Hey podcast listeners, this is one of our favorite episodes from the archives.

A lot of new listeners have found us recently and we thought you might enjoy hearing it.

And if you've already heard this one, there's an update to the story at the end.

Enjoy. I remember the loons, you know, basically trilling off across the lakes and the ponds that I was going through that last week and a half in New Hampshire and Maine.

I remember the sense of the different trees and the different

you know forms of dirt and it really was like as much as I was brought to that utter fatigue my senses just became really

attuned to what was going on around me and that's pretty magical I think too.

This is Scott Jurek.

This past summer, he set off trying to become the fastest person

to run the Appalachian Trail, which is over 2,000 miles long.

It's like running from New York City to Utah. Right at the beginning, he was flying along, making great time, but only a few hundred miles into the trail, his right knee started to hurt.

And I started compensating with my left side and then developed a quad tear on the right side.

And over the next couple of days, it got so bad where you know I can no longer

limp on one leg because I had two bad legs and I'm thinking to myself how am I

going to get through this you know the record I thought for sure was out of the question at that point.

But Jurek just sort of refused to stop and after a few days of basically limping along covering

30 miles a day instead of 50 he bounced back and could start running again.

But because of that injury, because of a few slow days, the whole attempt was in jeopardy.

Up until the last day, he wasn't sure he could break the record.

It's either sleep or get the record and I basically, you know, decided, okay, I'm going to get

an hour of sleep and get back out there. And that was the only

point which I thought, okay, I have this record as long as I keep a steady pace.

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