The Longreads Blog

Endurance: It’s All in Your Head, Apparently

Scott Jurek applies lotion to his feet before running McAffee's Knob trail -- part of the Appalachian Trail in Catawba, Va. on Thursday, June 11, 2015. Jurek is on day 16 of his attempt to complete the 2,168.1 mile trail in 42 days. The current record is 46 days held by Jennifer Pharr Davis. Starting at Springer Mountain, Ga., Jurek has ran roughly 700 miles to date. (John Roark/The Roanoke Times via AP)

At The Atlantic, Paul Bisceglio surveys three new books that consider the brain’s role in extreme endurance sports and how a large part of high performance is in how the brain negotiates with an exhausted body.

Of all the things that could have broken Scott Jurek on a 2,189-mile run, it was a small tree root that crushed his spirit. He was 38 days into an attempt to beat the speed record for completing the full length of the Appalachian Trail, the mountainous hiking path that snakes along America’s East Coast, from northern Georgia to the top of Mount Katahdin, in Maine. Jurek, one of the greatest ultramarathoners of all times, was in trouble. After battling through a succession of leg injuries, then slogging through Vermont’s wettest June in centuries, he had to make up ground over a particularly merciless stretch of the trail, New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Delirious from just two hours of sleep following 26 straight hours of hiking, he was stumbling along the trail when he encountered the root in his path.

“As I saw it coming, I didn’t know what to do,” Jurek recalls in his new memoir, North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail, co-written with his wife, Jenny. “Was I supposed to step around it or over it? I just couldn’t remember.” So he hit it and toppled. “I’d forgotten how to raise my legs,” he writes. “How to run like a sane person.”

After tripping over the root in New Hampshire, he picked himself up, charged forward in his delirium for another week, and defeated Davis’s time by a slim three hours: He finished in 46 days, 8 hours, and 7 minutes. Since then, two people have already beaten his record.

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Politics and Prose

Alex Milan Tracy / Sipa via AP Images

Marie Myung-Ok Lee | Longreads | May 2018 | 15 minutes (3,630 words)

 

“Walls are built in the mind.” — Wole Soyinka

“The whole country is outraged and outspoken and you should be too

because if you’re not, then you’re not doing your part.”

— Rachel Coye, “New Year”

As a writer, a books columnist for the literary site The Millions, the co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and a literary citizen with prolific and brilliant friends whose readings and performances I could probably ink every night on my calendar, let’s say I go to a lot of book signings. Some have food, some have wine. Some have people who wander in and ask irrelevant questions with disarming earnestness.

At one reading where I acted as interlocutor, the novelist I was interviewing took out a package of Swiss chocolate she’d brought with her from Geneva, and instead of putting it on the plate with the wine, handed it to me with a sly smile. I’ve been to several readings where I have been the sole member of the audience. I was asked to do a reading that would involve live exotic animals as accompaniment. I went to one on the Lower East Side, back when it was truly gritty, where the writer was accompanied — overpowered, really — by a person blowing random high notes on a flute. Each reading offers something different, delightful, educational, new.

But I’ve never been to a reading/book signing that had protesters. Especially not for a book the Cleveland Plain Dealer called a “Beautiful, eloquent, and timely” memoir authored by a young writer with a new MFA, a Fulbright, and a Whiting Award. In the era of Trump, where there is something new to protest every day (women’s rights, the EPA, the NEA, gun control, tax cuts for the rich, healthcare…), what would cause the lovely indie bookstore, Books Are Magic to send out a warning on Facebook before the event?

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Bundyville Chapter Four: The Gospel of Bundy

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 46 minutes (11,600 words)

Part 4 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

The best way to get to Bundyville is to drive straight into the desert and prepare to never come back.

The ghost town that used to be home to the Bundy family is reachable only by deeply rutted roads covered with red quicksand so thick that it can suck in even the burliest 4×4 if you hit it wrong.

On the map, Bundyville is actually called Mount Trumbull. But back in the early 1900s, people started referring to it as Bundyville, because, according to one Arizona Republic article from 1951, “every single soul in the tiny village except one person answer to the name Bundy!” There was never electricity, no phones.

Abraham Bundy, Cliven’s great-grandfather established the town with his wife, Ella, in 1916. Their son, Roy, homesteaded there with his own family. And Cliven’s dad, David, was born in Bundyville — a place “perched atop a cold and forbidding plateau at an elevation of 5,200 feet,” according to the Arizona Republic article.

