a biography of kilian jornet british council

A biography of Kilian Jornet

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When you picture mountain climbers scaling Mount Everest, what probably comes to mind are teams of climbers with Sherpa guides leading them to the summit, equipped with oxygen masks, supplies and tents. And in most cases you'd be right, as 97 per cent of climbers use oxygen to ascend to Everest's summit at 8,850 metres above sea level. The thin air at high altitudes makes most people breathless at 3,500 metres, and the vast majority of climbers use oxygen past 7,000 metres. A typical climbing group will have 8–15 people in it, with an almost equal number of guides, and they'll spend weeks to get to the top after reaching Base Camp.

But ultra-distance and mountain runner Kilian Jornet Burgada ascended the mountain in May 2017 alone, without an oxygen mask or fixed ropes for climbing.

Oh, and he did it in 26 hours.

With food poisoning.

And then, five days later, he did it again, this time in only 17 hours.

Born in 1987, Kilian has been training for Everest his whole life. And that really does mean his whole life, as he grew up 2,000 metres above sea level in the Pyrenees in the ski resort of Lles de Cerdanya in Catalonia, north-eastern Spain. While other children his age were learning to walk, Kilian was on skis. At one and a half years old he did a five-hour hike with his mother, entirely under his own steam. He left his peers even further behind when he climbed his first mountain and competed in his first cross-country ski race at age three. By age seven, he had scaled a 4,000er and, at ten, he did a 42-day crossing of the Pyrenees.

He was 13 when he says he started to take it 'seriously' and trained with the Ski Mountaineering Technical Centre (CTEMC) in Catalonia, entering competitions and working with a coach. At 18, he took over his own ski-mountaineering and trail-running training, with a schedule that only allows a couple of weeks of rest a year. He does as many as 1,140 hours of endurance training a year, plus strength training and technical workouts as well as specific training in the week before a race. For his record-breaking ascent and descent of the Matterhorn, he prepared by climbing the mountain ten times until he knew every detail of it, even including where the sun would be shining at every part of the day.

Sleeping only seven hours a night, Kilian Jornet seems almost superhuman. His resting heartbeat is extremely low at 33 beats per minute, compared with the average man's 60 per minute or an athlete's 40 per minute. He breathes more efficiently than average people too, taking in more oxygen per breath, and he has a much faster recovery time after exercise as his body quickly breaks down lactic acid – the acid in muscles that causes pain after exercise.

All this is thanks to his childhood in the mountains and to genetics, but it is his mental strength that sets him apart. He often sets himself challenges to see how long he can endure difficult conditions in order to truly understand what his body and mind can cope with. For example, he almost gave himself kidney failure after only drinking 3.5 litres of water on a 100km run in temperatures of around 40°C.

It would take a book to list all the races and awards he's won and the mountains he's climbed. And even here, Kilian’s achievements exceed the average person as, somehow, he finds time to record his career on his blog and has written three books, Run or Die , The Invisible Border  and Summits of My Life .

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• ADVENTURERS OF THE YEAR

Sky Runner Kilian Jornet

A prolific mountain athlete takes his sport to the vertical realm.

UPDATE: The votes are in—more than 75,000 of them, more than ever before—and we have a winner. Kilian Jornet is our 2014 People's Choice Adventurer of the Year. Discover what motivates Jornet in this video , then see his love for the mountains in an Instagram photo gallery .

Clothed in a T-shirt and a pair of running shorts, Catalan Kilian Jornet, 26, bounded up the last few meters of the 14,692-foot Matterhorn before tapping the metal cross that garnishes the summit, turning around, and tracing the fixed lines down the Matterhorn’s rocky Lion’s Ridge with astounding speed and agility. For the last few meters of his descent, he was joined, in a gesture of support, by his childhood hero, champion sky runner Bruno Brunod. Since he began racing as a sky runner at age 17, Jornet had dreamed of beating Brunod’s 1995 speed record on the peak.

"Bruno was a big inspiration," Jornet says, "When I started, he was winning everything. And in Europe, [the Matterhorn] is a very symbolic mountain."

