North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail

by Scott Jurek

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.

My decades of running had trained my brain in ways I hadn’t even anticipated. It was triaging itself, shutting off certain systems to allow others to keep going. Above all—my legs, my lungs.

Without her, I would have stopped in Vermont, stuck in the mud.

We went in for an ultrasound when I was eight weeks pregnant. It was hard to know what we were looking at on the screen, but we could see the tiny grain of something that we were told was the baby. We were so excited. It had been almost a year since my first miscarriage and ER visit. We were in the middle of final preparations for the Appalachian Trail, where we hoped that our baby would spend its first trimester on its first big adventure. Then the ultrasound tech measured the speck and typed two words: No heartbeat.

The rain had stopped; the sun was shining. I’d run all night and into the next morning, for twenty-six hours straight with only two hours of sleep. I had never felt this beaten. The cumulative stress and sleep deprivation were exacting a toll I never could have imagined.

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

In the past, the best moments in my life were when I reached down and found inner strength where I’d thought none existed. But I needed more than my own strength these days. I needed the strength embodied by the people standing by the side of the road,

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

Out there in the wild, on a long journey, you hike your own hike, blaze your own trail, and only you can find what you’re looking for.