Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

by Scott Jurek

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.

And an ultrarunner’s mind is what matters more than anything.

Racing ultras requires absolute confidence tempered with intense humility.

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.

Cramps don’t merit attention.

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 scraped 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.

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.

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.

spirited me away from debt and disease, from the niggling worries of everyday existence.

I ran because overcoming the difficulties of an ultramarathon reminded me that I could overcome the difficulties of life, that overcoming difficulties was life.

The stars didn’t care. That’s another pleasure of running an ultra: the absolute and soothing indifference of the land and the sky.

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?

The activity itself will reconnect you with the joy and instinctual pleasure of moving. It will feel like child’s play, which it should be. Don’t worry about speed at first or even distance.

Your long, slow runs will strengthen your heart and lungs, improve your circulation, and increase the metabolic efficiency of your muscles.

You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.

What we eat is a matter of life and death. Food is who we are.

my lifelong commitment to learning about

food, to eating better, and to living more consciously.

At every opportunity, I ran out my back door into the surrounding hills or drove to the Bighorn Mountains, where I’d spend hours running through the wild mountains of Wyoming. I loved those runs, but I didn’t love my life. Many of the people I was trying to help were smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, ignoring

I had been reading more about Buddhism and self-actualization. I wanted the peace that these mystics talked about. I wanted the serenity I found in movement, the calm that spread through me the longer I ran and the more fatigued I got. Winning had thrilled me, but what thrilled me more was forgetting my worries, losing myself.

I want to do the same

Every day I ran 10 to 15 miles; every weekend, 20 to 30. After a long talk with Leah, I flew to races in Virginia and Oregon, going deep into credit card debt in order to pay my travel expenses. I wanted to push my boundaries, to explore my potential. I was passionate,

But I felt better than I had ever felt before. I had always had pretty good endurance, but now the soreness I had always experienced after long runs was gone. The resting times I had always needed between hard workouts were shorter than ever. I felt lighter. I felt stronger. I felt faster. And I felt as young as ever. When I returned

breathing through the nose rather than the mouth lowers one’s heart rate and helps brain activity. A yogi announced in class that “the nose is for breathing, the mouth is for eating.” I experimented. I took easy, loping hour runs along Lake Washington. It was flat and damp, and the wind was blowing me sideways. I didn’t worry about speed or form. I focused only on breathing in and out through my nose. It was like when I was

Running Wild: An Extraordinary Adventure of the Human Spirit, by John Annerino; Running and Being: The Total

Experience, by George Sheehan; and The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei, by John Stevens.

try nasal breathing (in and out through the nose) while you’re running easy routes. For more difficult runs, like hills and tempo workouts, breathe in through the nose, then exhale forcefully through the mouth (akin to what yoga practitioners call “breath of fire”). Eventually, you should be able to breathe through

your nose for entire easy runs and to inhale nasally during the less strenuous sections of even 100-mile runs. I experimented with nasal breathing when I was training for the Western States 100, and it helped me become more of an abdominal runner. Nasal breathing humidifies and cleans the air. As a bonus, it allows you to eat quickly and breathe at the same time, whether running easy or hard.

My blood pressure and triglyceride levels dropped to all-time lows; my HDL, “good” cholesterol, shot up to an all-time high. I had virtually no joint inflammation, even after miles of pounding

trails and roads, and on the rare occasions I sprained an ankle or fell and whacked my elbow or knee, the soreness left faster than it ever had before. Was it the fiber that

Ultramarathons tend to attract obsessive

people. To undertake a race of over 50 miles requires training that can occupy 3 hours a day, a routine that involves cramps and pain and loneliness, not to mention the inevitable moments of doubt and maybe even a little self-loathing.

The Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, founded in 1977, has gone on to promote and compete in numerous ultras. The most famous is the 3,100-mile Self-Transcendence Race, the longest footrace in the world, held on a city block in Queens—164th Place to Abigail Adams (84th) Avenue to 168th Street to Grand Central Parkway. The 3,100-mile distance honors the year (’31) of Sri Chinmoy’s birth. Runners must complete 5,649 laps of the .5488-mile course in fifty-two days (extended to fifty-four in 2011 due to extreme heat). It is tantamount to running two marathons a day. Many run for 17 or 18 hours a day. The experience is so grueling and repetitive that few even undertake, much less complete, the race. In 2011, ten runners competed and eight finished.

Had running ever given anyone more? My problem was: I wanted more.

That’s when it hit me, the real secret of the Tarahumara. They didn’t prepare for runs. They didn’t run to win or for medals. And they didn’t eat so they could run. They ate, and they ran, to survive. To get someplace, they used their legs. To use their legs, they had to be healthy. The first great secret to the Tarahumara’s endurance and speed and vigorous health was that running and eating were essential parts of their lives. The second great secret—one I try to remember every day—is that while the Tarahumara run to get from point to point, in the process they travel into a zone beyond

Form is what matters in running. Barefoot running can help you develop great form, but it’s merely a means to an end. If you like running without shoes, great. If you prefer something on your feet, that’s great too. I agree that modernity has brought with it a host of bad habits and disastrous unintended consequences, not only in running (an overdependence on heavily cushioned shoes being chief among them, and the sense that running is reserved for only a select few), but in eating, too. Fast foods, mass production, grotesquely large servings—those by themselves have made us sick. Modernity has also brought us electricity, penicillin, and open heart surgery, of course.

What matters more than victory is what I do to reach it and how.

Have I prepared? Am I focused? Have I have been treating my body with attentiveness, eating healthfully and with

care? Have I been training properly? Have I pushed myself as far, and...

heat for 5 minutes (you may omit the Flora Oil from the

Years of eating plants had convinced me that the best way to get well and to stay well was to eat simply and to avoid processed foods whenever possible.

wanted to regain the purity and gratitude that Kyle and Tony seemed to hold so effortlessly, so lightly. I wanted to run with the wide eyes of a novice again, with the passion and freedom of someone from whom nothing is expected. I

wanted to be a dirt bag. I wanted to camp out, to drive where I wanted. I wanted to not worry about Leah, to not worry about making a living as a physical therapist and coach while building a career as an ultrarunner. I had been working since I was a kid. I wished I had taken some time for myself. I wanted to keep running, to live in the moment, to explore my

Running allowed me to define myself as an athlete. It had honed my discipline and strength and sped my path toward healthier, more joyous eating. Pursuing goals with single-mindedness had ultimately bestowed on me the greatest gift of all: the capacity to forget myself, to be absolutely present in the moment, and to appreciate the perfection of every moment.

Ultramarathon by James Shapiro in 1999.

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.”

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

did want to find that place of egolessness and mindlessness that only the monotony of a 24-hour race can produce.

official Runner’s Manual, and the article “It’s Gonna