Ultramarathoner Scott Jurek Attempted a New Speed Record. He Faced a Reckoning.

The goal was ambitious but doable: Jurek has a lengthy list of trail running achievements, including winning the 100-mile Western States race seven times. But he swears that getting the record back was not the primary motivation.

“It’s that drive of knowing I can do things better, and there was this pull to go back and explore everything that I went through again, the effort, the discomfort and the challenges,” Jurek said. “It’s this spiritual place you have to go to to perform.”

Jurek was 41 years old when he broke the record and is 47 now. He trained for months for this quest, on the trails near his home in Boulder, Colo., and on the track doing workouts that included strength training between intervals — plyometrics, box jumps, more push-ups and situps than he cares to think about — all in preparation for the rugged challenges of the Appalachian Trail — scaling boulders, hopping over downed trees and tree roots.

On Aug. 4, he was at Mount Katahdin in Maine ready to embark on his trek, with a support crew of two, plus his wife and two young kids. Achieving his goal would demand roughly 40 consecutive days of about 50 miles, translating to somewhere between 16 and 20 hours a day on his feet.

Everything started out fine, but on the fifth day, coming off the Bigelow mountains in Southern Maine, on a section of the trail filled with rocks and roots and little opportunity to actually run, Jurek started to feel tightness in his left quadriceps muscle. He tried to favor his right leg, which helped until the next day, when he felt the tightness in his right quad.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/05/sports/scott-jurek-ultramarathon.html