North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail

by Scott Jurek

Light and smooth was the name of our game. Quick, but easy. Desert hiking demands that you submit to paradoxes. You must move hastily through the sun and the heat, yet slowly enough to avoid producing too much heat of your own. You need to ration the water you haul on your back but not so much that you are burdened by its weight. Move too fast under the scorching sun and you’ll go through your water so quickly that you’ll wind up with dehydration and heatstroke. Carry too little water and you’ll shrivel up like a raisin, and the desert floor will swallow you whole. Out there, balance isn’t just a beautiful idea; it’s necessary for survival.

I’d always dreamed of doing a long trail, of hiking for weeks and months on end with no specific schedule. I’d walk all day, camp where I wanted, live in the moment, feel the flow of unrestricted movement. I felt an urge to live close to the land and forget what society thought was normal. To transcend like Thoreau and Muir, with the Christopher McCandless ideals from Into the Wild, chasing a romantic goal to “move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.”

But out here in the desert, it felt more like a law than an observation. Giving and taking. A rule of existence that people often failed to acknowledge except when out here in the marginal spaces, out where they’re confronted by it. I welcomed the give-and-take of the desert. I welcomed what it required of me. Somewhere in between was balance, and nature always encouraged me to find that stability. What would water be without the arid desert floor, and what would lightness be without the weight? And maybe that’s why JLu and I were out here; maybe we were trying to chase that balance through the desert.

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. Like Kerouac: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” I was in road-trippin’ heaven.

Walking with Spring.

A tunnel sounded nice. An escape from miscarriages and the failure to start a family. A chance to focus on just one thing, to do something hard, to get away from a warm bed and pancake Sundays and a life that I loved but that had ceased to be enough for me. I think we all assume that we’ll chafe against conformity and settling in our lives, but settling isn’t dangerous because it’s unpleasant. The real danger was that I was beginning to like it.

Injuries and problems were inevitable; that was the point. We were used to problems. That’s what all this was: a two-thousand-mile problem that JLu and I would get to solve on our own terms, together. Hidden in them were opportunities for growth, but we hoped there wouldn’t be too many.

The hiker at Buckeye Gap probably wouldn’t agree that you could revel in beauty while also struggling in pain. I didn’t feel like lecturing him, but I had a bit of experience with doing exactly that. He also probably didn’t know that I was moving at three miles an hour, no faster than a strong thru-hiker, not at the ten-mile-an-hour pace he likely imagined runners kept. 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? That if I wanted to find real peace, I had to pass through the crucible of fifty-mile days? Probably not.

To the Cherokee, these mountains were sacred. They called the area Shaconage (pronounced “sha-kon-oh-hey”), meaning “land of the blue smoke.” Modern scientists learned that this sacred and mysterious blue smoke is actually fog created by the local plant life. The same biological processes and products that create that freshly mowed–lawn smell after you cut the grass are at work behind the smoke of the Smokies. Only multiplied about a billion times. It’s almost like the earth itself is exhaling.

I was beginning to realize that there were two types of pain. There was the kind that I’d known for decades: the catalyzing kind, pain that’s fierce and angry, that kicks you in the ribs as you’re scrambling forward and slaps you across the face as you get to your feet. The kind that starts screaming at you as you approach the impossible—and makes you want to scream back. That pain fills you up. It weighs on you. It makes you big. And then there’s the pain that does the opposite. This pain was taking from me. I was emptying. I felt like I was leaving pieces of myself on the trail. I was disintegrating.

I knew that my prior experiences in dealing with unforeseen adversity would be a secret weapon. I’d gotten through a lot of tough spots in my life, and I knew I would be fully capable of tapping into my best self once again to meet whatever challenges inevitably cropped up over six weeks. I just needed to find that best self. Quickly. Because I was beginning to realize that there was a contradiction at the heart of my journey north. Those two big reasons that had been so clear were starting to wash out and bleed away in the rain. Worse than that, they were starting to seem antagonistic. Was I here for adventure—to test myself, improvise, discover, and refill myself so I could meet midlife with an open heart and mind? Or was I here to win?

I knew that adversity bred transformation, that there would be an enlightening ease at the other end of this struggle. The sweetest reward lay in that ease, and it was a feeling that neither money nor power—nor a healthy quadriceps—could guarantee. And it existed in each one of us. Stay the course; keep pressing forward, I told myself, but part of me—a lot of me—kept questioning the choices I’d made that had gotten us out here.

Before he fell asleep, Horty said with authority, “Your body will find a way to heal itself. It has a memory.” He turned off the lamp. “Your body will remember.

I was going to put the FKT out of my mind. I needed to focus on just being here. I’d make it through the next few miles, few hours, few days by keeping my mind tethered to the ground. No more forecasting forward, no more lofty goals. I wouldn’t be pursuing anything. I wouldn’t be trying to prove anything. I would be a guy with two bad legs out for a long hike.

When I was with her, I fed off that energy. But on day ten, I was alone, high up on Hump Mountain. And the more I tried to screw my head on straight, the more it spun. Maybe I just need to let go of the glory days and accept that the fire is gone. And yet…despite the swirling doubts, despite the stories I told myself of decline and retirement, somewhere deep inside, I still felt some of that drive, that old ego. You have to have some ego. I wish I could say that I was just channeling the vibrations and energy of the wilderness through my body, mind, and soul, that it was all beauty and joy. But at the end of the day, you have to want it. Plain and simple. The ego doesn’t have to be destructive, and it doesn’t have to make you lose sight of the real reasons you do what you do. It doesn’t have to go to your head. But when push comes to shove, nothing motivates like winning does. I remembered that electricity. I still felt the young athlete inside me who thrived on winning. I’d gotten wiser over the years, and that wisdom had made me a more complete person, a better partner—but it also made me slower. There was no way around it.

