Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

by Scott Jurek

We stayed in a garden apartment owned by some friends of ours. It had been a mill hundreds of years ago, built above a small river next to multicolored vegetable gardens and a field of rapeseed yellow as egg yolks. The streets were narrow and cobblestoned, and the night sky was brilliant with stars. Jenny spent many of those days climbing in nearby Fontainebleau, and I loped through the outlying fields—of more rapeseed, of wildflowers, of young wheat and rye. Together, we slacklined in an area of Fontainebleau called “the sea of sand.” Except for the tiny travel blender I had packed—and our computers—it was a quiet, simple existence. We would wake and have smoothies every morning with fresh whole-grain bread from the small bakery in town, then run and climb and take walks together, and catch up on e-mail in the evening before we went to bed and talk about food and music and life and death and meaning and love. We fell asleep to the rushing of the stream and the cool spring breeze wafting through the window.