Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness

by Scott Jurek

This was the point in a race where I had made a career of locating hidden reservoirs of sheer will that others didn’t possess, discovering powers that propelled me to distances and speeds that others couldn’t match.

There was only one answer: Get up and run. Whatever the problem in my life, the solution had always been the same: Keep going!

No industrial sprayer was going to protect my mind. And an ultrarunner’s mind is what matters more than anything.

Only the most saintly and delusional among us welcomes all pain as challenge, perceives all loss as harsh blessing. I know that.

As an ultrarunner buddy and physician once said, “Not all pain is significant.”

Eventually I ran because I turned into a runner, and my sport brought me physical pleasure and spirited me away from debt and disease, from the niggling worries of everyday existence. 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.

Maybe this would help me with humility. Maybe dropping out and being defeated would renew my spirit. Maybe cutting one race short was a good thing. If only I could have made myself believe that.

I wish I could say something different, that I was grateful to be of service, that I appreciated the opportunity to help the woman who loved me, but the truth is, I hated the chores. I hated what was happening to my mom. None of us could say anything, though, because of my father, who had served in the Navy and believed in military discipline, and I know now that he was more stressed out than ever. Don’t ask why. Sometimes you just do things. So my brother and sister, and especially I, basically lived in fear.

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.

You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have. —ANONYMOUS

It’s not like one day my mom was great and then, after she got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, everything sucked. Maybe even with a healthy mother and gentler father, I would have worried a lot. I’ll never know.

I didn’t run because it always felt good. My muscles ached, I had blisters, and I was having to go to the bathroom on the run—that was the summer I learned about the runner’s trots (cramps, gastrointestinal distress, and the urgent need to move your bowels). That was the summer I got honked at and run off the roads of northern Minnesota. I enjoyed the sense of movement and progress, discovering that I could reach places on my own without anyone driving me. But that’s not why I kept running. I ran because I wanted to ski.

Simplicity, he said, simplicity and a connection to the land made us happy and granted us freedom. As a bonus, it made us better runners.

I suggested we read up on race strategy and training techniques. Maybe, I said, we should do some intervals or alternate sprints and jogs. Maybe we should count our strides. I think I mentioned heart rate monitors and lactate thresholds. Dusty told me I was full of shit. He said I thought too much. Do monster distances, he said, work your tail off, and that’s what will save your ass. He mimicked the Ricker’s voice as he beamed, “If you want to win, get out and train, and then train some more!”

Somewhere between my agonized, gasping high school forays to Adolph Store and now, running had turned into something other than training. It 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.

I had completed one of the hardest things I had ever attempted, and I told myself “never again.” I lay face down in the grass, panting, happy but feeling sick, totally drained. I didn’t have anything left. Was this what being a runner meant? Putting everything into a single race until you had nothing left to give? I had sensed a long time earlier that I had a talent for gaining speed when others gave ground, and I had wondered how that talent might ever serve me. In the rocky hills outside Duluth, bouncing on my cruel, nut-crunching green Bianchi, I had realized that no matter how much something hurt, I could gut it out.

The average 19- to 30-year-old American consumes 91 grams a day, nearly twice the recommended daily amount (56 grams for an adult male, 46 for an adult female). I wasn’t aware that too much protein stresses the kidneys (an organ long-distance runners worry about in the best of times, due to our careful attention to water consumption, retention, and elimination) and can leach calcium from the bones.

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

As an athlete, I was ostensibly dedicated to health. As a physical therapist, I was supposed to be helping people with their bodies, but I didn’t spend a second focusing on their diet. The healthier I had eaten, the faster and stronger I had become. Was it a coincidence that sick people were being served starchy, crappy food? If a balanced diet could make someone faster, could a bad diet make someone sick?

The three most common causes of death in our country—heart disease, cancer, and stroke—have all been linked to the standard Western diet, rich in animal products, refined carbohydrates, and processed food.

Meat and dairy were other matters. I didn’t want to consume either—because of stress to my kidneys, possible loss of calcium, increased chances of prostate cancer, stroke, and heart disease, not to mention the chemicals and hormones injected into the country’s food supply and the environmental degradation caused by cattle farms—but I was racing now, not just running with Dusty for kicks, so I was even more conscious that I still needed fuel to burn. I knew I had to figure out a way to get enough protein, to marry my healthy eating with my long-distance running.

I had been right: I couldn’t run harder. But I had learned something important. I could run smarter. I could eat smarter. I could live smarter.

I wanted the peace that these mystics talked about. I wanted the serenity I found in movement, the calm that spread through me the longer I ran and the more fatigued I got.

