Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness by Scott Jurek, Steve Friedman Read Free Book Online Page A

people in races but called them names, laughed at them, and insulted their families when he did it. He had no discipline and was wasting his prodigious talent. We all knew that: cake eaters, greasers, and rural rednecks alike.
    But in the spring of 1992, when Dusty and I were seniors, I learned how much I didn’t know.
    Dusty and I stayed together at the USSA Junior Nationals in Rumford, Maine. There were cross-country skiers from every state where it was a sport. The conditions couldn’t have been worse. It was 55 degrees, and the snow was like frozen yogurt. The next day it rained 2 inches, and a cold snap the following night froze the trails into skating rinks. But every day the coaches would put us through training exercises. And every day Dusty would talk back. He wanted to know why we were doing this drill or that drill. He wanted to know why we weren’t doing more kilometers. He told all of us that the coaches were a joke. He told the coaches they were a joke. I couldn’t believe they didn’t kick him out the first day. I had never talked back to an adult. I had never questioned a coach. He read my face and told me to relax, they were just a bunch of pussies anyway. He called me “Jurker” and a “dumb Polack,” but the way he said it, I didn’t feel insulted.
    The first day of competition, in a 10K race, Dusty took a really bad fall on an icy hairpin turn with only 2K to go. He took some time getting up, and I knew something was wrong because he was in third place and closing. He calmly announced that he had broken his ankle. The coaches told him to suck it up, no one had broken an ankle. They knew all that they needed to know about Dusty. He was just trying to get attention. They told him to get a good night’s sleep and to be ready to race the next day.
    In his room that night, when he took off his boot, his foot was so purple it was almost black. It looked like a black volleyball, but Dusty didn’t say anything. There were no wisecracks. I was actually a little disappointed. Maybe the guy wasn’t such a badass after all. When he showed up for his start the next day, his ankle was so swollen, he couldn’t even pull his boot on. But he tried. He didn’t say a word, just tried to yank that boot up so he could race. Finally one of the coaches from another team, who happened to be a doctor, saw what was going on and yelled at him to stop, that they were driving to the hospital. Dusty got X-rayed and sure enough, it was broken.
    That’s when I realized I had been wrong about Dusty. He was one tough bastard.
    The rest of the week was vintage Dusty. First he snuck into the Alaskan team’s room and stole their Nintendo game. When they found out, he told them they were pussies and launched a water fight with them that lasted all week. Every night Dusty would hold forth at the hotel bar over Cokes and ginger ales. He told stories about getting chased through the woods by cops and their K-9 units. He talked about all the women he’d slept with. He told us about how he had befriended a guy who knew which janitors’ closets were open at the University of Minnesota at Duluth and how he’d steal ninety rolls of toilet paper at a time, then TP the houses of people he wanted to piss off. He said he never ran out of houses. He said he once ran 18 miles from his house to the start of the Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, then ran the marathon, then ran the 5 miles home.
    I said “yes sir” to adults and Dusty asked coaches, “Why the hell are you making us do this?” I wore button-down shirts and Dusty shaved half his skull. Our differences were obvious to anyone who was looking. What wasn’t so apparent was the hunger we shared, the way we defined ourselves by our effort. When Dusty regaled everyone with outlandish tales of superhuman endurance, they all hooted and hollered. Except me. Dusty was hilarious, but everyone thought he was totally full of shit. I wasn’t so sure. He had something that allowed him to