Kilian Jornet has spent his life roaming mountains. It is a passion that borders on obsession, and no human has more effectively mastered the various means by which to traverse them.
Where to begin? Mr. Jornet, 37, has won multiple world championships in the sport of skyrunning, which is sort of like trail running — except at altitude, which makes it more difficult — and in ski mountaineering, which combines climbing and backcountry skiing. He once reached the summit of Mount Everest twice in one week, without support or supplementary oxygen. He is a four-time winner of the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, a 106-mile ultramarathon.
Now, Mr. Jornet, whose 5-foot-7, 128-pound frame seems cut from igneous rock, is set to undertake one of his most astonishing challenges to date. He will attempt to summit all of the tallest peaks in the contiguous United States — a series of 60-plus mountains in Colorado, California and Washington known as the 14ers, since they each have an elevation of over 14,000 feet — while connecting them by foot and by bike.
Mr. Jornet is calling the project “States of Elevation,” and a rough sketch of it would require him to run, hike and climb over 600 miles while bicycling an additional 2,400 miles. (This year’s Tour de France was about 2,100 miles.) Mr. Jornet, who will begin his adventure in Colorado in early September, expects it to take about a month — if all goes according to plan.
It is a journey that will have him reaching as many as a dozen summits in a single day, only to turn around and ride 50 miles on a bike. And he will do it with little rest.
“Sport is all about moving the body and having a purpose,” said Mr. Jornet, who is from Spain and now lives in Norway with his wife, Emelie Forsberg, a former skyrunning world champion, and their three young daughters. “I’m interested to see how we can optimize our performance as humans.”
When Mr. Jornet informed Mireia Miró Varela, a longtime friend and a former teammate of his on the Spanish national ski mountaineering team, of his plan, Ms. Miró Varela had several questions, starting with: Are you sure you want to do this?
“When you put the map in front of you,” she said, “it’s like, Wow, this is a lot.”
Mr. Jornet, though, does not ask himself those sorts of questions, because they don’t occur to him. If possible, he would spend all his time in the mountains, and it has been that way since he grew up in a hut in the Pyrenees, where his parents filled him with a love of the outdoors. He had a poster of the Matterhorn tacked to his bedroom wall.
In his 2020 memoir, “Above the Clouds: How I Carved My Own Path to the Top of the World,” he writes about how his mother deposited him and his sister in a forest and left them to find their way home. “In this natural and almost unconscious way, we learned from our mother to be part of the mountain,” he writes.
Later, Mr. Jornet would test his physical limits through the delicate art of deprivation: He once determined that he could spend four days going about his life as usual — running two to four hours in the morning, followed by another hour in the afternoon — without eating anything. (He collapsed on Day 5.)
But it was that sort of masochism — his word — that would propel him to set speed records on peaks like Denali, Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn; to become a five-time winner of the Hardrock Hundred Mile Endurance Run in Colorado; and to turn the Pyrenees and the Alps into his personal playground.
In recent years, Mr. Jornet has gradually eased away from cluttering his calendar with organized competitions in order to prioritize personalized challenges. Perhaps that is what happens when the mortal world has exhausted its capacity to test someone who is seemingly superhuman. Mr. Jornet also hopes to inspire others. Too many people, he said, lead sedentary lives that “deactivate our genetic expression.”
Running ultramarathons? Spending up to 80 hours on the sheer face of a mountain? Bicycling hundreds of miles a day? “It brings a window to understanding how we function and what health can look like,” he said.
The shift for Mr. Jornet happened a bit by accident when, in 2023, he was caught in an avalanche while climbing the Hornbein Couloir, a steep gully on Everest, and broke several ribs. Impatient in his recovery, Mr. Jornet wound up aggravating his injuries, which derailed his hopes of competing in ultramarathons that summer.
Once his body mended, he began to dream of the sort of adventure he could do instead of racing. He had a car that he needed to drive to Spain, and it dawned on him that he might as well multitask once he arrived: Why not climb all 177 peaks in the Pyrenees that eclipse 3,000 meters (nearly 10,000 feet) in a single effort?
“It was kind of like, OK, I’m leaving today, let’s go,” he recalled.
It was daunting largely because of his lack of preparation. Some climbs that he figured would take about 10 hours took three times as long. He had a support crew that he met about once a day. But because his rest and nutrition were not as “dialed in” as they should have been, he said, he lost more than 13 pounds. Even so, he completed the project in eight days, covering more than 300 miles and 131,000 vertical feet.
“You have athletes who are very strong at ski mountaineering or trail running or ultrarunning or various projects,” Ms. Miró Varela said. “But everything is ‘or,’ ‘or,’ ‘or.’ Kilian has done a lot of everything — and been able to perform the best at everything. To do that, I think you need to have a bit of a pioneer mentality, to be open to possibilities that no one before you has explored.”
