Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his
generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races,
claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of
them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an
airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses (Corsica) and
mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs
all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On
summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of
Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe’s
roof — over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex’d climbers, into the thin
air at 15,781 feet — and back home again in less than seven hours, a
trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete. A few years ago
Jornet ran the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail and stopped just twice to sleep
on the ground for a total of about 90 minutes. In the middle of the
night he took a wrong turn, which added perhaps six miles to his run. He
still finished in 38 hours 32 minutes, beating the record of Tim
Twietmeyer, a legend in the world of ultrarunning, by more than seven
hours. When he reached the finish line, he looked as if he’d just won
the local turkey trot.
Levon Biss for The New York Times
Jornet “is not normal,” his mother says. “My mission
is to make Kilian tired. Always, I was tired, but Kilian, no.”
Come winter, when most elite ultrarunners keep running, Jornet puts away
his trail-running shoes for six months and takes up ski-mountaineering
racing, which basically amounts to running up and around large mountains
on alpine skis. In this sport too, Jornet reigns supreme: he has been
the overall World Cup champion three of the last four winters.
So what’s next when you’re 25 and every one of the races on the wish
list you drew up as a youngster has been won and crossed out? You dream
up a new challenge. Last year Jornet began what he calls the Summits of My Life project,
a four-year effort to set speed records climbing and descending some of
the world’s most well known peaks, from the Matterhorn this summer to
Mount Everest in 2015. In doing so, he joins a cadre of alpinists like
Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Chad Kellogg from the United States who
are racing up peaks and redefining what’s possible. In a way, Jornet
says, all of his racing has been preparation for greater trials. This
month, he is in the Himalayas with a couple of veteran alpinists. They
plan to climb and ski the south face of a peak that hasn’t been skied
before in winter.
But bigger challenges bring bigger risks. Less than a year ago, Jornet
watched as his hero and friend Stéphane Brosse died in the mountains.
Since then, he has asked himself, How much is it worth sacrificing to do
what you love?
Chamonix, France, READ ON
No comments:
Post a Comment