Before World War II, as many as 200 people — mostly Bundys — made their home in Bundyville, despite its remote location. Newspapers took six days to arrive. Four postmasters doled out mail twice a week. There was a school, a general store.

It was a Bundy utopia. A place that was all theirs, a place no one else wanted. And yet, still, it slipped right through their fingers. There wasn’t enough water to sustain them. By the 1950s, the place was mostly abandoned. Little had changed between the time the Bundys arrived and the time they left. “We heard the coyotes howl at night,” one Bundy resident once said, “but did not see a living soul.”

I want to stand in that place — where the family’s curse of loss began and where their anger at the government may have originated. I want to go to the middle of nowhere to see how far this family has been willing to go to live by their own code.

Bundyville still holds meaning for the family. Each year, hundreds of Bundys make a pilgrimage back for a giant Bundy family reunion. It’s like it’s not just a place in the desert, but a state of mind, too.

When Abraham Bundy and his wife arrived there, it must have seemed like it was the only place where they could fathom solace, calm. Far from civilization, far from the reaches of the federal government, the family tried to tame the landscape, farm, and raise livestock for themselves with little forage or water. To live by their own rules. To make an intractable place bend to their will.

I explain all this to a representative at the BLM’s Arizona Strip field office — that I’d like to go to the place the Bundy story started. And she clearly doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me and my producer, Ryan Haas, to go there this time of year. It’s been raining recently, she tells me. I think, so what? I’m from Oregon. But rain is unusual in that part of the Southwest, and it turns the clay-like dirt on the roads into a silty paste known to suck up tires, stranding unprepared people in potentially deadly temperatures until someone can come with help.

I read about an old lady who got lost on the road to Mount Trumbull and almost died before anyone found her. Another article talks about some hikers who’d come across skeletons in the desert there.

The outdoorsy dude-bros at a Jeep rental place in Hurricane, Utah, were skeptical, too: Just before we pull out of the lot in the burliest Jeep they’ve got, one of them throws a shovel into the back for us. “Better than nothing,” he says with a shrug.

The next morning, we wake up at 3 a.m. The way we’re figuring, if we’re going to make it, we’d better go while the ground is frozen. Read more…

‘I Feel Closer to My Faith Than I Did Before’: Holding On to Ramadan

PUTRAJAYA, MALAYSIA - JUNE 05: An officer of Malaysia's Islamic authority uses a telescope to perform "rukyah", the sighting of the new moon of Ramadan, in Putrajaya outside Kuala Lumpur on June 5, 2016. Muslims scan the sky at dusk in the beginning of the lunar calendar's ninth month in search of the new moon to proclaim the start of Ramadan, Islam's holiest month during which observant believers fast from dawn to dusk. Muslims celebrate the end of Ramadan with the Eid al-Fitr festival. (Photo by Mohd Samsul Mohd Said/Getty Images)

For BuzzFeed Reader, poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib considers how holding on to the observance of Ramadan, despite an adulthood spent veering from other aspects of his faith, has been a grounding force in a busy, thoroughly modern life.

I don’t know why Ramadan is the act of faith which has endured for me. I hardly refer to myself as a practicing Muslim these days, but I am still very invested in the rigor of Ramadan. And I suppose that might be it — the rigor is the act I still chase after. A part of this is routine — even when I stopped praying in my early twenties, I found myself still adhering to the commemoration of the holy month. But a part of it, I imagine, is like the home-run hitter who comes to the plate with the bases loaded and his team down by four, swinging for the fences and trying to get it all back at once.

I know the ways in which I fail in the face of my beliefs, and yet I wish to consider myself forgiven once each year, when I wake up early to pray and have a small meal with the sun breaking over the horizon. When I abstain from food and drink and still take a long run. I suppose it has never stopped being a performance, but when I engage in Ramadan now, I feel closer to my faith than I did before. I am performing it for no one but myself, in most instances. I am often traveling, or secluded during the month. My non-Muslim friends and peers rarely know I’m fasting, or often forget. To go about it in solitude is my preferred mode now, when nothing else matters but the monthlong journey back to some emotional center I’ve thought myself to be lacking. When the month ends, I don’t return to a dedicated spiritual practice, and my life resumes as it normally does all other 11 months of the year. But for as many days as it takes the crescent moon to unsheathe itself, I remember all of the old prayers I skipped. I remind myself how to talk to a holy entity. I don’t eat, sure, but the not eating has become the easy part, particularly as I’ve aged. To find the humility to imagine yourself as small in the face of something larger than you is the hard part, and for me, that has little to do with not eating, and more to do with the knowing that you could eat, at any time. That you have the ability and privilege to fill yourself, and you still choose not to. I do this in the name of a faith that I am uncertain of, and haven’t always felt at home in, and that makes the act both more complicated and more fulfilling.

