTA, 1980.

The only line that is true is the line you're from.

-ISRAEL NEBEKER OF BLIND PILOT.

I sat on a stool in our kitchen. My mother thrust a rough wooden spoon at me and told me to stir, but the batter was too thick. She told me to use both hands, but still I couldn't move the spoon. Suddenly it moved and kept moving. She had put her hands around mine. We made spirals of pale yellow out of sugar and b.u.t.ter, and I pretended I was doing it all by myself. It's one of my earliest memories.

I thought my mom was famous. She worked for the Litton Microwave company, showing women how to cook bacon and make chocolate cake with the new invention. The Minnesota Egg Council hired her to go on the radio to talk about eggs and that led to television commercials and that led to her own cable cooking show. Her motto (which I still believe): "You don't have to be a chef to cook great food." For her family she roasted pork, baked chicken, broiled steak, and whipped up mashed potatoes from scratch. In the childhood of my memory, there was always a pie cooling on the kitchen windowsill, the scent of pastry and fruit stealing into our kitchen, enveloping my mother and me in its thick embrace.

I don't remember anyone talking about a primal connection to food, or how by eating the vegetables we grew we were connecting ourselves to the place where we lived and each other. I don't remember anyone remarking that the act of catching and cleaning and frying and eating walleye together was akin to a family sacrament. At my mother's insistence, we did sit down together for a full hour at dinner. If someone had praised her for baking cookies from scratch rather than using a mix, she would have thought they were nuts. I didn't know it, but I was learning a lot about food and its connection to love. When we cooked together, she told me stories about when she was in college, and said she knew I would go to college, too. When my dad wasn't around, she would ask me to grab my baseball bat, and she'd take me into the backyard, next to the garden, and she'd pitch underhand to me. She told me she was proud of what a hard worker I was and not to let Dad's grouchiness bother me. He just worried a lot.

My father wasn't the only disciplinarian in the family. When I misbehaved, my mom would spank me-with the same wooden spoon with which we stirred batter. She was the one who limited my television watching to 5 hours a week. If I wanted to watch a football game, she made me choose between the first or second half. I always chose the second half.

I can't remember the first time I saw her drop a jar. I must have been about nine. After a while, it was hard to remember when she didn't drop things. Knives trembled in her once-sure fingers. Sometimes, just standing by the counter, she would wince. If she saw me watching, she'd wink and smile.

Here's another memory: When I was six, stacking firewood outside, a car pulled up to our house. I knew it wasn't a neighbor; we lived on a dead-end road at the edge of a woods, 5 miles from Proctor, Minnesota, which was another 150 miles from Minneapolis. I knew all the cars on our road, who was driving, and which brothers and sisters were probably sitting in the back seat punching one another. This car belonged to a friend from Proctor. His mom had driven him out to play with me. I yelped and ran toward the car, but a stern voice stopped me.

"You can play when we're finished stacking wood. From the looks of it, we've got two more hours to go."

It was Dad, and I knew better than to argue. So I whispered the news to my friend and he told his mom. She gave me a look, then gave my dad a look, and then they drove off. I went back to stacking wood.

When I was done with ch.o.r.es, on rare occasions my dad would take me for a walk in the woods. Once, when I was seven and my mom was taking a nap-she had been getting tired a lot-he picked up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his thick fingers. He told me about the day that two of the smartest scientists in the world were walking in the woods-maybe woods just like these, right here in Minnesota-and G.o.d strolled up, right out of the trees. And G.o.d said, "If you guys are so smart, can you make dirt out of thin air, like I can?" I remember my dad smiling when he told me that story, but it was a sad smile. I think he was trying to tell me that no matter how hard a man thought or worked, some things in life would remain unknowable, and we had to accept that.

