North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail

by Scott Jurek

settling isn’t dangerous because it’s unpleasant. The real danger was that I was beginning to like it.

I felt how sweet life could be when I wasn’t looking at it through a prism of doing, but just being. That was enough for now. It was enough to start running again.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles…. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly…who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

We often think we can’t go any farther and feel like we have nothing left to give, yet there is a hidden potential and strength in all of us, begging us to find it. We arrive at it via different means—sometimes reward, sometimes fear. There was something to Horty’s motivational theory, and finding that desire was the most vexing problem. How bad did I want it?

Elective suffering is such a strange thing. At its essence, pushing his limits was a way for Jurker to learn more about himself and our relationship. Like Dean Potter once said, “I willingly expose myself to death-consequence situations in order to predictably enter heightened awareness.…And [it] often leads to a feeling of connectivity with everything.” Albeit less extreme, we had gone in searching for heightened awareness and connectivity with ourselves, each other, and the trail. I think that’s what drew so many people to follow our journey. It was like Scott was in a fishbowl; people could watch him in his most vulnerable state and laugh at his humiliation and cry at his defeat. They had a feeling of connectedness to what Jurker was doing, as if they were a part of the journey. Back on day two, Jurker had told a reporter that this would be his masterpiece. I’d cringed, but in a way, he was right. He’d gone to the graveyard and come back; he’d messed up and learned along the way; he’d pushed his body beyond what was possible and put it all out there for the world to see. In one sense, it was the most beautiful expression of his running career.