“I wish it went differently, but it’s still fun to explore different things and new projects. The document was exquisite in its geekiness. But the occasion was largely celebrated as a historic milestone. Jornet seemed resigned to the fact that clarity might be impossible. “Of course,” she says. The trail running star had hoped to see how far he could run in 24 hours during the Salomon-organised event in Måndalen, Norway, but he was forced to withdraw after 10 hours and 20 minutes due to chest pain and dizziness. Jornet was two years too young for the program, but he didn’t quite fit into a typical high school. It was Jornet’s first time, but the pair summited in four hours and were back in town in less than ten. “His versatility as an athlete is unparalleled,” says Mike Foote, who has twice finished second to Jornet at the Hardrock 100. Jornet’s background is mainly in off-road ultra-running events like the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, which he has won three times and which usually takes him about 21 hours to cover 106 miles of gruelling mountainous terrain through the French, Swiss and Italian Alps. And now you see people catching up to him. Jornet has done his best to be accommodating, and I’ve tried my best to keep up. He was, it seemed, superhuman, but also human, after all. After four days, I’m beat. He and his fiancée, the Swedish ultrarunner Emelie Forsberg, moved here in 2015 to escape the maddening sports crowd of France’s Chamonix Valley, where they previously resided and are huge celebrities. 21:42 Temps de lectura: 3 minuts The longest distance ever run on the track in 24 hours is 188.590 miles (303.506km) which was recorded by ultra running legend Yiannis Kouros in 1997, a feat which had been described by Jornet as “absolutely wild”. While attempting the first objective, the Mont Blanc traverse, his partner, world-champion ski-mountaineering racer Stéphane Brosse, was skinning beside Jornet above the Argentière Glacier when a large cornice broke off between them, pitching Brosse 2,000 feet to his death. “Friends will visit and ask about a route, and Kilian will say it takes three hours, but for them it’s like 15,” she says. Despite the tragedy, Jornet went on to flash up and down the other peaks, setting records, traveling light, deploying his bohemian brand of mountain endurance, and often doing in hours what took other experienced climbers days. “They don’t seem to think it is anything too serious.”. I was intimately familiar with Everest’s north side. (Sébastian Montaz-Rosset) Find out more here and go take a look inside. By the time he reached the North Col, at 23,000 feet, he felt terrible and began wrestling with stomach problems. A few critics warned that they would “give the website a bad name” and that Wallace should “get legal advice about publishing the article.” Concerned about losing the audience it had taken him a decade to build, Wallace promptly removed the piece. He would routinely ride his bike to school, work out all afternoon, and then ride home—25 miles each way. I’d watched a lot of footage of Jornet in the preceding months, from various races and climbs, and I realized that this was the only time I’d ever seen him looking exhausted. He had no radio or satellite phone, and no way to alert his lone teammate, the filmmaker Sébastien Montaz-Rosset, or the handful of friends he’d made since being on the mountain. Find more newsletters on our, Jornet training in the mountains near his home in Norway, our entire suite of free newsletters here. But I’m afraid of nature. Perhaps there was another, simpler explanation for his back-to-back Everest summits. Jornet tells me that they spent less than a month total in Tibet, the first ten days on 26,864-foot Cho Oyu, before moving on to Everest Base Camp, at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier. Around 2 a.m. on May 28, 2017, Kilian Jornet crabbed across Mount Everest’s North Face, alone, delirious, at nearly 27,000 feet, and far off route. Howitt persisted, however, lobbying media outlets, including Outside, and claiming that he could prove Jornet had come up short, at least on the first Everest ascent. Three years ago, he began teaming up for occasional climbs with the late Ueli Steck, a.k.a. Ten miles from the finish, at the last checkpoint, they detained him for more than an hour. When he compared Jornet’s summit track on a topographic map with Adrian Ballinger’s, Jornet’s route appears to terminate in a different location, presumably below the summit. “In the hospital they ran a number of tests to try to determine what it was,” added Jornet, who was speaking on Saturday after being released from the hospital. It had a tragic start. That’s a common phenomenon in our digital age. “When he talked, he had a special shine and determination. For dinner she’s prepared a rich lentil stew and fresh bread made from locally produced spelt flour. @gopro #hero9” “I think there will always be fans, and there will be those who doubt,” he said. “I was like, Fuck you, fuck the race and everything.”