Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

by Scott Jurek

It wasn’t that I hadn’t prepared; in my line of work, lack of preparation was tantamount to self-abuse.

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

Racing ultras requires absolute confidence tempered with intense humility. To be a champion, you have to believe that you can destroy your competition. But you also have to realize that winning requires total commitment, and a wavering of focus, a lack of drive, a single misstep, might lead to defeat or worse. Had I been too confident, not humble enough?

I ran because I grew to love other runners. I ran because I loved challenges and because there is no better feeling than arriving at the finish line or completing a difficult training run. And because, as an accomplished runner, I could tell others how rewarding it was to live healthily, to move my body every day, to get through difficulties, to eat with consciousness, that what mattered wasn’t how much money you made or where you lived, it was how you lived. I ran because overcoming the difficulties of an ultramarathon reminded me that I could overcome the difficulties of life, that overcoming difficulties was life.

I didn’t know it, but I was learning a lot about food and its connection to love.

I began spending more and more time in the woods. I built trails and passageways to hidden tree forts with scrap wood left over from my father’s projects. I took my rifle out every chance I could get, my fishing pole every other chance. Much of the time I went empty-handed, just me, and I walked under the cool green canopy until I knew every foot of those woods by heart.

but my parents were training me to be an endurance athlete. By the time I started running, I knew how to suffer.

I think I read a book by this author when I first became vegan in summer 2012 to learn how to be vegan and keep up my endurance athletics

cows. I was just noticing that the more I ate what I thought of then as hippie food, the better I felt—and

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are. —KURT COBAIN

What wasn’t so apparent was the hunger we shared, the way we defined ourselves by our effort.

Steve Carlin was a real down-to-earth guy, not like the doctor who wanted to put me on blood pressure medicine. Steve would help get my mom up, and when she didn’t want to, he would help me motivate her.

Dusty promised it would be fun. He persuaded a friend of his to sell me his old bike—a Celeste green steel Bianchi.

had turned into a kind of meditation, a place where I could let my mind—usually occupied with school, thoughts of the future, or concerns about my mom—float free. My body was doing by itself what I had always struggled to make it do. I wasn’t stuck on my dead-end street. No bully was spitting in my face. I felt as if I was flying.

Always do what you are afraid to do. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

As angry as I had been at my father, it was nothing compared to how I felt when she delivered that news. How could he let this happen? A nursing home! She was only forty-four. What if I had never left? Could I have prevented this? Again, I had questions for which there were no answers. She told me it was for the best, that I shouldn’t worry, that I should study hard, that everything would be okay. So I studied hard and ran harder. Dusty noticed. I was tearing up ground. I was assaulting hills and attacking animal trails, the more weed-choked the better.

held on to the pain. In my second Minnesota Voyageur, I made the pain mine. I used it. All through the 50 miles of the race, I listened to it. You could have done more. You can do more. Sometimes you just do things! I ran away from the pain, but it seemed as if I were running toward it. I thought of my mom, crippled. I thought of my life, my ridiculous, petty worries. I thought of the distances I had gone, all the work I had done. I didn’t even have to ask myself the question. It was a part of me now. Why?

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

“When you run on the earth and with the earth, you can run forever.”

To my delight (and, I admit, surprise), subtracting some things from my diet actually allowed me to expand the number of foods I ate and to discover incredible and delicious new foods.

All the whys in the universe hadn’t granted me peace or given me answers. But the asking—and the doing—had created something in me, something strong. I

Timeless silence, except for the crunching of my feet, the heavy, rhythmic breathing of the forest’s only moving creature—me. I would run an hour and 15 minutes this morning—10 miles at a 7:30 pace.

I ran 7 1/2 miles in an hour every Monday through Friday morning when I was a law student. That’s 8 minutes a mile which is close to what he was doing! I’d have run for another hour if I had time.

called the Stotan sessions “beautiful and painful . . . underneath it all there was a sort of sound philosophy based on ‘Let’s improve ourselves as human beings, let’s become more compassionate, let’s become bigger, let’s become stronger, let’s become nicer people.’”

That’s why I was drawn to outliers like Newton and Cerutty, men who pushed themselves far beyond the lines that others set. It was runners like Dusty who stirred me. It was men from other eras—crashing through barriers others had deemed inviolable—who taught me. But the one who pushed me most of all was Chuck Jones. He became my Western States idol.

A simultaneously cerebral and primitive approach to running that brought childlike joy. It seemed familiar.

Dusty, Jones, Newton, and Cerutty had all bumped against the limits of their bodies and their minds, then created new limits. Running wasn’t just exercise or a hobby, or even necessarily competition, for them. Basically, they were existentialists in shorts. I wanted to be one, too.

My hero Chuck Jones had granted interviews (and confused interviewers) where he spoke of vibrations and wavelengths and signs from the hidden world, and while I knew what he meant—the sensation of losing oneself, of entering a zone at once connected to the earth and separated from earthly concerns—I

According to bushido, the best mind for the battlefield—or the race—is that of emptiness, or an empty mind.

Bushido is letting go of the past and the future and focusing on the moment.