On August 21, 2013, Jornet sprinted out of the crowd of spectators gathered in Breuil-Cervinia to begin his attempt, and ran up and down the mountain’s 8,100 vertical feet, beating Brunod's longstanding record by 22 minutes. Jornet's time: 2 hours and 52 minutes. The push typically takes climbers around 12 hours.

Jornet did not invent "sky running," a cross between mountaineering and trail running that involves ascending technical terrain at a runner’s pace. The sport dates back to Italian mountaineer Marino Giacometti's speed records in the Italian Alps in the early '90s. Jornet has, however, taken sky running into the public eye with his unprecedented streak of breaking records and winning races. In the past three years alone, he set a new speed record on Mount Kilimanjaro, and, six weeks before his Matterhorn record, he completed a speed ascent and descent of Mont Blanc, an elevation change of 12,378 feet, in 4 hours and 57 minutes.

"Trail runners have always searched out mountains. There has been a shift in the sport, however, as sky running illuminated a desire that many have to push beyond the defined single-track, upwards into the craggy rock," says American ultra-runner Hal Koerner. "Kilian’s worldly ascents have definitely highlighted and helped to kick-start the new trend but, more importantly, I think the proficiency of his prolificacy and vice versa has caused many to rethink what is possible."

Jornet grew up in Cap del Rec, small ski village in the Catalan Pyrenees, where his father worked as a mountain guide and his mother as a schoolteacher. Jornet and his sister commuted to school by skis during the winters and by bicycle during the summers. "But it wasn’t that far away," Jornet is quick to add, by which he means "maybe one hour" each way. Jornet couldn't help but turn out to be an endurance athlete in the mountains.

"I always joke with my sister that we didn’t have a chance to do something else because we were always in the mountains," he says.

Jornet began racing in ski mountaineering at age 13. He did well in youth competitions but clearly remembers the moment when, during the 2004 International Ski Mountaineering World Championship, he found himself unexpectedly in the lead alongside four of his idols. He discovered he might have a talent for racing.

"What happened here? Why did they stop? Why are they waiting?” Jornet remembers thinking. “I did not understand that I was at the same level that they were."

Jornet won that race, and went on to win too many championships and break too many records to list concisely, not only in ski mountaineering, but in trail running, ultra running, and sky running. This coming year, Jornet will race in sky running, ski mountaineering, and trail running, and if conditions allow, he plans to spend time in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming, and to challenge the speed records on Denali and Aconcagua.

When asked what type of athlete he considers himself, Jornet responds simply: "I am a person that loves mountains. I can go with skis when there's snow, and I can go running when it's summer. Doing all this stuff—it's the possibility to live in the mountains and to live my passion. It doesn’t really matter if I win or whether I finish last. It’s important maybe for me, but it really doesn’t matter."

—Fitz Cahall

THE INTERVIEW

Adventure: of the races you’ve won and the records you’ve broken, do you have an accomplishment you’re most proud of.

Kilian Jornet: The Matterhorn record I did this year and the first World Cup in Ski Mountaineering that I won when I was young. When you go to a race you know you’re going to win, when you win, you are proud of yourself, but it’s not that strong [of a] feeling. But in a race that you didn't know you're going to do [well in] and you do, there’s an explosion of endorphins, and that’s what it was like.

A: Do you ever have moments when you’re running or racing when you want to stop? That you don’t enjoy what you’re doing?

KJ: In long races, you want to stop all the time. You think, "Okay, I’m going to go to the next aid station, and then I’m going to stop," because you have pain everywhere, and you want to just stop the pain. We are a bit masochistic or a bit stupid.

Then there are days that you are training and the conditions are hard and you don’t want to continue, but it’s these days that are going to make you stronger. It’s not always good days. You need to have the shadow to be in the sun.

• Nat Geo Expeditions

A: Are there any moments like that that really stand out to you?

KJ: Last year, we did a ski crossing of Mont Blanc, and I lost my friend Stéphane [Brosse]. We were together, and he just broke through the snow [a cornice] and fell for 600 meters. So, you think about whether or not this thing we do is good, or makes sense. And then, you realize that we all know the risk and we all accept the risk. It’s not like we are playing football and the worst thing that can happen is we break a knee. We are mountaineering. We know that the mountains are dangerous. We need to accept that it’s risky. We don’t want to die, but we need to know that we can.

