Born to Run

had dropped into a chair to drink a Coke, but

“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”

Whenever an art form loses its fire, when it gets weakened by intellectual inbreeding and first principles fade into stale tradition, a radical fringe eventually appears to blow it up and rebuild from the rubble.

“Try the meditation of the trail, just walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don’t look about and

“If you’re going to try, go all the way,”

somewhere after all, he realized. All the hopelessness of nursing a mother who would never get better, all the frustration of chasing taunting jerks he could never catch—it had quietly bloomed into an ability to push harder and harder as things looked worse and worse. Coach Vigil would have been touched; Scott asked for nothing from his endurance,

Steve Peterson, a member of a Colorado higher-consciousness cult called Divine Madness, which seeks nirvana through sex parties, extreme trail running, and affordable housecleaning.

Make friends with pain, and you will never be alone. —KEN CHLOUBER, Colorado miner and creator of the Leadville Trail 100

We wouldn’t be alive without love; we wouldn’t have survived without running; maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that getting better at one could make you better at the other.