My craft was running, and as I climbed those northwest mountains, I tried to do so with extreme focus. It’s easy to shut your brain off when you’re running long distances, and sometimes it’s necessary, but I stayed plugged in. I concentrated on running a particular section harder, on picking up speed downhill while I rested my heart and lungs.

People use drugs and technology to turn their minds off but I’m nothing like that. I drank when I was a teenager but I started working on getting sober when I was fifteen in 1995 before I turned sixteen. I learned how to love life without having to turn my mind off or dull it.

But my joints and muscles were memorizing new movements, too. My mind was becoming easier to empty and easier to fill with determination. Sometimes I even felt as if I was floating over the mossy trails.

tried to ignore my darkest visions. I reminded myself how hard I had worked, of my gasping, aching labor. I told myself that the work would protect me at my most trying moments. I didn’t need to remind myself of how much I wanted to win. That hunger burned.

Asking why was fine, and even if it wasn’t, it’s what I did. It had led me to link what I ate to how I ran, to link what anyone ate to how they lived.

Asking why had somehow led me to the thing that I loved—the feeling of moving over the earth, with the earth, the sensation of being in the present, free from chores and expectations and disappointment and worry. Asking why had given me the answer, too. I don’t think my dad intended it that way, but what he said—Sometimes you just do things—carried the weight of hard-earned wisdom.

You could carry your burdens lightly or with great effort. You could worry about tomorrow or not. You could imagine horrible fates or garland-filled tomorrows. None of it mattered as long as you moved, as long as you did something. Asking why was fine, but it wasn’t action. Nothing brought the rewards of moving, of running.

I would eat and drink at the exact places where my body demanded, because I would become an expert at reading every twitch and cramp and surge of energy. I

wanted something, so I moved. Simple. It’s something we all have inside us. My body wasn’t ready to go, but it didn’t matter. That’s the moment I learned the power of will.

And staying at the finish line, I got to remind myself of our collective struggle, to experience that joy over and over again.

The joy of struggle! I miss people that find joy in struggle! I have chosen things in my life to struggle for and working towards those things made me feel the most joyful that I ever felt in my life. From 2006 until 2013 when I earned my law degree and passed the New York State Bar, I worked hard for my health and for things I wanted and my life was joyful. I hope to feel that way again. Now I’m struggling for my rights and I’m happy that I’m fighting for things that matter to me but I’ll be joyful again one day.

I had set a goal and achieved it. I had pushed myself to what I thought were the outer limits of my capabilities and then pushed farther—on a vegan diet. Being crowned a champion was good for both my mind and my soul.

But the fuel and medicine—the food—I put in my body was not the place to scrimp. My never-better vigor and well-being made the extra investment a no-brainer.

“Wow,” she said after she checked and rechecked the numbers. “You’ve been doing things right the last few years.” She recognized immediately just how in tune with my body I was, how I had learned to listen to what it needed to run on “the edge.”

Imagine that every time you inhaled, the air was so hot that it seared your already parched throat and stung your lungs. Now imagine that a tall, cool, iced bottle of water was waiting for you, along with an aquamarine swimming pool and giant puddles of shade under oversized umbrellas and that fans were wafting cool breezes your way as you lay down on crisp, chilly sheets. Now imagine that all that relief was only another 110 miles away, and you had to run there, through heat every bit as awful as what you had just endured—maybe worse.

If you’re an athlete and you’re fortunate, you’ve felt it. Being “in the zone,” tasting satori—the sudden, Zen-like clarity that comes when you least expect it, often when your body is pushed to the limit.

I would increase my distance when I noticed I was lesss joyful at the end of my run. But I know what satori every morning is. I felt my limits were pushed when I began running

When I’ve been lucky enough to feel it, the sensation is one of effortlessness. It occurs when the intensity of the race, the pressure to win, the pain, build to a level that’s nearly unbearable. Then something opens up inside me. I find the part of me that is bigger than the pain.

worrying about how the person I’m chasing down is feeling. I can’t beat back those feelings or desires, but I know they’re not what really matters. What matters is the place of effortlessness, of selflessness. There might be many paths to that magical region—prayer and meditation come to mind. My way leads up to and past the point of absolute, maximal effort. It’s only when I get to a place where all my physical and psychological warning lights are flashing red, and then run beyond it, that I hit the sweet spot. I know people who get there on a 5-mile jog or by mindfully chopping a carrot. I’ve traveled to the zone myself by those activities.

In an ultramarathon, though, a trip to the zone isn’t a luxury, it’s almost a given.

I was a professional racer, trained almost year-round. I was at the height of my career. These guys had never heard of “tempo runs” or interval training. 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

geography and beyond even the five senses.

They run—and live—with great efficiency, without a lot of needless thought. They don’t reject technology in order to be fashionable or to make a political point. If technology is available and helps them lead a more efficient life, they embrace it. They’ll jump into a pickup truck for transportation. They’ll improve their huaraches with the rubber from d...

but when I was with them I couldn’t help but feel that they were experiencing a peace and a serenity, that they—through running and through living with great simplicity—were able to access a state of being, a zone, a “sixth sense,” where they were in touch with the world in its purest form.

Ultrarunners need to bring all the knowledge we can bear to our training, but we can’t afford to be rigid. If there’s one thing I can count on in a 100-mile race, it’s that I will encounter things I didn’t count on.