Excerpts from the book: Is my series where I share some highlights and notes I made while reading some book that I think is good, thought provoking and worth sharing.
- Remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, lonely for contemplation, it beckons not merely north and south, but upward to the body, mind and soul of man. —Harold Allen, early Appalachian Trail planner
- To transcend like Thoreau and Muir, with the Christopher McCandless ideals from Into the Wild, chasing a romantic goal to “move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon.”
- El Coyote had the ability to laugh when he wanted to cry, the secret to longevity in ultrarunning.
- Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward.
- The planning was done, our doubts were irrelevant.
- Out here it was very easy to appreciate the few things we had with us. It was better than lamenting what we had lost.
- I was in good shape physically. I was breathing steadily, and I felt my skin cooling as I took a moment to take in the view. I was tired, of course, but the ache in my muscles felt good; I was alive, doing what I did best, and pushing myself to do more. That was the reason I was out here.
- I ran into two women well into their sixties. We all stopped to chat, and I asked how far they were planning to go. I was expecting to hear about a day trip, maybe an adventurous overnight, maybe a drop-off and pickup somewhere on the other side of the forest. They smiled and said, “Katahdin!” Their spirit sustained me through the rest of the day. It began to rain harder as we conversed, but it didn’t matter. I hoped to be just like them one day: older, vibrant, and on the trail.
- Would he have understood if I’d told him that, though man’s soul finds solace in natural beauty, it is forged in the fire of pain?
- The Hardrock victories weren’t what made Horty resilient, though. It was how he’d won them.
- I’ve experienced my fair share of success. And I know this: You rarely ask why when you win. It’s a word you can outrun and outperform. Applause makes it hard to hear yourself. But just because you ignore it doesn’t mean it’s not there. And why doesn’t get old and tired. It catches up, and it gets louder. It churns up thoughts that are best kept down in the dark.
- And there was that paradoxical peace of mind that emerged with middle age: As I accumulated more and more memories—good and bad—the pain of each individual bad one was blunted. What’s one more mile when you’ve already run forty-nine?
- But like execution and adaptability, will is just another ingredient in the recipe for success.
- I knew that my prior experiences in dealing with unforeseen adversity would be a secret weapon. I’d gotten through a lot of tough spots in my life, and I knew I would be fully capable of tapping into my best self once again to meet whatever challenges inevitably cropped up over six weeks.
- The pain must have been affecting my ability to hold a conversation because Will kept reminding me that if anyone could get through this, it was me. That sounded right, and I appreciated it, but right then it didn’t feel right. During those moments of quiet, my mind snapped back from newts and grassy balds and homed back in on the pain. To try to take command of my ruminations, I started repeating my tried and true mantras: Sometimes you just do things. This is what you came for. I’d chosen this path, and I’d chosen to push myself to the limits of my body and mind. I knew that adversity bred transformation, that there would be an enlightening ease at the other end of this struggle. The sweetest reward lay in that ease, and it was a feeling that neither money nor power—nor a healthy quadriceps—could guarantee. And it existed in each one of us. Stay the course; keep pressing forward, I told myself, but part of me—a lot of me—kept questioning the choices I’d made that had gotten us out here.
- I sensed the tears welling up deep behind my eyes. Just when I felt like I couldn’t hold them back a moment longer, Horty spun around and looked straight into my soul. “Remember this, boy: This is who I am, and this is what I do.” He was still crazy old Horty, and on any other day, that would have sounded like nonsense. But in that moment, it felt like an answer to that question I couldn’t shake. Why? This is who I am. This is what I do.
- Among the unwritten, wildly interpreted FKT ethics, there is only one inviolable rule: Cover every step of the trail under your own power.
- Or maybe, at the core, helping someone reach a goal is what it means to be human.
- What matters most is how you walk through the fire. —Charles Bukowski
- When I was with her, I fed off that energy. But on day ten, I was alone, high up on Hump Mountain. And the more I tried to screw my head on straight, the more it spun. Maybe I just need to let go of the glory days and accept that the fire is gone. And yet … despite the swirling doubts, despite the stories I told myself of decline and retirement, somewhere deep inside, I still felt some of that drive, that old ego. You have to have some ego.
