North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail

by Scott Jurek

“Twenty years of ultramarathon racing is my training.”

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.

El Coyote had the ability to laugh when he wanted to cry, the secret to longevity in ultrarunning.

The AT is 2,189 miles long—the distance from Los Angeles to Atlanta.

The Appalachian Trail is so wooded and thick, so dense and enclosed, that it is known as the Green Tunnel.

This insane Green Tunnel and the landscape surrounding it was going to be my life, our lives, for the foreseeable future. We would be eating, sleeping, thinking, dreaming out here. The planning was done, our doubts were irrelevant.

I’m far from symmetrical, nor do I have the perfect physique for running, but with careful preparation and prevention, I’d never been sidelined due to an injury for more than a few weeks over two decades of racing hard.

For some people—many of whom announce their views loudly online—the Appalachian Trail is an opportunity for unplugging, for connecting to subtler rhythms of nature, for letting go of technology and submitting to forces beyond one’s control. In the parlance of the decade, it’s an invitation to be mindful. And mindfulness, for these people, must be uncoupled from ambition.

Would he have understood if I’d told him that, though man’s soul finds solace in natural beauty, it is forged in the fire of pain?

But my greatest asset—which I’ve only occasionally lost—has been my mind.

You rarely ask why when you win.

“Remember this, boy: This is who I am, and this is what I do.”

the mystique of the AT had always seemed to me to be its comprehensiveness. Not doing it all was the same as not doing it, period.

You have to have some ego.

But not all pain is the same. Pain can be high or low; it can be deep or shallow. Pain has more than one axis.

He represented one special section of AT obsessives whose earnest love for the place had curdled over the years into a sense of possession. It was palpable online and on the trail.

The Appalachian Trail was a path toward higher consciousness and a test of character, but it was also a wild, lawless place.

Pennsylvania’s rocks were notorious on the AT for causing disabling injuries and ending trips.

The woods of the Northeast are responsible for the country’s highest incidence of Lyme disease, and even a mild bout of it could wreck my chances for the FKT and extend well beyond that. Even after treatment, Lyme disease can manifest as a mysterious, disabling condition that can last for years.

Our sport shows there’s hope for different kinds of humans to get along and not hate each other—at least, if they all have a similar goal to concentrate on.

Just a few miles beyond the strip malls and neighborhoods lay this unassuming trailhead, a portal to a whole other world, like Alice’s rabbit hole. We’d been living a different life in a parallel universe, so close to the rest of the world, yet so removed.

The mind of a warrior (or anyone performing a difficult task) should be so attuned to the moment that thoughts and emotions do not impede proper action.

Each chief officer brought something different to the table. One brought grit and irrepressibility; the other, obsessive calculation and strategizing. And they were both crazy as hell.

My decades of running had trained my brain in ways I hadn’t even anticipated. It was triaging itself, shutting off certain systems to allow others to keep going. Above all—my legs, my lungs.

The truth was, and is, that mountains humble you. They humbled me. You can steal a performance or two, but you’d better be prepared to sit back and rest after your finish.

It was the greatest gift anyone could have given me at the time, the gift of not having to be on.

without a crew that you can honestly turn to for help, a crew that truly understands you, you won’t be able to help yourself. Even the most eccentric among us—and, yes, I am referring here to Speedgoat—depend on other people far more than an outsider might suppose.

undergoing something like the FKT attempt was kind of like producing offspring: I wouldn’t know what it was like until I went ahead and did it.

Out there in the wild, on a long journey, you hike your own hike, blaze your own trail, and only you can find what you’re looking for.