North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail

by Scott Jurek

Strangers stared at me when I picked up my food with my dirty fingers and shoved it into my mouth. They said I looked like a shadow of myself, a weaker, sicker version. My skin was stretched taut over my cheekbones,

he seemed to get more gleeful as things got rougher.

I wasn’t becoming more powerful, not at all. Instead I was being stripped down not only of fat, muscle, and nerve but also of my mental toughness. I was losing it, but maybe that’s what I needed to do.

I was actually sleepwalking before I suddenly snapped to and caught myself as I slid down a series of cascading roots atop steep stone slabs.

one that would have me losing my mind as I had never done before.

As the sun began to push above the horizon, I rediscovered my body and felt my limbs warm. I remembered how to use them.

I had never felt this beaten. The cumulative stress and sleep deprivation were exacting a toll I never could have imagined.

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

I fell asleep instantly and got four or five solid hours, which felt like an illicit luxury.

I think I had hope.

he wasn’t becoming one with the trail, he was becoming the trail.

He had a lifeless blank stare, like his mind wasn’t all there.

I could swear he was even tripping on pine needles.

Sure enough, almost on cue, I sank deep into some hidden mud. That was the whole Appalachian Trail in a nutshell. Just when you think you have the rhythm, it cuts you off at the knees.

All this drama because he’d been spewing drunk math?

In 2013, a sixty-six-year-old thru-hiker named Geraldine Largay stepped off the AT in Maine the recommended two hundred feet to relieve herself. Her body was found less than two miles from the trail. She had wandered, lost, for twenty-six days before dying of starvation.

here was a man who’d endured something most people can’t even imagine— yet he didn’t like getting dirty. He would take off his shoes and socks every time we crossed a stream

I felt like I was actually losing my own body.

I’d slept only seven hours total in the past three nights.

himself; I had never seen him go this deep and this dark, ever.

My high-priced thoroughbred had become a low-rent donkey.

the part that keeps each of us moving toward what we need rather than what we think we want.

There would be no premature victory celebration.

even after the trail’s two thousand miles had finally broken me, I’d still been kind to strangers and been a good trail steward.

Even the bad memories felt precious, since those were the times that had made me and Jurker even closer.

we would never be standing here if it weren’t for the countless strangers who’d come out to help.

Elective suffering is such a strange thing.

I had run the Appalachian Trail in forty-six days, eight hours, and seven minutes. I had beaten the record by three hours and thirteen minutes.

She was the secret to my sauce, the salt to my pepper, and being with her had been my luckiest break.

This is who I am. This is what I do.

“Tell him to hurry up. I need you back here to help with the baby.”

You train not to beat other people but to beat time and previous performances.