A: On September 7, 2013, you and Emelie Forsberg called for a rescue partway up the Frendo Spur Route on Mont Blanc. The incident stirred up controversy over the style in which you climb mountains without traditional mountaineering equipment and safety gear. Are you concerned that people will follow your example in the mountains and get in over their heads?

KJ: That day we called because I was anticipating having more problems. There are things that we cannot do for ourselves. It’s important to be humble, and just to call for help before having big[ger] problems.

I always try to say, "We are not an example." If I see a video of Alex Honnold soloing in Yosemite, I'm not going to go to Yosemite tomorrow to do that. I think it’s very important to know the person that’s inside, and to really think if it’s possible or not.

A: What do you say to people who are getting started in the sport of sky running?

KJ: More people are going to the mountains. We are in a land that’s really beautiful, and can give us a lot, but we need to know that we are really fragile animals. Compared to the others, we are really nothing. We are good for the brain, but as for the body, we are really fragile. So, just think about that.

Related Topics

• ADVENTURERS
• TRAIL RUNNING

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Meet Kilian Jornet, the ultra distance athlete who is going to run up Everest in a day

By Mark Russell

Even among the rarefied air of ultra running's most superhuman athletes, a world in which competitors race colossal distances of up to hundreds of miles on foot over the planet's most inhospitable landscapes, Kilian Jornet and his achievements stand out as breathtaking.

In 2008 at the age of 20, Jornet burst onto the trail-running scene during the gruelling 100-mile, 30,000ft Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, leaving the world's finest trail runners in his wake as he completed the course on his first attempt in just over 20 hours. Since then, the Catalan hasn't looked back (why would he? There's never anyone coming up behind him) and has come to dominate the sport fully: his feats include a hat trick at Skyrunning world championships, breaking the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail record by more than seven hours, winning the 110-mile GR20 Corsica trail race in an unprecedented in 32 hours 54 minutes (more than four hours off the previous best) and crossing 500 miles east to west across the Pyrenees in eight days. All this and he's not even a full time runner! Ultras are merely his summer sport; come winter, the 27-year-old ditches his trainers and spends his time ski-mountaineering, a discipline at which he also excels.

This summer Jornet conquered America's iconic Hardrock Hundred Endurance Run in Colorado, completing the 100.5-mile race in 22 hours, 41 minutes and 33 seconds - wiping 40 minutes off the previous record. He also found time to smash the world best for the fastest ascent and descent of Alaska's Mount McKinley in, 20,237ft in 11 hours, 40 minutes - a whole five hours and six minutes off the nearest time.

The Alaskan adventure was the latest in his " Summits Of My Life " project, in which he is attempting to set ascent and descent records on the planet's most iconic mountains, a series that will, if all goes to plan, culminate in Jornet running from Base Camp to the summit of Everest and back down again - without the aid of oxygen! <div> GQ caught up with Jornet in a rare stationary moment, while he was in London for the William Hill Sports Book Of The Year Awards, for which he was shortlisted. GQ: You grew up in the Pyrenees, in the heart of some of the world's most beautiful trails - what was that like?

Kilian Jornet: My dad was a mountain guide and the guardian of a [climbing] hut, so he would cook for people and preparing things for them, and that's where we lived. It was fun. When you're children you like to explore and find out what is behind the house and we [liked to discover] the mountains or the forest; it was really nice to have this connection with nature. But then, it was also a normal life - my mother is a teacher so we went to school with her, but after work it was [all about] our own landscape.

You spend so much of your life now travelling; do any of your trips stick out as being the most wild?

The first time I was in the Himalayas, I was with two friends, and we were there in February but with only light-expedition gear. I was there again a few weeks ago with my girlfriend and it was the same feeling - we took just 40-litre rucksacks, put all our gear in them, and just ran and walked.

**You grew up in the mountains, what did you make of the Himalayas?

** They're beautiful, huge. You don't realise when you are there, but when you come back [to Europe] and go to the Alps you think, "OK these are not mountains, these are hills!"