By the time I was eight, there were fewer walks in the woods with my dad. I was helping around the house a lot. I was pulling weeds from the big garden we had out back, or picking out rocks, or stacking wood, or helping in the kitchen, or making sure my sister, Angela, who was five, had a snack, or that my brother, Greg, who was three, wasn't getting into mischief. By the time I was ten, I could cook a pot roast in the oven by myself. Whenever I complained that I didn't want to pick rocks or stack wood, I just wanted to go play, my dad would growl, "Sometimes you just do things!" After a while, I stopped complaining.

He tempered his discipline with compa.s.sion and a sense of fun. He would challenge me to see how much wood I could haul into our "wood room" in 10 minutes or how many rocks I could pick out of the garden in the same time. I don't think I realized it at the time, but he was teaching me that compet.i.tion could turn the most mundane task into a thrill, and that successfully completing a job-no matter how onerous-made me feel unaccountably happy.

When I was ten my dad bought me a .22-caliber rifle with a polished walnut handle and a barrel made from burnished steel. He told me to kill any animal I wounded, to skin and gut it, to always eat whatever I brought home. I already knew how to catch a walleye and gut it and clean it.

I was a great blueberry picker, too. It was a rite of pa.s.sage in my family that when you turned six, you got to go blueberry and cherry picking with Grandma Jurek. My older cousins had told me stories about the great adventure and I couldn't wait. My cousins had forgotten to mention the clouds of mosquitoes, or stinky bogs, or the beating sun, or the ladder, which I fell off. I cried and said I wanted to go home, but that didn't happen. Grandma Jurek had raised my dad. When you went cherry picking with her, you were picking for hours. And when you went fishing with Grandpa Jurek, if you got bored, too bad, you were gonna stay and fish. I learned patience while doing the tedious tasks, but more important, I learned to find joy in repet.i.tive and physically demanding work.

I didn't always feel happy or patient, of course. I was a kid. But those were the times I kept going. Why?

Sometimes you just do things!

My dad was working two jobs then-during the day as a pipefitter and during the night in maintenance at the local hospital. I knew that the coupons Mom was using when I went with her to the grocery store were really food stamps, that we were getting government cheese, and that Dad was having trouble making ends meet. When our television broke, we didn't replace it for a year. We had two cars, but one was usually not working at all, and sometimes both. I knew that Mom was tired more and more and our garden next to the house was getting smaller while the list of ch.o.r.es my dad put on the fridge for us-a piece of paper with grids and the names and duties for me, my brother, and my sister-was getting bigger and bigger. I knew that none of my friends had to weed the garden and cut gra.s.s when it was 90 degrees and humid or haul and stack wood for 2 hours before they could play. My mom stopped pitching to me behind the house. I learned not to ask her.

The worse my mom got, the more I had to help. The more I helped, the more I wondered why things were the way they were. Why was my mom sick? When would she get better? Why couldn't my dad be less grumpy? Why did the school nurse always single me out for a second look at our regular head lice inspections? Was it because we lived in the country? Or because she thought we were poor?

Things got much worse the summer after third grade. It was a hot, clear Minnesota day. My dad had gotten off his shift, and he and my mom were coming to see me play baseball. I was in left field, and I had just caught a fly ball. I flung the ball toward the infield, and that's when I saw the Oldsmobile station wagon pull up and my father get out. The pa.s.senger door opened and my mother got out too, but something was wrong. The door was opening in slow motion. Then I saw her stumble and my father rush around the car to help her. He had to help her walk the 30 yards to the bleachers, and I watched each slow step. I missed two batters, and when the inning was over, I was still in left field, watching.

The ch.o.r.e list got bigger. We knew Mom was sick, and she took more and more naps. One day when I was in sixth grade my dad told us Mom was seeing some specialists. Maybe he said "multiple sclerosis," but if he did, they were just words. It didn't change who my mom was or what was happening to her. If I thought about it at all, it was along the lines of "Multiple what?" She would stay in Minneapolis for treatment from time to time. Dad said there was always hope.

One day, a physical therapist came to help Mom. It was an acknowledgment that her condition wasn't going to go away or be cured. She didn't see specialists after that.