'The Interview': Kílian Jornet on What We Can Learn From Pushing Our Bodies to Extremes

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 Killian 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 completed his most 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 ultra marathoner, Cillian Tournette. Cillian, you know, I am not a, 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? I always said that I I just love to be in the mountains and, like, it's where I feel at home and it's where I feel, like, connected with with the landscape and the environment. And what I do is just like to to explore them. And 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 and 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 the excuse to continue moving our body. But, really, for me, just like to be out as long as I can in the mountains. 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? I think in in the most in the in the first essence, it's to connect with oneself. We we live in a society that, we are over over connected with so many things and, like, we are every day, getting, like every …