**Do you have a favourite event?

** The best run is the one you're doing tomorrow, the next one. I like the wild places, Scandinavia, the Norwegian mountains, in the US there are some national parks where you have huge areas without people, the Himalayas, of course, in the UK, it's Scotland, the Lake District... Every place has its beauty, but the beauty is not in the landscape, it's in ourselves.

If we have beauty inside we will see beauty.

By Conrad Quilty-Harper

By Mike Christensen

By Zak Maoui

**You travel very light, but do you have an essential piece of kit?

** The thing I most like about running is that it's simple, you need nothing, a pair of shoes and you can do it.

Sometimes I'm travelling in the car, see a nice mountain and I just say, "I want to go there", and I just take off my jeans and run.

You seem to apply the minimal philosophy to your diet, too.

I'm used to not eating much when I'm running. Sometimes you have to carry a bit for a long run but, like water, there are many places that you can get food [out in the trails]. In spring there are berries you can eat, like b lueberries and lingonberries.

**Do you stick to a strict diet to maintain your physique?

** I don't have a strict diet, but I think, obviously, that the more you train the more you can eat because you need more energy. At home we try to find produce that is natural and I don't eat much meat, maybe two times a month - my mother is a vegetarian. My girlfriend bakes a lot, so we don't have to get cookies or bread from the supermarket.

**You talk about pain a lot in Run Or Die , but it doesn't seem to stop you.

Do you have a high pain threshold?

** I think you get used to the pain when you run. In a road race it's easy to stop because you can, then maybe stop a car and go home. In the mountains the problem is if you want to stop the base could be 20 kilometres away, so you can't stop. I always try to think, "OK, the faster I go then the less time I'll spend here and the pain will be here for less time." Also you can make the difference between what pain is normal because of the distance and what pain is because you're getting an injury.

**You're not very injury prone, though, are you?

** I had a knee injury but it happened when I was in the city in the street! I've never had a running injury. Maybe because, firstly, I do two seasons, six months skiing and six months running so I'm using different body parts, and secondly, when you're running in the mountains every step is different. When you run in the road they're always the same steps.

**Do you ever feel you push it too far when out on the mountains. Two years ago your good friend [ski mountaineer] Stéphane Brosse was killed while you were traversing Mont Blanc, that must have been frightening as well as deeply upsetting. **

The more you are in the mountains, the more you understand that you actually know even less. The mountains don't follow rules, they're just dangerous. Sometimes you go too far and you can admit that, "Today I did a stupid thing," and you can learn from the mistakes. But if you're always in the comfort area you'll stay there. If you want to progress you have to go out of this comfort area and make mistakes. Obviously I don't think anybody does sport because they want to die; we want to be alive, to enjoy and be happy, and I don't know why we need to take these risks to be happy... When there's an accident, like with Stéphane, you think, "Why was it him and not me?" He had kids and things so it would have been easier if it was me that died... You think all these things: why do we need to do that? Why did it happen? The difference now is that although I knew before that it's risky when you go to the mountains, that there are dangers and you could die, when it happens this close, you understand the risk. So you have a different approach, listen more to the fear.

How is the Summits Of My Life project going?

We're going to Aconcagua in South America over December and then in spring we will go to Everest. I think Everest is a long term project but it will start next year and I'll make my first attempt but I'm sure it won't be the final one. With these big mountains you need to be really patient and not feel you have to do it.

What time are you going for?

I don't know the numbers exactly, but I think it's possible in one day.

**Wow, base camp to summit and back in 24 hours?

** If there are good conditions then it's possible; if it's deep snow or ice then it's not possible, which is why it's important to be patient and wait for the moment, which could be now or in one year or two years. The good thing on this project is that it's a really small team, four people, which means we can move fast. Then there is the fact that the project is

not sponsored, so we don't have the pressure that we need to do it. If we don't want to do it we just go home.

Run Or Die by Kilian Jornet (Viking) is out now.

By Charlie Teasdale

By David Taylor

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Becoming the All-Terrain Human

By Christopher Solomon

• March 20, 2013

Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses­ (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe’s roof — over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex’d climbers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet — and back home again in less than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete. A few years ago Jornet ran the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail and stopped just twice to sleep on the ground for a total of about 90 minutes. In the middle of the night he took a wrong turn, which added perhaps six miles to his run. He still finished in 38 hours 32 minutes, beating the record of Tim Twietmeyer, a legend in the world of ultrarunning, by more than seven hours. When he reached the finish line, he looked as if he’d just won the local turkey trot.

