About a month ago, when I was enjoying my time in the woods and at the beach, I had enough time to read for pleasure. Recently I had read Eat and Run, Scott Jurek’s first book that is mostly autobiographical, but it is also part cookbook. At one-point Jurek was at the pinnacle of ultra-running, he had won some of the biggest and toughest races multiple times, and he loved to test himself, and often times, he managed to pass the test and accomplish his goals. While on his journey, he decided that it was best to become a vegan, thus Eat and Run also being a cookbook, because he wants to extol the virtue of being vegan, and also make it seem like it is a tasty alternative. He makes a fairly compelling case, and in my reading of his book, it has shifted the way I eat to being largely vegetarian, but the thought of going full vegan does not interest me, due to a variety of factors like pizza and hamburgers, but those are just occasional meals. I can say as someone who has largely gone vegetarian and only eats meat maybe once or twice a week now, it does make a big difference in body feel. If you commit to it for a long enough time, you can tell the difference between the body after a vegetarian meal and a meal that has meat, and especially if it is one heavy on the meat. So the change has been good, and I do not feel like I am missing out on anything good.
In Eat and Run, Jurek mentions another book called Marathon Monks of Mount Hiei. This book is about a group of Buddhists monks that live in Japan, and they have a veneration for running, and for them it is a religious experience, and they turn their runs into a ceremony. The monks at the top of their game do a hard trial that involves doing one thousand “Marathons” over the course of seven years, but they do them in consecutive 100-day periods. The initial distance for the first few hundred-day stints is a little over 18 miles, but as the hundred-day periods increase, so does the distance, the sixth year, the distance ups to over 30 miles a day, and the seventh year has a 100-day stint of 52 miles a day. They do this also on a vegetarian diet, and it might even be vegan, and not only that, but the portions that they eat are incredibly small compared to the distances that they are covering, not to mention the sleep deprivation that they are going through as well, because it is not easy to go 50 miles in a day. An incredible feat, that only very few of the monks have ever completed.
In Scott Jurek’s next book, North, his career is winding down, but he has one last goal he wants to achieve, and it is one of those things, where he only had one shot, so either he did it, or it was never going to happen. He basically had to run 50 miles a day for 50 days while traversing the Appalachian Trial, which is not joke, clearly, the elevation gain is incredible, with it constantly going up and down mountain after mountain, and although none of the peaks are as high as those in the Rockies or the Sierras, it is no joke. It is also something that is incredibly hard to train for, because the body really is not built to be running 50 miles a day repeatedly.
Quickly Jurek realized what he had signed up for, and at times it beat him down badly, mentally and physically, but he hung in there. Toward the end of his journey, he was really pushing the limits of his body’s potential, he was basically a walking zombie. He hardly had time to sleep, and it is hard to replenish the lose of so many calories day after day, so he became disheveled as well. At times he was hallucinating on the go, and he was trying not to fall asleep while he was running. Eventually he summits a top of Mount Katahdin, the finishing point of the Appalachian Trail in Maine, and he sets the record, and he does so in 46 days and 8 hours, and he just barely beat the previous fastest known time for the trail.
So my question is, who would win in a race, the most prolific Marathon Monk or Scott Jurek? Jurek clearly has the advantage in race experience and in the will to win, whereas the Monks are doing it for religious purposes, and they are not trying to receive any glory, just enlightenment. Another area, where Jurek may have the advantage comes from the mountain training that he has. The book about the monks never mentions the kind of elevation that the monks are doing on their daily pilgrimages, but I feel like if it was significant, that it would have been mentioned, and after a quick google, it says that Mount Hiei is only 2,783 feet, which is not too high. The highest point on the AT is over 6,600 feet, but other than that, I think the Marathon Monks might have most of the advantages.
Buddhists are searching for a spiritual enlightenment, and they are doing the whole thing for religious purposes, they stop at shrines along their journey, and they stop and perform religious rites along the way. It seems like this mindset, sets them above Jurek, there is such a level of peace that it sounds like they have while on their journey that it keeps them going and at a firm baseline, whereas Jurek was all over the place on his run mentally, and at many times it sounded like he was going to give up.
Also the diet that the Monks live off of is much more meager rations, and it does not change. There has to be some beauty in consistency, they know exactly how much they are going to eat each day, and they know exactly when they are going to eat it. There are no questions about it, and the book says that although it seems impossible that it would sustain them, somehow it does. They are also running on a massive lack of sleep. While doing the hundred days of 52 miles, they are getting around four hours of sleep a night if that.
The whole thing is done in sandals that are flimsy. The bottoms are pretty thin and break easily, especially if it rains. They wear the same thing every day, and none of it is athletic wear, and it seems like the best luxury they have is a hat that they can wear sometimes, and its main goal is to prevent any sticks from going into their eyes when they are walking when it is dark. All of this without complaining, and they still manage to do 52 miles a day.
The one area that really sets them a part comes from the Monks nine-day total fast they go on. During the fast, they are not only not eating food, but they are also not drinking anything or sleeping. The only time liquid is allowed to enter their body is when they swish water in their mouth to make sure there is not permanent damage from dryness, and they say that the amount of water spit back into the cup is typically more than was swished. They take it all very seriously, and if this does not harden a person to be able to do almost anything, nothing will. (The fast is in between one of the periods of hundred day marathon stints)
The current record is 41 days and almost eight hours, or an average of 53 miles a day. So that is only one mile more a day than the Monks do, but they do it for 59 more days. To me it seems totally reasonable for the monks to be able to run an extra mile and a quarter a day to set the record. To do this, it would be much like how the Tarahumara are pawned out to American races to show off their ability, but it seems like it is never the best situation, and there are not Buddhists shrines along the AT, so it would defeat the point of their pilgrimage, which who knows what that would do to their mindset, but if anyone is trained to set the speed record on the AT it is them.
Movie This Week:
It was another subpar movie watching week due to running and football, I only watched one movie this week, and that was at 6:30 am Sunday morning, and I slept through part of it.
Werewolf Castle: A bad werewolf movie on Prime, but it is unapologetic. It is clearly low budget, and they do the best they can, but some of the actors stink bad! The cool thing about the movie is that there is no CGI, the army of werewolves are all just people in costumes, that although they look hokey, it is cool to see a movie made in 2021 that is not all computer-generated garbage. It has a Month Python level of production to it.
New Rankings:
Werewolf Castle: 2 Stars
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