It was no surprise to Ms. Miró Varela that Mr. Jornet had big plans for 2024, too. That August, he feasted on some of his usual fare by entering the Sierre-Zinal, a nearly 20-mile mountain running race in Switzerland. Mr. Jornet won for the 10th time while breaking his own course record.
A few days later, he was at the foot of Piz Bernina, the highest mountain in the Eastern Alps, for the start of his next adventure, a project that he called “Alpine Connections.” His goal was to link the 82 tallest peaks in the Alps, each of which is higher than 4,000 meters (about 13,100 feet). That required him tackling 247,000 feet of elevation gain while climbing, running, walking and bicycling nearly 750 miles.
Because he had learned from his mistakes in the Pyrenees, Mr. Jornet felt more confident. He knew, for example, that he would need to consume about 8,600 calories a day.
Nick Danielson, a photographer and videographer from Seattle who documented the project, said his job was to spend as much time on the trail with Mr. Jornet as possible. Mr. Danielson, 31, is an experienced mountaineer, but keeping up with Mr. Jornet was like trying to catch smoke with his hands.
“He just moved so fast,” Mr. Danielson said. “We’d get to this super technical terrain, and I’d be like, OK, that’s it for me. So I would descend and then find him on the other side as he’s coming out of the alpine.”
For his part, Mr. Jornet said the physical effort, while enormous, paled in comparison to the mental toll.
“For 15 hours every day,” Mr. Jornet said, “you are in terrain that if you make a mistake, you die.”
Despite the dangers, Mr. Jornet was determined. On the 19th day of the project, he reached his final summit, on the Barre des Écrins, where he was joined by two friends, Mathéo Jacquemoud and Benjamin Védrines, as the sun set along the massif. About 10 friends welcomed him back to base camp with slices of pizza.
Mr. Danielson was struck by the intimacy of the gathering. Here was Mr. Jornet, completing what Mr. Danielson described as “an epic feat that is really hard to comprehend,” and it was all happening in virtual isolation. Mr. Jornet had shattered a previous record for the feat by 43 days.
Yet Mr. Jornet has become far more famous than he ever could have fathomed when he was younger and a self-described loner. In some ways, he would prefer anonymity. But he knows that celebrity has been helpful in many ways — he has sponsors and his own gear company — and now that he has a platform, he feels obligated to use it by raising awareness about issues like environmental protection and climate change.
Still, Ms. Miró Varela was blown away when she learned that Mr. Jornet had participated in a recent forum for fans on Reddit. “It’s very difficult to explain to someone who didn’t know him before,” she said, “but he was super introverted, and now you see him with two million followers on Instagram.”
Mr. Jornet described his coming adventure as “aesthetically attractive to me,” with its contrasts in landscapes, the various rock textures, the volcanoes that populate the Cascades. It also will be a personal education, providing him with the chance to “explore both the physical and cultural aspects of the West,” he said. He plans to chart his progress in real time on Strava, an online exercise-tracking platform. Fellow climbers will join him for various phases, and a friend will drive a support van with gear, food and his bicycle. Mr. Jornet plans to occasionally sleep in the van, too.
One of his greatest tests could be a 500-mile bike ride from California to Washington, toward the end of the project. Beyond the physical demands (“I have never done that much biking,” Mr. Jornet said), he worries about getting hit by a truck. Ms. Miró Varela, who is helping with logistics, has been working to find roads that are less congested.
But Mr. Jornet is not concerned about his fitness. In June, he returned to the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run through California’s Sierra Nevada after a 14-year hiatus and finished third in 14 hours, 19 minutes, 22 seconds, which beat his winning time from 2011 by over an hour. A race spokesman described him as “one of the sport’s most legendary and enduring figures.”
That description could apply to any number of Mr. Jornet’s pursuits: ultrarunning, skyrunning, skiing, climbing, mountaineering. But while there is a base level of fitness that helps him jump from trail to cliff (and back again), Mr. Jornet balked when he was asked whether his experience at Western States had helped him prepare for the 14ers.
“At a race like Western States, you mostly run quickly for 14 hours, so it really has nothing to do with this,” he said. “Instead, I can look at my entire career and what I have done in the mountains since I was 14 years old. That is what has prepared me.”
He is not fearless — far from it. The variables beyond his control are what worry him most: logging trucks, thunderstorms, mountain lions, firearms. He recalled a prior visit to the U.S., when he was greeted on a hike by a rural landowner who was toting a rifle.
Mr. Jornet knows that there are no guarantees, and that simply finishing the adventure would be meaningful — at least in the moment. But his accomplishments have never meant that much to him. He does not keep any trophies. He does not see the point of dwelling on the past.
As he writes in his memoir, “I’m convinced that the best time is always now, and the best memory is always tomorrow.”
After all, there is always another trail to run and another mountain to climb. He must keep moving. It is the only way he knows how to live.
Matt Ruby and K.K. Rebecca Lai contributed reporting.
Scott Cacciola writes features and profiles of people in the worlds of sports and entertainment for the Styles section of The Times.
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