Come winter, when most elite ultrarunners keep running, Jornet puts away his trail-running shoes for six months and takes up ski-mountaineering racing, which basically amounts to running up and around large mountains on alpine skis. In this sport too, Jornet reigns supreme: he has been the overall World Cup champion three of the last four winters.

So what’s next when you’re 25 and every one of the races on the wish list you drew up as a youngster has been won and crossed out? You dream up a new challenge. Last year Jornet began what he calls the Summits of My Life project , a four-year effort to set speed records climbing and descending some of the world’s most well known peaks, from the Matterhorn this summer to Mount Everest in 2015. In doing so, he joins a cadre of alpinists like Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Chad Kellogg from the United States who are racing up peaks and redefining what’s possible. In a way, Jornet says, all of his racing has been preparation for greater trials. This month, he is in the Himalayas with a couple of veteran alpinists. They plan to climb and ski the south face of a peak that hasn’t been skied before in winter.

But bigger challenges bring bigger risks. Less than a year ago, Jornet watched as his hero and friend Stéphane Brosse died in the mountains. Since then, he has asked himself, How much is it worth sacrificing to do what you love?

Chamonix, France, is a resort town wedged into a narrow valley at the foot of Mont Blanc, just over an hour’s drive southeast of Geneva. For those who adore high mountains, the place is hallowed. The Rue du Docteur Paccard is named for one of the first men to ascend Mont Blanc, in 1786; millionaires are tolerated, but mountain men are revered. The valley is Jornet’s home for the few months each year when he is not traveling. I met him there on a stormy morning in December, when he drove his dented Peugeot van into a parking lot at the edge of town, stepped out and offered a shy handshake. He is slight and unremarkable in the deceptive way of a Tour de France cyclist — he’s 5-foot-6 and 125 pounds — with the burnished complexion of years spent above the tree line and a thatch of black hair that, when sprung from a ski hat, has a slightly blendered look.

As we drove to and from Valle d’Aosta in Italy, where he would train that day, Jornet told me in soft-spoken English (one of five languages­ he speaks) how he first stunned the small world of elite ultrarunning. It happened at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, the most competitive ultrarunning event outside the United States. (An “ultra” is any race longer than a marathon.) In 2008, when he was 20, Jornet defeated a field that included Scott Jurek, perhaps the sport’s most well known star, while setting a record for the 104-mile course around the Mont Blanc massif (which happens to include 31,500 feet of uphill climbing, or the equivalent of 25 trips to the top of the Empire State Building). “It was a revelation and a coronation at once,” Runner’s World magazine later wrote. Then Jornet won again the next year (and again in 2011).

Jornet has won dozens of mountain footraces up to 100 miles in length and six world titles in Skyrunning, a series of races of varying distances­ held on billy-goat terrain. “Other Top 5 or 10 ultramarathoners can show up for a race, and he’ll just be jogging along, biding his time, enjoying their company until it’s time to go,” Bryon Powell, the editor in chief of the Web site iRunFar.com, told me. In the longest races, which can last 24 hours, he’s been known to best the competition by an hour or more. Lauri van Houten, executive director of the International Skyrunning Federation, calls Jornet “God on earth.”

He is also the most visible figure in the growing “fastest known times” movement, in which runners measure how long it takes to complete geographic challenges — running up and down the Grand Teton in Wyoming, say, or around a lake — and then post their results online. This is often done on the honor system, although Jornet, the only fully sponsored professional in ultrarunning, frequently has others time him. In addition to the mark he set at Lake Tahoe, Jornet holds the record for the GR20 trail that traces Corsica’s mountainous spine, and he crossed the 500-plus miles of the Pyrenees in 8 days 3 hours 15 minutes. He has set records on the 19,341-foot Kilimanjaro in Tanzania (7 hours 14 minutes) and the 9,570-foot Mount Olympus in Greece (just under 5 hours 20 minutes).