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In the End, It’s All Just the Stories We Tell

The Monument to the Armenian Alphabet in the hills around the village of Artashavan, Armenia. Photo by Rita Willaert via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Diana Arterian published a sad, lyrical essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books on the legacy of the Armenian Genocide on descendants and diaspora members, skillfully weaving together family memories and verse by Armenian diasporic poets. At its center is a family story that everyone has heard — but that no one knows the truth of.

There is a story. A shepherd boy, 13 or so, has a dozen brothers. His family lives in a small village near a large mountain. One day the boy is gone — with his flock, or to complete a chore, or perhaps even to find a safer place for the family to stay. He returns and finds everyone in the village dead. His brothers are all decapitated, and his father, too. His mother raped by attackers and dead by suicide. Over many years, he makes his way, somehow, halfway across the earth, where he marries a woman from a country near his homeland. They have three sons, none of whom marry. Until one of them does, at the age of 41, to a woman who is 38. They have two daughters, one of whom tells this story to her children for as long as they can remember.

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Wild At Heart

A Bureau of Land Management park ranger tries to corner a steer that escaped from a cattle trailer outside Yuma, Arizona in 2011. (Craig Fry/The Yuma Daily Sun/AP)

Tove DanovichTopic | May 2017 | 12 minutes (2,954 words)

This story is featured in collaboration with Topic, a digital storytelling platform that delivers an original story to your inbox each and every week. Sign up for Topic’s newsletter now.

It was breaking news in New York City. News helicopters thrummed overhead, the police were called in for backup, and a crowd of rubberneckers peered through the chain-link fence at the edge of the Prospect Park soccer field. Over 3,400 viewers watched a livestream online as police exited their vehicles and walked onto the grass, nets in hand, hoping to subdue the escapee: a young chocolate-colored steer with oversize tan ears that stuck straight out from its head, like a disguise that didn’t fit right.

The Brahman steer—one of the most common cattle breeds used in meat processing—had been on the lam since the morning, when it likely escaped from one of South Brooklyn’s live slaughter markets. These aren’t the assembly-line slaughterhouses of factory farming, but rather small establishments where customers can walk up to pens of live chickens, goats, rabbits, and other animals, point to the one they want, and have it killed on the premises. Often such live markets serve immigrant communities used to eating their meat when it’s still fresh, or religious communities who want to ensure their meat was prepared kosher or halal. Apparently, the Prospect Park steer didn’t want to linger long at a place like that.

First, the steer took a breakneck tour of Flatbush and South Park Slope. As early as 8:30 a.m., Twitter lit up with people reporting sightings of the steer as it charged down the sidewalk. “I thought there was nothing new to be seen after a lifetime in NYC,” one woman wrote. Eventually, the little steer got itself into the park, and it was there that the news cameras, and the NYPD, caught up with it. The police tried to use the soccer nets to corral the animal, tipping them over and awkwardly maneuvering the enormous nets around the field. But the steer slipped out of their grasp. This went on for hours. Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Three: A Clan Not to Cross

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 29 minutes (7,300 words)

Part 3 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

Since Cliven Bundy took in his first desert breath as a free man this past January, the old cowboy has found himself more in ballrooms and meeting rooms and on stages across the West than back in the saddles he fought so hard to sit in again.

Just two days after his release, he stood in front of the Las Vegas Metro Police Department in Las Vegas, bullhorn in hand, goading the sheriff to come outside: “Is this man going to stand up and protect our life, liberty, and property?” he asked the small crowd gathered around him, smartphones livestreaming his words. The sheriff never emerged.

“My defense is a fifteen-second defense: I graze my cattle only on Clark County, Nevada, land, and I have no contract with the federal government,” Bundy told his flock.

Later that month, on a rural Montana stage flanked by ruffled red curtains, there he stood in jeans and boots and an ash-gray sport coat as a crowd of a couple hundred welcomed him with whoops and whistles fit for rural royalty. “I have a fifteen-second defense,” he said. The crowd listened, rapt.

