A running partner had to explain that what he saw was the moon. Late one night, he was mystified by the lights of a house he spotted on top of a mountain. His body reeked of apple-cider vinegar as his sweat excreted excess ammonia. Five weeks in, he was down more than a dozen pounds, and his ribs were visible. But tackling the Appalachian Trail forced him to dig deeper than he ever had before. Jurek’s victories in punishing 100-mile races since the late 1990s-plus a starring role in the writer Christopher McDougall’s best seller, Born to Run-have made him a distance-running celebrity. “How to run like a sane person.”Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

“I’d forgotten how to raise my legs,” he writes. “Was I supposed to step around it or over it? I just couldn’t remember.” So he hit it and toppled. “As I saw it coming, I didn’t know what to do,” Jurek recalls in his new memoir, North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail, co-written with his wife, Jenny. Delirious from just two hours of sleep following 26 straight hours of hiking, he was stumbling along the trail when he encountered the root in his path. After battling through a succession of leg injuries, then slogging through Vermont’s wettest June in centuries, he had to make up ground over a particularly merciless stretch of the trail, New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Jurek, one of the greatest ultramarathoners of all times, was in trouble. He was 38 days into an attempt to beat the speed record for completing the full length of the Appalachian Trail, the mountainous hiking path that snakes along America’s East Coast, from northern Georgia to the top of Mount Katahdin, in Maine. Of all the things that could have broken Scott Jurek on a 2,189-mile run, it was a small tree root that crushed his spirit.

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