Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

by Scott Jurek

bushido, the culture of ancient Japanese warriors, who espoused courage, simplicity, honor, and self-sacrifice. According to bushido, the best mind for the battlefield—or the race—is that of emptiness, or an empty mind. This doesn’t mean sleepiness or inattention; the bushido concept of emptiness is more like that rush of surprise and expansiveness you get under an ice-cold waterfall. The empty mind is a dominant mind. It can draw other minds into its rhythm, the way a vacuum sucks up dirt or the way the person on the bottom of a seesaw controls the person on the top. When I hear a runner say he “runs his own race,” what I hear is bushido.

Bushido is letting go of the past and the future and focusing on the moment.

“Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers … simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”

Regular running is satisfying in itself. If you’re the competitive type, even greater satisfaction lies in running faster and longer, in challenging yourself. Progress can be a great motivator and a great incentive to keep exercising. If you want to improve as a runner, you can (and should) do supplemental training, which involves strengthening, flexibility, and technique work. But the simplest way to improve is to run faster. And the way to do that is to train yourself to run harder, the way I did during my long climbs at Mount Si. Here’s how:

After you’ve been running for 30 to 45 minutes at least three times a week for six to eight weeks, you’re ready to start running occasionally at 85 to 90 percent of your physical capacity,

or the point where lactate is building up in your muscles but your ...

clear and process it. Build to where you can maintain that lactate threshold level for 5 minutes. Then take 1 minute of easy running to give the body time to recover, then repeat. As you progress, increase the number of the intervals and their length while maintaining a 5:1 ratio between work and rest. So you would do 10-minute intervals of hard running follo...

But if you can imagine running 100 miles, you can imagine almost anything. I tried to ignore my darkest visions. I reminded myself how hard I had worked, of my gasping, aching labor. I told myself that the work would protect me at my most trying moments. I didn’t need to remind myself of how much I wanted to win. That hunger burned.

I had trained as hard as I could imagine.

Now I would learn if it had been enough. Could I go the distance against the best in the sport or would the mountain men send me squealing back to the flatlands?

Why didn’t people realize how hard I had trained, how much I wanted to win?

Why was my mom sick? Why had my dad thrown me out of the house? Why did no one, including me, think I would ever beat Dusty—until I did? Asking why was fine, and even if it wasn’t, it’s what I did. It had led me to link what I ate to how I ran, to link what anyone ate to how they lived.

Asking why had somehow led me to the thing that I loved—the feeling of moving over the earth, with the earth, the sensation of being in the present, free from chores and expectations and disappointment and worry. Asking why had given me the answer, too. I don’t think my dad intended it that way, but what he said—Sometimes you just do things—carried the weight of hard-earned wisdom.

The naysayers’ doubts were whispers compared to the screaming in my head: Did you train too hard? Did you train enough? Can you really run 100 miles on only plants? Did you go out too fast, too early? Are you doomed? But—and this is what I had learned—the screaming in my head could be reduced to faint hissing. All I had to do was remember why I was here, what I wanted—how bad I had wanted it. I had faced difficulties before. You work through them. The lung-burning climbs and quad-pounding descents? A small price to pay for entry into the promised land I had dreamt about. Part of me felt the scalding air. Part of me didn’t care. Part of me winced at each painful, jolting step. Part of me didn’t care. I was running toward that region where my body couldn’t go on, to see if I could will it to do so. It was exactly the place I wanted to be. And there was only one way to get there.

You could carry your burdens lightly or with great effort. You could worry about tomorrow or not. You could imagine horrible fates or garland-filled tomorrows. None of it mattered as long as you moved, as long as you did something. Asking why was fine, but it wasn’t action. Nothing brought the rewards of moving, of running. Sometimes you just do things.

62 miles, bare-chested, my wet shirt wrapped around my smooth skull. I screamed and hooted—to celebrate that I was still in first place, to express gratitude that I had made it this far, to remind myself that I was alive and on the journey of my choosing. This was the firs...

My body wasn’t ready to go, but it didn’t matter. That’s the moment I learned the power of will. That’s the instant I found what I had been looking for. I straightened up, and Ian removed his hand. I looked at him.

bushido code as I understood it espoused serenity, even in the midst of slaying one’s enemies. But I made no attempt to empty my mind of rage. I used

wanted to know more about that space between exhaustion and breaking. I wanted to know more about my body and my will.

