He is the most outrageously talented mountain runner there has ever been, conquering peaks in dizzying new records. But what keeps driving Kílian Jornet ever upwards? And how does he cope with his new life as a social influencer?
More days than not, Kílian Jornet runs up a mountain. A short run will take him between one and four hours. A long run will take him five or more. Usually he’ll take a backpack with him, but for the sake of efficiency there won’t be much in it. “I can run for 10 hours, comfortably, without food or water,” he tells me, on a Zoom call. He’s not boasting – it is what it is. If he gets thirsty, he’ll drink from a stream.
Jornet is to endurance sports what Usain Bolt was to the 100m and Eliud Kipchoge is to the road marathon – an outlier and a record breaker. Most of his achievements seem basically inhuman. He has won every significant race on the mountain-running circuit, some of which are 100 miles long. He has broken nearly every mountaineering record in the world. He is the fastest man to have run up and down various big peaks, including Mont Blanc (normal time: two days; Jornet time: four hours, 57 minutes). In 2018, he scrambled to the top of Everest without supplementary oxygen but with a nasty bout of diarrhoea. (“I used a rock to wipe my ass,” he recalls in Above the Clouds, his latest book.) The frequent emergency stops frustrated him, and when he returned to camp he felt sure he could run it quicker. Three days later he tried again. What took him 26 hours first time around took him 17 hours on the second attempt.
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