KILIAN JORNET BORN TO RUN - Amer Sports

France’s Puymorens pass. A 150-kilometer circuit, the
legendary “Three Nations” tour. “It was normal”, explains
Kilian. “I had always wanted to do it and I just took off.”
Late that afternoon Nuria Burgada received a telephone
call from the French Gendarmes. It was snowing
and the police had stopped Kilian in Puymorens not far
from Pic Carlit. “Naturally, my mother was a little worried
since she didn’t know where I was, but when she realized I
was on a bicycle and practically home [Puymorens is over
40 kilometers from Lles de Cerdanya] there was no problem
and they let me continue.”
Nuria decided that Kilian needed new challenges for
his prodigious energies and, at the age of 12, enrolled him
in the local Mountain Skiing Technical Center for more
structure and discipline.
Unique physical profile
A champion mountain skier as well as trail runner, Kilian’s
“Kilian needs very little water and
he hardly eats when he's running.
He seems to gain power from the
mountains.”
physical profile is astounding: 171 cm, 56 kg, body fat 8%,
VO2 Max 88 to 92 ml/kg/min, lung capacity 5.3 liters, maximum
heart frequency 205 ppm, frequency in repose 34
ppm, anaerobic threshold 190 ppm.
Other statistics are even more surprising: 2’45” flat
kilometer, 12km/h on a 22% grade, ability to sustain
180ppm for 3 or 4 hours, red blood cell count of nearly
47%. Diet: fish and eggs, little meat; sleeps 7 to 8 hours
a night, spends some 300 days a year at an altitude of over
1,500 meters above sea level.
But even these data fall short of explaining Kilian’s
extraordinary power and appeal. Anna Frost from New
Zealand described Kilian’s running as “…like, for me,
walking. He is still talking, conversing, making sense; his
brain is still working. It’s more like a long walk. His physical
stress level seems to be very low or nonexistent.”
Santiago Alvarruiz said something similar: “The first
thing that comes to mind is that running is very, very easy,
as easy as sitting and watching the countryside go by, or
taking a walk in the park. It’s only when you think about
the numbers, 8 days averaging 12 to 15 hours a day, crossing
snow fields and streams over hundreds of kilometers
that it hits you that this is not so easy, that very few people
can do this, and at the moment, maybe only Kilian.”
“As we were running along, he pointed out a group of
mountain goats and said something like ‘now that’s really
what mountain running is all about’, and I noted a little
envy in his gesture. He kept looking back at them with
admiration.”
And yet, the question lingers: what makes Kilian run?
And what makes Kilian’s running matter? Fellow runners
and fans alike seem to sense a sweetly human quality in
Kilian, even as they compare him to a mountain goat and
speculate aloud as to whether he is, in fact, human at all.
In Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, the author
finds the secret of running in the connection between
compassion and competition: “The Hopis consider running
a form of prayer; they offer every step as a sacrifice to a
loved one, and in return ask the Great Spirit to match their
strength with some of his own.” Legendary running coach
Joe Vigil defined character not as toughness but as compassion:
“It was compassion. Kindness. Love.” Kilian
agrees: “You don’t have to dominate the mountain, it is
much more powerful than we are. You have to try to
understand it, to learn to love it, and run with it, letting it
help you." Kilian, like the Tarahumara runners in Born to
Run, runs for his people, and for his Pyrenees. In a greater
sense, he runs for the environment, for life and for love.
No wonder it looks easy.
3.2010 || 29