And there he was again, in February, on an amateur YouTube talk show, in a blue plaid shirt and bolo tie, expounding for well beyond 15 seconds on his ideas about government.

If Cliven Bundy was a star among constitutional literalists after the standoff in 2014, two years in jail transformed the old man and his family into the full-fledged glitterati of the far, far right.

His trademark 15-second defense line is mostly true: Cliven has no contract with the federal government and, yet, continues to graze his cows illegally on public land. Read more…

Life After Life: Offering Dignity to Fellow Prisoners Through Hospice Care

VACAVILLE, CA - John Gillis (the prisoner's name has been changed at his request), age 73, grimmaces while an open wound -- a development due to terminal colon cancer -- is treated by fellow prisoner and hospice care worker JP Madrona, in the hospice care wing of California Medical Facility (CMF) in Vacaville, California. (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

At the New York Times Magazine, Suleika Jaouad and photographer Katy Grannan document how some inmates serving life sentences at The California Medical Facility work 10-15 hours a day, seven days a week, stripping soiled beds, helping with personal hygiene, and at the very end, sitting vigil so that terminally ill fellow prisoners do not have to die alone.

The workers make a point not to find out what the patients have done. They worry that knowing too much could affect the quality of care. When a patient’s past sins cross over into the realm of the horrific, it can be hard to keep creeping judgments and questions at bay. How do you reconcile the dissonance between the serial killer and the elderly patient, bedridden, incontinent and lost in the fog of dementia? The workers are also in prison for crimes, but that doesn’t make them immune to judgment. “Death can be an equalizer,” Lyman said. The past falls aside. Time is grounded in the shifting demands of the body as it begins its decay.

Each of the workers has his own style of caregiving, but if there is one trait that stands out about Murillo, it is the tenderness with which he handles the patients. When Jimmy Figueroa needed a shower, Murillo stood in the stall with him to make sure he didn’t fall, fidgeted with the water temperature until it was just right and gently helped towel him off. A few days later, when Ralph Martinez’s health took a sudden turn for the worse and he began sobbing on his bed, it was Murillo who sat down next to him and put an arm around his shoulders. “I’m just returning something I didn’t get as a kid,” Murillo told me, rocking back and forth in his chair, punching his hands together. “All I wanted was kindness and to be held as a boy. Now I get to do that for somebody else. There’s also the regret of not being able to do that for my victims, for the people in my community who I hurt.”

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Will Big Pharma Help Save Some of the Oldest Marine Life on Earth?

Dale Gerhard/The Press of Atlantic City via AP

Ecology is the study of the relationships between organisms and their environment. Birds known as Red Knots migrate to the Arctic to breed. To gather the necessary caloric reserves, each bird needs to feed on approximately 400,000 horseshoe crabs’ eggs along the eastern seaboard. Unfortunately, the crabs’ numbers have declined precipitously, and the birds haven’t been breeding as much as before. The problem is that biomedical companies bleed the live crabs to use their blue blood in endotoxin tests — and as their numbers drop, so do the numbers of birds.

At Audubon magazine, Deborah Cramer examines how Eli Lilly biologist Jay Bolden tackled this ecological problem by convincing his employer to switch from crab blood to an effective synthetic. Bolden’s next challenge is to get the rest of the pharmaceutical industry to follow suit.

But Bolden had a compelling reason: “I’m a birder,” he says, “so this hit close to home.” He’d seen Red Knots, one in Delaware’s Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge, and then another in Ireland’s Ballycotton Marsh. And a few years ago, at an endotoxin summit in Delaware hosted by Lonza, Bolden witnessed the arrival of horseshoe crabs. “We were walking along Pickering Beach, in Delaware,” he recalls, “and the beach, seemingly empty, suddenly filled with horseshoe crabs coming in from the sea. It was a religious experience for me.”

The longtime birder didn’t need to be told how badly shorebirds along the Atlantic Flyway need horseshoe crab eggs. Further, he had learned about the plight of horseshoe crabs worldwide in 2013, during a Lonza webinar with Glenn Gauvry, president of Ecological Research and Development Group, an organization dedicated to the conservation of horseshoe crabs across the globe. While population data on the animals in Asia isn’t fully known, “horseshoe crab populations in Japan, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, once vibrant, are now endangered,” Gauvry has written. It is questionable, he writes, whether current takes of horseshoe crabs for endotoxin testing “can be sustained, much less meet the projected future demands of this rapidly growing market.”

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