- I wish I could say that I was just channeling the vibrations and energy of the wilderness through my body, mind, and soul, that it was all beauty and joy. But at the end of the day, you have to want it. Plain and simple. The ego doesn’t have to be destructive, and it doesn’t have to make you lose sight of the real reasons you do what you do. It doesn’t have to go to your head. But when push comes to shove, nothing motivates like winning does.
- And in the case of pain, perhaps the one we know hurts us less than the one we fear.
- I forgot about Katahdin being eighteen hundred miles away, about the FKT, about the loss of normalcy, about everything. I felt how sweet life could be when I wasn’t looking at it through a prism of doing, but just being. That was enough for now. It was enough to start running again.
- I took a few tentative steps, felt the same stabbing pains … and kept going. I was back running. Not elegantly, not with fierceness, not with anything near the speed I’d eventually need. But I was running. If I could just let life happen, everything could work. I didn’t have to win, not yet. I just needed to let myself run.
- Here’s the thing: if anyone had come across me hiking and hobbling toward Damascus and asked what I thought my chances were for the FKT, I would have been … more than cautious. I wouldn’t have advised putting a single cent on me, despite El Coyote’s advice “never bet against the Champ.”
- It was only years later, well after her passing, that I began to understand what she had been doing. Certainly as I limped in pain and doubt along the Appalachian Trail, I was giving myself a crash course in the power of a mantra, in the power of single-mindedness, of stubbornness, of codes, of real toughness. When I was a younger man, I was angry, and I’d wanted my mother to be angry too. But she wasn’t. She was reminding herself that despite the hideous disease that was stealing everything else from her, she still had her toughness. Because she said so, and because she could say so. And did. Often. Her physical strength was gone. But her toughness only got tougher; it became her essential feature. If she hadn’t been a tough old lady, she would have had to just be a bitter teenager like me. She was still teaching me things, still reminding me what toughness looked like.
- “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles …. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly … who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
- Perspective can be both humbling and inspiring. Those
- He carried himself with that same Zen-like dignity, but he could quickly switch to Mortal Kombat mode.
- There are echoes of its lessons in the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius, especially in the tenet that has most influenced me: The mind of a warrior (or anyone performing a difficult task) should be so attuned to the moment that thoughts and emotions do not impede proper action. A mind in this condition is thought to function so optimally that the right decisions come naturally and pain and fear disappear. I often saw similarities between this mind-set and what elite athletes refer to as being “in the zone.”
- Don—wonderful Don—had brought exactly what I needed most in that moment: stability, authority, grace, and groundedness. He almost instantaneously shook me out of my depression, and I was grateful once again for his ability to intervene in my life and make me focus on the here and now.
- Horty had a theory about motivation. He told me that a lot of motivation could be boiled down to this: How bad do you want it? He would ask people, “What’s the furthest you can run without stopping?” After they replied whatever distance, he followed up with “Could you run a mile further if I gave you a million dollars? What if I was running behind you holding a gun to your head, could you run even further?”
- He said, “It’s easy to say you want it real bad when you’re sitting at home on the couch. But when the going gets tough, do you want it enough?”
- 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. There was something to Horty’s motivational theory, and finding that desire was the most vexing problem. How bad did I want it?
- I didn’t have the energy to care what was reality. And yet I was still moving forward. 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.
- It was really testing my faith in Horty’s favorite aphorism: It never always gets worse.
- 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, waving and calling out. This time, I really didn’t have any strength left. But my team did. And even if they gave it to me, it still wouldn’t be mine. It would be ours, collectively, just like the FKT would be—if we managed to get it.
- The sport of ultrarunning cultivates perseverance in the face of pain, fatigue, illness, and anything else. For that reason, to the untrained eye, it might seem to reward the self-sufficient and punish any kind of weakness. But the most experienced and highest-achieving ultrarunners learn that without support, it’s easy to wander aimlessly. And without a crew that you can honestly turn to for help, a crew that truly understands you, you won’t be able to help yourself. Even the most eccentric among us—and, yes, I am referring here to Speedgoat—depend on other people far more than an outsider might suppose.
- 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.
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