. Kilian Jornet’s name is one of the first you’ll hear when you enter the trail running world. Howitt has assumed this role in the mountaineering realm for nearly two decades. He was descending from the 29,029-foot summit, his second trip to the top without supplemental oxygen in seven days. He has a near miraculous ability to recover quickly from workouts and races. Proof of Jornet’s potential at the distance came earlier this year when he ran 29:42 for a 10km run after a 29:57 vertical kilometre as part of his ‘VK10K’ session. After an hour of steady effort, my base layer soggy with sweat, I reach the top. “You don’t think about much up there,” he says. (Damien Rosso), When I spoke to Canals on the phone, I asked him what was the most amazing thing he’d seen Jornet do. . Cho Oyu was only a preamble for the two weeks ahead. At ten, he completed a 42-day through-hike of the Pyrenees with Nuria and Naila. “There’s no incentive,” says John Gaston, the top U.S. skimo racer, who spent the year training and racing on the European World Cup circuit. By himself? “I’m hurting everywhere,” he said, as the clocked ticked down on 24 hours. With Jornet, there have been occasional whispers of foul play but nothing concrete, just garden-variety trolling and speculation that could reasonably be chalked up to professional jealousy. He’s out there a lot, and I know things can happen in the mountains.”. He’s wearing a face mask and seems profoundly tired. Jornet remained largely quiet as his accuser continued his media campaign. It was snowing, the slope growing icier and more precarious with every move. Far below, at ABC, they peered anxiously through a spotting scope in search of Jornet, now hours overdue. Jornet and his fellow Salomon athlete Sebastian Conrad Håkansson, who were wearing the new Salomon S/LAB Phantasm road running shoes, moved ahead early on, with Håkansson going on to complete 100 miles in 12 hours and 46 minutes to break the Norwegian 100-mile record before stepping off the track. “I don’t like to put tags on things,” says the 30-year-old. He lived to race but didn’t race to live. When I last heard from him, a few weeks after the accident, he sounded upbeat and optimistic, and he intended to be racing again by July. On May 20, he departed Base Camp at 10 p.m. to make his first try for the summit. He had earlier struggled with knee pain but it was on doctor’s advice due to the chest pain and dizziness that his attempt came to an early end. “I don’t want to spend time on the haters, but I understand about proof.”, Jornet had also stormed back to racing, climbing, and skiing. We decided to admit him because we thought it was better that he was in our group than just alone in the mountains.”. He lasted five days before he passed out, midrun. During the run I felt a sudden sharp chest pain and needed to spent the night on observation. » For more on the latest athletics news, athletics events coverage and athletics updates, check out the AW homepage and our social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, Tags: Kilian Jornet, Phantasm 24, Photo by Salomon, Salomon, Ultra running, Yiannis Kouros, 7.14m long jump for Tara Davis at the Texas Relays. Today…” I expect the question to mark the immediate end of the dinner party’s convivial vibe. Given the significance of the claims, he convinced a British website called Mount Everest the British Story, to publish the document in full in the summer of 2017. We humbly offer you the Kilian Jornet meal plan, culled from highlighter marks of an early review copy: THE RUN: The 2010 Sierre-Zinal race, a 19.3 … But now he was lost and couldn’t recall how he’d gotten there; his memory from the past hour was blank. Two weeks after Everest, he set a blazing pace in a road half marathon in Norway that ascended more than 5,500 feet, cranking out miles in under six and a half minutes on an 8 percent grade and winning in 1:30. Jornet on Everest in 2017 Off-road ultra running great Kilian Jornet says a 24-hour challenge remains “on the list” despite his Phantasm 24 track attempt on Friday ending in hospital. Fucking. I don’t hear from Jornet for another four hours. “He has this resistance to osteoarticular and muscular lesions”—the bone contusions and muscle strains commonly triggered by demanding exercise. In total, Jornet covered 134.8km in 10 hours and 20 minutes in temperatures hovering around the freezing mark. The film, by Montaz-Rosset, centers on Vivian Bruchez, one of France’s most skilled extreme skiers. “I’m not afraid because of his capacities; things that look like risks to others are within his experience and knowledge. But I felt very well.’ ” Canals recalled. The report sparked widespread debate. Steve House, the alpinist and author, believes Jornet is an example of what happens when you log an average of almost 1,000 hours a year for 17 years—the compound interest of nearly two decades of progressive training. In early 2018, the Spanish climbing magazine Desnivel ran a cover story calling Jornet out, stating, “He did not show definitive evidence of what he had done.” When I reached out to Himalayan Database, the Kathmandu-based organization that has been verifying Himalayan mountaineering since 1991, it had not confirmed either of the climbs. He was still a student then, studying exercise physiology in Font-Romeu, France, living in shared housing, stretching what little money he had to keep him in pasta and olive oil. (Downside Up). “I like to move on mountains in different ways. Two ascents, back-to-back? “Some people enjoyed the read, but most disagreed with what Dan had written,” Collin Wallace, the website’s founder, wrote me in an e-mail. Summits was a chance to pursue more imaginative, independent projects, moving how he liked, fast and free, on his own schedule. There is a dimly lit final photo on the ridge and then video of his face in the darkness, illuminated by the GoPro’s small bulb. Athletic training at CTEMC was carefully prescribed and supervised, but Jornet was hard to restrain. I ask Forsberg if she worries about her partner. Forsberg eventually turned back before the top on Cho Oyu, but Jornet reached the broad plateau on May 14. Kilian Jornet is quite possibly the best mountain and trail runner of all time. Track, analyse & audit your Instagram Account with future projections of real followers growth in professionally audited report by Rajat Jain using Free Social Media Auditor. Until his recent shoulder trouble, he seemed impervious to injury. Early on, Jornet’s unique qualities amazed and perplexed his coaches, most notably his “extraordinary recovery from strenuous trainings,” as Canals described it. Check out our entire suite of free newsletters here. 40.7k Likes, 442 Comments - Kilian Jornet (@kilianjornet) on Instagram: “What’s your confinement mood ? In 2012, his VO2 max was recorded at 92, one of the highest values ever seen. I’ve watched the film dozens of times, and it never fails to leave pools of sweat under my palms. Forsberg laughs when she hears the story. “Sometimes after climbing, my friends take a beer,” Jornet says in fluent but heavily accented English, “but I am like, why?”, Jornet training in the mountains near his home in Norway (Photo: Matti Bernitz/Lymbus). His “taper week” prior to the Hardrock 100 in July included a 35-mile ascent of Mount Eolus and a 26-mile run up Mount Elbert, both Colorado fourteeners. “The public only understands velocity, they don’t understand climbing,” said Himalayan gadfly Reinhold Messner, dismissing the feat as merely racing, not mountaineering. Jornet with the late Ueli Steck “I don’t want to spend time on the haters, but I understand about proof.”. As we remove our skins, I ignore the fact that this is his second lap. Howitt’s report raises legitimate questions, but it mainly delivers uncertainty—by no means proof that Jornet is a fraud. Instead, Jornet seems happy to go over it in detail. “It was hard to film,” Jornet says. I ask him, half jokingly, what he can bench-press. In other countries, skimo is a fringe sport, but in Spain, it is more popular than either cross-country or alpine skiing. Anything else was a waste of time. Forsberg grows much of their food on the property. “There was a moment when he was a teenager that I saw his attitude had a destructive point,” she told me. It seems far in physical distance, (from Måndalen to Minessota is more than 7000km over the Atlantic) and in personal circumstances. Subscribe to our What You Missed newsletter for the top headlines from the outdoor world, in your inbox six days a week. “The only motion possible is to keep jogging.”. I dropped a rock to see how steep it was, and I realized it was not a dream and that I needed to wait until daylight so I could see before making any more decisions.”. The Real-Life Diet of Kilian Jornet, Who Dominates 100-Mile Ultramarathons and Runs Up the World’s Highest Mountains Training to race up Mt. ‍♂️ 2. No TV, no Xbox, no internet, just his year-younger sister, Naila, for company and the wild peaks outside the door. In person it’s easy to see how Jornet is so fast. “Still up,” he texts, “but will be back in town in an hour.”. By the time he arrived at Everest in 2017, his third trip there in as many years, he was one of the most recognized athletes in adventure sports, with a robust social-media following, including nearly 250,000 on Twitter  and more than half a million on Instagram. That left him perched dangerously near the top of Everest’s soaring 7,000-foot north wall. You can count the restaurants in nearby Andalsnes, the town of 2,300 where I’m staying, on one hand. I spoke with Jornet again a few weeks after my trip to Norway. Splitting his year between the two disciplines helped stave off the overtraining and burnout that has plagued so many talented runners—a strategy that’s now employed by top competitors like Krupicka, Foote, and Rob Krar. But that was enough. Would I mind? He lasted five days before he passed out, midrun. It’s the same zone we skied on the first day of my visit, a soft snow cone of a summit 3,000 vertical feet above. “I think there will always be fans, and there will be those who doubt,” he said. He’d just started training again when I showed up, and the prospect of chasing the very best around the Norwegian mountains made me as giddy as a teenager. La segunda sesión del club de lectura de Kilian Jornet ha tenido aún más éxito que la anterior. “Ueli was coming from a supertechnical background—like pure difficulty—and I was coming from endurance. “I can’t imagine trying to recover and climb again five days later, physically