I had read enough Buddhist writings by then to realize that chasing a concrete goal was good, but it wasn’t the point. And the nuns taught us that blind ambition provided a clear path to dubious behavior, so I knew the answer to Jesus’ question, “For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his soul?” The point was living with grace, decency, and attention to the world, and breaking free of the artificial constructs in your own life. I know all that now. I sensed it then.

Ultramarathon and Meditations from the Breakdown Lane,

“granny gear.” I found that by shortening my stride I could “spin,” maintaining the ideal turnover of 180 foot strikes a minute. Downhill, I lengthened my stride but stayed light on my feet, and I kept the same 180-footfalls-a-minute pace.

He and I would go out twice a week for 20 to 30 miles, and we’d focus on hitting miles at a 6:20- to 6:45-minute-mile pace.

Running smarter and with more quality, I didn’t run as far. A lot of marathoners log 120 to 140 miles. I was doing 90 to 110.

posture and stabilization and core strength and about movement integration from the book Running with the Whole Body, one of the few books I could find on running technique.

but my mind and emotions as well. I picked up a book called Body, Mind, and Sport, by John Douillard, and learned that breathing through the nose rather than the mouth lowers one’s heart rate and helps brain activity.

“the nose is for breathing, the mouth is for eating.”

I trained myself to breathe from my diaphragm, to “belly breathe,” rather than to breathe from my chest.

The better I ate, the better I felt. The better I felt, the more I ate. Since going vegan, I had lost a layer of fat—the layer that came with eating the cookies and cakes and Twinkies and cheese pizza that so many omnivores and even vegetarians gulp down.

I learned that I could eat more, enjoy it more, and still get leaner than I had ever been in my life. When I went vegan, I started eating more whole grains and legumes, fruits and vegetables. My cheekbones seemed more pronounced, my face more chiseled. Muscles I didn’t even know I had popped out. I was eating more, losing weight, and gaining muscle—all on a vegan

d...

My recovery times between workouts and races g...

I wasn’t even sore the day after 50-mile races. I woke up with more energy every day. Fruit tasted sweeter, vegetables crunchier and more flavorful. I was doing short runs in the morning, working 8- to 10-hour days, then running 10 to 20 miles in t...

just how in tune with my body I was, how I had learned to listen to what it needed to run on “the edge.”

My targeted training made me a more efficient runner. My expanded diet made food taste better and my body work better. Together, they helped change my approach to life.

developing good habits and the power of repetition.

Tolle’s The Power of Now and Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Bone Games by Rob Schultheis.

my natural impulses, I could hone those impulses even more. By combining instinct and technique, I searched for that small zone where I could push myself as hard as possible without injury and the unraveling of the body’s systems.

Accessing and staying in that small zone is the key to success.

“Not all pain is significant.” He was known for projectile vomiting without breaking stride while running downhill at a 7-minute-mile pace.)

I knew I was screwed. This wasn’t a roll or even a sprain. This was torn ligaments. It was mile 44, 56 miles to go.

Two years earlier I might have just gritted my teeth and gutted it out. But I was smarter now. I knew my body better. I knew ultras better. Most important, I knew that will wasn’t just a matter of strength but a matter of focus. The health of my body was critical to running an ultra.

But to run it well, my mind was what mattered. My first step was to allow myself to feel hurt, and bad, and sad, and all those emotions that unexpected loss—whether in an ultramarathon or a relationship or a job—inspire. So that’s what I did while I continued running a mile downhill, then 1,800 feet uph...

My next step was to take stock. Was I going to die? Could I put weight on the foot? Did I break it? The answers were no (at least not immediately), yes (at least some), and no. Sometimes you need a doctor or nurse to help you determine whether you’ll be doing permanent damage if you continue with an injury. But I’d had some experience. I knew it was bad, but I didn’t think it was dangerous. Step three: What can I do to remedy or improve the situation? Stopping and putting ice on it was not a good option. That was partly because it would cost time. More critical, I knew that the swelli...

Then the final step: mentally separate all my alarmed and distressed thoughts and emotions—“Why did this happen?” “This is going to really...

them someplace where I wouldn’t d...

One way to do that was to focus on the tasks at hand and on the benefits of the situation. The tasks: Keep my stride rate high and my foot landings light. The benefits: The agony in my ankle helped distract me from the garden-varie...

ticked off my checklist silently and kept running. Eight miles later, I passed Scott St. John and moved into second place. I made sure there wasn’t even the faintest limp in my stride. You don’t want your competitors to know there’s a woun...

Ultrarunners train so hard and long and compete so ferociously that the friendships that develop are unusually sticky and tenacious. Otherwise, I’m convinced, no one could tolerate the loneliness.