Kílian Jornet on What We Can Learn From Pushing Our Bodies to Extremes [Re-Run]

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Lulu Garcia-Navarro** (0:30)
Hi, it's Lulu. We don't have a new episode this weekend. Instead, we're sharing an interview I loved from earlier this year. My fascinating conversation with ultra runner and mountaineer, Kílian Jornet. Perhaps it will inspire you to get out on the trail this summer or push yourself to take a longer, more difficult hike or you can like me just relax while listening to this episode if you missed it the first time. Either way, enjoy and we'll be back next weekend when David talks with bluegrass phenom, Billy Strings.
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
Imagine yourself on an isolated mountain pass. The wind is whipping, the air is thin, there's nothing around you except the sky and the sound of your feet hitting the craggy ground. Many of us have experienced the wonder and exertion that comes with being in the world's wild spaces. But for Kílian Jornet, it is much more than that.
Jornet is a professional ultra-marathoner whose life's work is to literally run up mountains. But even in that world of elite athletes, he is exceptional. He holds the fastest known time for scaling Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, to name just a few. He's gone up Everest twice in the space of a week. And he did it with no supplementary oxygen and without support. His physical stamina has been studied by researchers, and he's pushed the limits of what is considered physically possible. And then, just last fall, he completed his most radical adventure, which he called States of Elevation. He climbed 72 of the highest peaks in the Western United States over the course of just a month. And for good measure, he also cycled between all of them, a ride totaling over 2,400 miles. I mean, I'm exhausted just imagining it. But as I discovered in our conversation, he also is a deep thinker who has important lessons to impart about what our bodies and minds are capable of when we push them to extremes and the joy and danger that effort can bring. Here's my interview with Spanish ultramarathoner Kílian Jornet.
Kílian, you know, I am not an athlete, certainly not an elite athlete. And I find what you do so incredibly unusual. When you tell people what you do, how do you describe it?

**Kílian Jornet** (3:19)
I always said that I just love to be in the mountains, and like it's where I feel home, and it's where I feel like connected with the landscape and the environment. And what I do is just like to explore them. And I think like running or climbing or like biking, or it's just tools to explore those mountains. And as humans, like we are made to walk and to run and to do that for hours. That's what we did like for thousands of years, like just hunting. And now we don't need to do it.
So we find the sport like as the excuse to continue moving our body. But really for me, just like to be out as long as I can in the mountains.

**Lulu Garcia-Navarro** (4:01)
You've written in your book that what made me fall in love with traversing mountains at high speed is the feeling it gives me of being naked and inconsequential, unrestrained. It brings me freedom and connection. What are you connecting with?

**Kílian Jornet** (4:20)
I think in the most, in the first essence, it's to connect with oneself.
We live in a society that we are over connected with so many things. And we are every day getting, every second, we are getting information in social media, on the news, on everything, on things that they are very far away. And we don't find, often, the time to connect with ourselves, with our body, with our mind, and with the people that we love. So often when I go to run in the mountains, it's to find this connection. And it's through this connection with the landscape that we find ourselves. Hmm.

**Lulu Garcia-Navarro** (5:06)
You've been connected to the mountains since you were a child. You grew up in a mountain lodge in the Pyrenees. Your father was a mountain guide. Your mother was a teacher.
What did your parents teach you about how to be in nature?

**Kílian Jornet** (5:21)
What's fun is that both my parents, they were really far away from competition. Like they had the background of classical mountaineering.