His versatility amazes other runners, including Jurek, who today is a friend. Jornet has been able to run the very short mountain races like a vertical kilometer race that’s over in about 30 minutes, Jurek says — and then, he adds, Jornet can turn around and win the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run in California’s Sierra mountains, arguably the world’s most prestigious ultrarun. (Jurek himself won the Western States seven consecutive times between 1999 and 2005.) It’s a little like an Olympic-champion sprinter winning the Boston Marathon.

Once we crossed over the Italian border, Jornet steered the Peugeot through tight alpine streets to the small ski area of La Thuile. Ski-mountaineering racing, usually called SkiMo in Europe, is a mountain man’s steeplechase up, down and around high peaks while wearing ultralight backcountry gear that’s built to climb: matchstick skis, slipper-light carbon-fiber ski boots, climbing skins that grip the snow. The first race of the season was a few weeks away, and Jornet needed to log some workouts in the mountains. Beneath a giant trail map, we discussed a plan: he’d ski, and I’d try to watch. He wore a skintight cat suit adorned with tiger stripes the color of traffic cones. KILIAN was printed across his right thigh. The message was less boast than warning: Get off the tracks. Train coming.

At one point during Jornet’s workout that day — he’d climb and then descend about 10,000 feet in about four hours — he paused at a mountaintop cafe to talk. I offered espresso. He declined. He also hadn’t eaten breakfast, nor would he eat or drink during his workout.

Don’t you sweat? I asked.

“Maybe a bit here,” he replied, touching the back of his neck.

Even among top athletes, Jornet is an outlier. Take his VO2 max, a measure of a person’s ability to consume oxygen and a factor in determining aerobic endurance. An average male’s VO2 max is 45 to 55 ml/kg/min. A college-level 10,000-meter runner’s max is typically 60 to 70. Jornet’s VO2 max is 89.5 — one of the highest recorded, according to Daniel Brotons Cuixart, a sports specialist at the University of Barcelona who tested Jornet last fall. Jornet simply has more men in the engine room, shoveling coal. “I’ve not seen any athletes higher than the low 80s, and we’ve tested some elite athletes,” says Edward Coyle, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, who has studied the limits of human exercise performance for three decades.

Born into a Catalan family, Jornet grew up in the Spanish Pyrenees at 6,500 feet, and his gifts are literally in his blood. “When you are born and bred at altitude, you tend to have a higher blood volume and red-cell count for oxygen-carrying capacity,” which translates to better endurance, says Stacy Sims, a researcher at Stanford who holds a doctorate in exercise physiology and nutrition science. Years of daily running and skiing up mountains have further bolstered this advantage. This helps explain why Jornet sweats so little. During exercise, the bodies of very fit people quickly act to disperse heat by, among other things, vasodilation — expanding blood vessels at the skin’s surface where the air can cool the body. A body that sweats less loses less precious liquid from its circulatory system, a major factor in fatigue. In moderate temperatures, Jornet says, he can run easily for eight hours without drinking water.

Jornet was raised in the Cap del Rec regional park, where his father was a hut keeper and mountain guide and his mother a schoolteacher who liked to run and ski. “Mountains were his playground,” his mother, Núria Burgada Burón, told me. When Jornet was 18 months old, she took him on a seven-hour hike in the Pyrenees, and he never cried or fussed. Seven hours? She laughed. “Kilian is not normal.” At 3, she says, he completed a 7.5-mile cross-country ski race. “My mission is to make Kilian tired. Always, I was tired. But Kilian? No.”

His parents tried to instill a sense of humility and a deep feeling for the landscape. “ Por las noches we walk out to the wood, the forest, without lamp,” Burgada says, describing how she sometimes took Jornet and his sister, Naila, a year and a half younger (and today also a SkiMo racer), out barefoot into the night dressed only in pajamas. Listen to the forest, their mother told them. Feel the direction of the wind against your cheeks, the way the pebbles change underfoot. Then she made her children lead the way home in the darkness. “All this,” she says, “to feel the passion of the nature.” At 13 Jornet entered a program for young Catalan ski-mountaineering athletes; he won his first youth World Cup race at 16. He began to run as off-season training.