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

When we got to the finish line, I had a second-place finish. I had defeated the members of a legendary tribe and almost caught the Man of Tattoos. I had almost won my first 100-miler. Now I knew I could run this distance. I knew I could win, too. But few others knew it. It was my little secret.

My mom, Lynn, taught me to cook. My dad, Gordy, taught me to hunt and fish. Though I suspect they didn't know it at the time, they both taught me, in word and deed, to endure.

I considered eating well to be good, cheap health insurance.

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. My new diet included fresh fruits and vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, whole grains, and soy products like miso, tofu, and tempeh.

I took my first steps onto the path and sunk to my ankles. Good. Difficulty would help. It had always helped. I was finally figuring that out. 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 felt better than I had ever felt before. I had always had pretty good endurance, but now the soreness I had always experienced after long runs was gone. The resting times I had always needed between hard workouts were shorter than ever. I felt lighter. I felt stronger. I felt faster. And I felt as young as ever.

he embarked on a regimen of diet, exercise, and a philosophy of living that he called “Stotan,” which he explained as a combination of Stoic and Spartan. He wrote that an athlete needed “hardness, toughness, and unswerving devotion to an ideal,” but he also needed to embrace “diet, philosophy, cultivation of the intellect, and openness to artistic endeavors.” According to Cerutty, “You only ever grow as a human being if you’re outside your comfort zone.”

Though my childhood was unusual by most standards, my behavior had been ferociously conventional. I had spent my life being the Good Son. I had lived not just inches but yards within the lines etched by parents and teachers, bosses and coaches. That’s why I was drawn to outliers like Newton and Cerutty, men who pushed themselves far beyond the lines that others set.

If I was always asking why and considering all the options, Dusty was taking what he wanted when he wanted. 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.

According to bushido, the best mind for the battlefield—or the race—is that of emptiness, or an empty mind. This doesn’t mean sleepiness or inattention; the bushido concept of emptiness is more like that rush of surprise and expansiveness you get under an ice-cold waterfall. The empty mind is a dominant mind. It can draw other minds into its rhythm, the way a vacuum sucks up dirt or the way the person on the bottom of a seesaw controls the person on the top. When I hear a runner say he “runs his own race,” what I hear is bushido. Bushido is letting go of the past and the future and focusing on the moment. As Thoreau, an American practitioner (though he probably didn’t realize it) of bushido and a pretty good distance walker himself, wrote, “Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers . . . simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”

Asking why was fine, and even if it wasn’t, it’s what I did.

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.

Run for 20 minutes and you’ll feel better. Run another 20 and you might tire. Add on 3 hours and you’ll hurt, but keep going and you’ll see—and hear and smell and taste—the world with a vividness that will make your former life pale. That’s what was happening now.

Every single one of us possesses the strength to attempt something he isn’t sure he can accomplish.

If you were an ultrarunner, you were an ultrarunner. In that moniker everyone was on the same level. We paid the same price and garnered the same joy.

Kicking ass—especially the asses of so many who had said I was doomed—was a sensation that all but the most spiritually evolved or brain-fried would enjoy.

“For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his soul?” The point was living with grace, decency, and attention to the world, and breaking free of the artificial constructs in your own life. I know all that now. I sensed it then.

While I was preparing for another victory, I planned to make myself a more complete, mindful human being, more aware of the world around me, of myself, and even of the world I couldn’t see.

I found that by shortening my stride I could “spin,” maintaining the ideal turnover of 180 foot strikes a minute.

I’d celebrate by making us a stack of my eight-grain blueberry pancakes with freshly ground grains or a gigantic skillet of tofu veggie scramble and Ezekiel 4:9 sprouted-grain toast—the perfect recovery food. Life was good and it was simple: hard-earned miles and delicious nourishment.

Running with the Whole Body, one of the few books I could find on running technique.

My targeted training made me a more efficient runner. My expanded diet made food taste better and my body work better. Together, they helped change my approach to life.

The more I measured and adjusted, the more I trusted my instincts. Running as we were born to run is great, and I believe in it. But we live in the twenty-first century, and we have tools our ancestors never did. I wouldn’t ignore those tools any more than I would ignore my impulse to get outside on a sunny morning and just run for the sheer joy of it.

Running Wild: An Extraordinary Adventure of the Human Spirit, by John Annerino; Running and Being: The Total Experience, by George Sheehan; and The Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei, by John Stevens.

And yet ultrarunners—even the fiercest competitors—grow to love each other because we all love the same exercise in self-sacrifice and pursuit of transcendence.