The pain was still there; on day ten, I woke up, if anything, more beaten up than when I’d gone to sleep. 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. As I wrestled through the Bayou, I checked in with my own pain load. It was increasing in intensity, no question, but decreasing in effect. My pain was getting less painful—which might sound ridiculous, but you’ll know what I mean if you routinely push yourself in the gym or if you have the misfortune to live with a chronic illness or disability. Some of us are familiar with a whole bouquet of pains, each with its own special meaning and impact.

My distance from the finish line also helped, surprisingly. Back in Boulder, I might have predicted the opposite—that the unimaginably long way to go would make the pain more acute by making the journey feel impossible—but that wasn’t what happened at all. Instead, I was freed from thinking about the finish line altogether. It remained a faraway thing, an abstraction. My mind didn’t have to whirl through calculations about whether or not I could withstand all this punishment for the next X or Y hours. I had to forget about how many hours or days I had left. Why bother calculating? So I thought about the step in front of me, and the step in front of that one. The scope was overwhelming. There was nothing to do but keep going.

It was enough to start running again. I took a few tentative steps, felt the same stabbing pains…and kept going. I was back running. Not elegantly, not with fierceness, not with anything near the speed I’d eventually need. But I was running. If I could just let life happen, everything could work. I didn’t have to win, not yet. I just needed to let myself run.

When you’re pursuing hard challenges, emotions rise to the surface, and I was so much more fragile than I’d been back in Boulder. The two things seemed related; I was becoming stronger and weaker.

Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose. —Yoda, Star Wars

we became increasingly aware that we were leaving the South behind. Or, rather, that the trail and the world around it seemed to be slowly transitioning. It hadn’t been easy to make it this far. But there we were, and we were still moving. That thought, at least, gave me comfort. Perhaps I was weathered now. Perhaps the oldest mountains in the world and their endless peaks were shaping me into something stronger. Not that I didn’t have doubts. There were plenty of things that made me question myself, but they could also fuel my fire.

“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.”

I wandered around the state park and drove to a lake somebody had told me about. It was completely empty because of the rain, but luckily, just then the storm started to break. I jumped in, and, as clichéd as it sounds, I felt all my cares slip away as I floated on my back and stared at the rapidly clearing sky. We made it halfway! We had a crazy 1,095 miles behind us and another 1,095 to go. We had everything we needed—each other—and that was enough. I closed my eyes, held my breath, and felt the water get colder as I sank below the surface.

It was in the Kittatinny Mountains in New Jersey that I struggled with the daily despair of How can I keep doing this for another two weeks? It was a strange form of depression. I would be happy throughout the day, with some ups and downs. Running and hiking tens of miles a day isn’t always a joyful experience. I would finish the day flying high on the satisfaction of completing another fifty-plus-mile day. That moment of glory would last a few minutes, and then I’d feel a sinking sensation as I remembered that in less than six hours, I would be waking up to do the same thing again. I was caught up in a cycle of emotions every damn day.

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. A mind in this condition is thought to function so optimally that the right decisions come naturally and pain and fear disappear. I often saw similarities between this mind-set and what elite athletes refer to as being “in the zone.” When I successfully adopted the mind of the warrior, I felt a great sense of must-ness replace my confusion and anxiety. I must keep going—no question. Was I going to release my heaviness or carry it the rest of the way north? Was I even going to make it to Maine, much less break the record for doing it? I had no idea. Literally. I had no idea in my head beyond the overwhelming must. Keep going; it’s as easy as that. A single focal point. Keep going. Stay in the now. Every moment contains only one thing: the potential to keep going.

And yet, there were still moments every day when I felt a sense of certainty that I was in exactly the right place, doing the right thing at the right time. I wanted it to end, but I already knew I’d miss it when it did.

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?

“I’ve seen you give it everything you had, way back in Erwin, Tennessee, then in Virginia, and now you’re gonna work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life. The greater the price we pay, the greater the reward. You can do this, boy!”

As my trail compatriots traded laugh-out-loud anecdotes and parody songs, I realized how much fun I could have been having. I was like the boy in the bubble; I could see but not actually touch their world. I would laugh to myself in between head bobs. I had no idea what time it was. The hands on my internal clock slowed then sped up, and I couldn’t determine if it was really late or really early.

The truth was, I was crawling. It really felt like I was on all fours, moving forward inch by inch. Of course I had known that I would go through stretches like this, but I had also known—known deep down in my bones and muscles—that by this point on the journey, I would have become trail-hardened like I always had before. By now I should be stronger.

All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming—a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

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.”

The point of a thru-hike is different for everybody. Some people assume thru-hikers are running away from something, trying to escape the real world. For me, it was transformation. I wanted to find something I thought I’d lost, to test strengths I didn’t think I had anymore, to rekindle the fire I’d thought was long extinguished. The journey was the tool I needed to pry myself open. I guess old Horty was right. This is who I am. This is what I do.

Maybe the whole thing was one long and muddy Zen koan, and only through considering it in the first place could I begin to comprehend the unanswerable. I remember Timmy telling me about a presentation he gave at a university where a professor’s child suddenly raised his hand as an image of the yin and yang symbol appeared. When Timmy called on the precocious youth, he asked what color the line was between the black and white sides. The little Buddha was onto something. The line exists, but now I think I know that you have to start walking it to figure out what it really looks like.