A lifetime spent scrabbling over uneven ground — Jornet has never trained on a track — has molded him into a gifted negotiator of terrain. Skyrunning races are often won on the downhill, by hurling yourself over roots and logs and shifting scree. “There is probably no one in the world who is a better technical downhill runner than him,” Anton Krupicka, a top American ultrarunner, told me. Yet amazingly, Jornet has never sprained an ankle.

When Jornet told me this, we were at his apartment, a modest place just down the valley from Chamonix. Its décor is Modern Mountain Bum — rows of hard-worn trail shoes at the door, bins of carabiners and ice axes in the guest room, something gray and half-eaten petrifying in a saucepan on the stovetop. He stood in his socks, rolled one of his thick ankles to a tendon-straining angle, then began to hop up and down on it nonchalantly while I watched in horror.

On another day, Jornet pulled a pair of shoes out of storage, laced them up and then demonstrated his downhill technique on a snow-covered track behind the apartment — his weight almost recklessly forward, the sides of his shoes biting deeply when he cut a turn as if they were an ibex’s hooves, arms pinwheeling overhead for balance. He didn’t resemble a runner so much as the downhill skier Bode Miller, that master of the calculated free-fall, or an ecstatic child set free from school. “It’s like dancing,” he said when we reached the bottom of the hill.

And this gets to the heart of Jornet’s talent. Observers and competitors describe him as someone who draws endurance and vitality, Samson-like, from being among high peaks. Runners who have served as pacesetters for him have told me with amazement how, when he was midrace at Lake Tahoe, Jornet didn’t run with his head down in focused misery but instead brushed the hairgrass and corn lily that grew along the trail with his fingertips and brought the smell to his nose, as if he were feeding off the scenery. Sometimes in his all-day solitary runs, stopping only to eat berries, he can seem half-feral, more mountain goat than human. He likes to move fast and touch rock and feel wild, he told me; he feels most at ease and performs best when wrapped by the silence and beauty of the mountains. He can’t abide cities for more than a few hours. The sea — its unrelenting horizontality — scares him. Leading long races like Western States, he’s been known to stop and exclaim at a sunrise, or wait for friends to catch up so he can enjoy the mountains with them instead of furthering his lead. “It’s almost insulting,” Krupicka told me. But it’s just Kilian being Kilian, Krupicka said. “He’s not rubbing it in anyone’s face. He’s truly enjoying being out there in the mountains, and he’s expressing that.”

The trip last June was supposed to be special, a lightning traverse of the 43-mile Mont Blanc massif on skis, a punishing but glorious first in mountains that people have crisscrossed for centuries. It would kick off his Summits of My Life project. What made the trip truly special, however, was the man Jornet would make it with, Stéphane Brosse. A two-time ski-mountaineering world champion, Brosse was Jornet’s idol as a teenager — Jornet had a picture of Brosse in his notebook — and later became his mentor, training partner and good friend.

Jornet described to me the beauty of the trip, how blackbirds drifted like scraps of cloth in the thermals just beyond the skiers on the mountaintop. On the second day, they were almost done; all that stood between them and a triumphant descent to the wildflowers was a ridge crossing between the twin summits of the 12,799-foot Aiguille d’Argentière. Jornet led the way, skiing about 10 feet from the mountain’s edge to avoid releasing a cornice, an overhanging lip of hardened snow. Brosse and two of their friends skied behind, about the same distance from the edge. Looking back, Jornet noticed they were too far out on the overhang. He lifted his ski pole to give a warning, but it was already too late: under the skiers’ weight, a chunk of snow 10 feet wide and 20 feet long ripped from the mountain at Jornet’s feet. The collapse swept Brosse away 2,000 feet to his death.

The fall of his friend shook Jornet. A few days later, he climbed alone to the summit of Aiguille de Bionnassay high in the massif. He needed to experience why he’d been in the mountains with Brosse: “because it’s our home.” More than once during my visit, Jornet compared the mountains to a lover. To really know a deep love, you have to give yourself completely to another, he told me, which means making yourself vulnerable. As he wrote on his blog after Brosse’s death, “The mountain takes many things away from us, but it also gives us everything we need to breathe.”