and emotionally,” says alpinist and guide Adrian Ballinger, whose own oxygenless ascent of Everest coincided with Jornet’s. And he has cultivated a monklike devotion to training, technique, and equipment that he deploys through 1,200 hours of yearly practice. The closest bar is 30 miles away. There was some predictable grumbling. Even after his UTMB win, when Salomon signed him to a full-time contract, it only meant bigger bags of pasta and, at events, an occasional hotel room instead of the back of his car. In winter, in snow, I go on skis.”, It’s January, and I’ve come to Romsdal, on the western coast of Norway, to go on skis with Jornet. Harald Bjerke won the event after covering 232.2km (144.1 miles) – 580 laps of the track. Kilian Jornet announced his retirement from running on Wednesday, with the intention of taking up fishing instead. In February, he placed first in the vertical and fourth in the individual race at the Puy Saint Vincent Ski Mountaineering World Cup in France, his first competition since surgery. Next Kilian Jornet Has a New Book on His Epic Everest Quest ... he had written it for the four freaks who understand him rather than the adoring worldwide fan base that devours his Instagram … Three days before the Marathon du Mont Blanc, he ran up and down the Mont Blanc massif—14,000 vertical feet—in seven hours. Why should I talk about it? The Everest feats, meanwhile, started coming under scrutiny. skimo—an Alps-born sport that entails hauling ass up and down wintry mountains on featherweight touring gear while dressed in a skintight onesie. He continued to compete—he liked meeting people, enjoyed the milieu—but he’d already won everything there was to win, often multiple times, including marquee pain parties like Colorado’s Hardrock 100, the 106-mile Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB), and Alaska’s brief but brutal Mount Marathon. He grew up in Refugi Cap del Rec, a backcountry hut in the Spanish Pyrenees, where his parents, Eduoard and Nuria, worked as caretakers and mountain guides. the Swiss Machine. “That’s the reason why I look for help at the school.”, She believed CTEMC would provide an outlet for his irrepressible energy. They accused him of cheating—of using a pacer (he wasn’t) and not carrying the mandatory gear (he was). After the climb, Howitt produced and circulated a 19-page document that reviewed, in painstaking detail, Jornet’s ascent of Cho Oyu, in early May, and both of his Everest climbs later that same month. (Jornet’s watch had inexplicably recorded part of the descent for the second climb, but nothing more.). The weather was worse—windy and cold—but he felt better and moved more quickly, again summiting in the dark. View this post on Instagram “A lot of athletes with smaller training loads have lots of trouble.”, Previous It also prompted threats directed at the website’s staff via online comments and Facebook. But then again, most people aren’t Kilian Jornet. “I did some stupid sprint on the North Ridge,” he laughs, “because I could.” The summit glistened temptingly less than 2,000 vertical feet above and Jornet felt great, but he stuck to his plan: descend to Base Camp, recover, and make an actual attempt in a couple of days. His parents had split by then, and Eduoard had moved into a neighboring hut, but soon, Jornet says, it seemed normal, he and his sister rotating each week between the two parents. In recent years, Jornet has transcended traditional endurance sports, establishing himself in an elite club of adventurers that is reinventing high-mountain objectives. At 13, Jornet applied to the Center for Mountain Skiing of Catalonia (CTEMC)—a kind of Spanish version of Vermont’s Burke Mountain Academy, but for skimo racing. It was impossible not to wonder, in a post–Lance Armstrong fake-news world, if something was amiss. I’d first learned of Jornet through my own inexplicable midlife addiction to ski-mountaineering racing—a.k.a. On the fourth and final stage, he and his teammate, Jakob Herrmann, were leading and poised for the overall win when Jornet crashed on a downhill section and fractured his fibula. As he narrates, Jornet cues up a series of images and video clips he took with a GoPro along the route. The school agreed. With support from his main sponsor, Salomon, and help from his friend Montaz-Rosset, Jornet produced impressive documentation of each mission: photos, blog posts, data, and several films. I’m on my bike, busting my ass, six hours a day. By then, at age 24, racing had lost its luster. Some fans even referred to their Salomon running shoes as Air Jornets. It saddened me to feel suspicious, but who could forget the now infamous 2001 Nike ad in which Lance Armstrong says, “What am I on? Eventually, worried that I could get lost forever in the whiteout, I bail. If we’re going to the mountains and he estimates seven hours, I pack food for ten.”. . He was ascending nearly 1,000 feet an hour, an impossible pace, all the way to 27,500 feet. The competition is tight. But there is Jornet, right next to him, scritching out turns on 55-degree blue ice, downclimbing Class 5 rock and snow, slipping across knife ridges so narrow and airy that his skis stick out in both directions.