Kilian Jornet

RUN OR DIE

Translated from Catalan by Peter Bush

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First published as Córrer o Morir in Spain by Ara Llibres SCCL 2011
This translation first published in the USA by VeloPress 2013
Published in Penguin Books 2014

Catalan copyright © Kilian Jornet, 2011
Translation copyright © Peter Bush, 2013
English copyright © VeloPress, 2013

Cover photography © Droz Photo

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-97091-1

Contents

The Skyrunner’s Manifesto

1 What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

2 Adrenaline Comes with a Number

3 It’s Not Only About Competing

4 The Windy City

5 Lakes, Rivers, and Rain

6 A Victory for the Senses

7 Running a Long Way to Find Yourself

8 We Celebrate a Peak When We’re Back Down

9 What I Think About When I Think About Running

Illustrations

Credits

Acknowledgments

Follow Penguin

To Núria, for showing me the way
and lighting it when it gets dark

The Skyrunner’s Manifesto

Kiss or kill. Besa o mata. Kiss glory or die in the attempt. Losing is death; winning is life. The fight is what decides the victory, the winner. How often have rage and pain made you cry? How often has exhaustion made you lose your memory, voice, common sense? And how often in this state have you exclaimed, with a broad smile on your face, “The final stage! Two more hours! Go, onward and upward! That pain only exists inside your head. Control it, destroy it, eliminate it, and keep on. Make your rivals suffer. Kill them.” I am selfish, right? Sport is selfish, because you must be selfish to know how to fight on while you suffer, to love solitude and hell. Stopping, coughing, feeling cold, not feeling your legs, feeling sick, vomiting, getting headaches, cuts, bleeding … can you think of anything better?

The secret isn’t in your legs, but in your strength of mind. You need to go for a run when it is raining, windy, and snowing, when lightning sets trees on fire as you pass them, when snowflakes or hailstones strike your legs and body in the storm and make you weep, and in order to keep running, you have to wipe away the tears to see the stones, walls, or sky. The strength of mind to say no to hours of partying, to good grades, to a pretty girl, to the bedsheets against your face. To put your soul into it, going out into the rain until your legs bleed from the cuts when you slip on the mud and fall to the ground, and then get back on your feet and continue uphill until your legs cry out, “Enough!” and leave you marooned in a storm on the remotest peaks, until you die.

Leggings soaked by snow, driven on by the wind that sticks to your face and freezes your sweat. Feeling the pressure from your legs, the weight of your body bearing down on the metatarsals in your toes, pressure that can shatter rocks, destroy planets, and move continents. Legs suspended in the air, gliding like an eagle, or running faster than a cheetah. Running downhill, slipping on the snow and mud before driving yourself on anew, and suddenly you are free to fly, to shout out in the heart of the mountain, with only the most intrepid rodents and birds hidden in their nests beneath the rocks as your confessors. Only they know your secrets, your fears. Because losing is death. And you should not die before you have given your all, have wept from the pain and the wounds. And you cannot surrender. You must fight on to the death. Because glory is the greatest, and you can either aspire to glory or fall by the wayside. You cannot simply not fight, not suffer, not die. … Now is the time to suffer, the time to fight, the time to win. Kiss or kill.

Pinned on the door of an old flat, these were the words I read every morning before I went out training.