A few months later Jornet ran again. This time he traversed Mont Blanc from Courmayeur to Chamonix, crossing crumbling moraines and split-lip glaciers and the chasm of the Innominata (“Unnamed”) Ridge. The route — 26 miles and 14,000 feet of ascent — takes alpinists several days. Jornet did it in less than nine hours while carrying a little more than a dozen ounces of sports drink.

What are you running after? I asked Jornet. Having beaten men, do you now want to challenge the mountains? He gently corrected me. You don’t beat the mountains. You go when they permit, he said. The speed records and “firsts” aren’t important except for motivation, he insisted. Then he mentioned the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Hughes Galeano, who once likened the ideal of Utopia to the horizon — goals that retreat even as we chase them. “The important thing is not to catch something,” said Jornet, whose own memoir, “Run or Die,” will be published in the United States in July. What matters in life is the pursuit, and everything we learn along the way. “The important thing,” he said, “is moving.”

Before departing Chamonix, I accompanied Jornet on his morning workout. I wanted to try to feel his speed and freedom for myself. We drove almost to the head of the valley and parked at a still-closed ski area, not far from the crumbling Le Tour Glacier. Where the parking lot turned to snow, Jornet stepped into his ski bindings and, wordlessly and without stretching, began to move. I fell in beside him. The apron of the mountain was a gentle bunny slope, and Jornet began to kick and glide upward with long, sure, measured paces. He wore a puffy jacket and warm-up pants against the cold, his ski-pole-holding hands jammed deep into his pockets and his poles trailing behind.

This isn’t so bad, I thought. I can do this.

We passed the silent bull wheel of the gondola house. We passed a shuttered chalet. The slope canted upward. My pulse bucked. Jornet’s stride remained unchanged: wide and sure and metronomic. The scenery began to blur. We passed the ribbon of the iced-over Arve River and a woman ski touring up the track.

My vision grayed at the edges. I glanced over at Jornet. His hands were still in his pockets.

It happened quickly. I was beside Jornet. Then I was not-so-beside him. Then I was behind him, snorting and huffing like a plow horse turning tough soil. Soon I doubled over, heaving and trying not to revisit the morning’s croissant. Jornet looked back, said something I couldn’t make out over the timpani of heart booming in ears and kept moving.

A lifelong runner, a marathoner, a backcountry skier, I lasted 3 minutes 6 seconds.

In a while the ski-tourer we passed arrived. She was a fit Frenchwoman, middle-aged, with silver hair. I nodded ahead. “The world champion,” I managed.

“My son knows him,” she replied. She looked after him for a moment, then said, “Everyone must have his — how do you say, rythme ?”

After that we watched him together. Jornet was an entire knoll away now. He had removed his hands from his pockets and taken off his jacket. His arms pumped strongly with his poles. He moved fast and alone and content on the mountain, growing smaller and smaller as he climbed until he soon disappeared around a bend.

An article on March 24 about the Spanish ultrarunner Kilian Jornet Burgada misstated the time it takes for Jornet to run a short, vertical-kilometer mountain race. It is about a half-hour, not two hours.

How we handle corrections

Christopher Solomon is a frequent contributor to Travel and other sections at The Times. This is his first article for the magazine.

Editor: Dean Robinson

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Shin splints. Achilles tendinitis. Runner’s knee. Dangers abound for runners, but there are ways to prevent them .

You don’t need to run fast to consider yourself an athlete. A slower pace can actually be more beneficial to your mental health .

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'It's pretty high': runner tells how he scaled Everest twice in a week

Kilian Jornet made climbs without fixed ropes or oxygen and suffered illness on first ascent but is laid back about his exploits

Forty-eight hours after racing up Mount Everest twice in a week , Kilian Jornet flew home to Norway where, rather than popping corks and collapsing into bed, he celebrated by going for a run with his girlfriend and sitting down to a meal of bread, salad and vegetables.

“To be honest, I’m not really one for celebrations,” he tells the Guardian. “After weeks of rice and nothing fresh, it was nice to eat a salad. I just wanted something normal.”

The muted festivities were in keeping with the spartan philosophy that propelled the 29-year-old Spaniard to the summit without fixed ropes and supplementary oxygen on both occasions last month.

Despite suffering from food poisoning on his first ascent – and coming within minutes of the 16 hours and 45 minutes record set 21 years ago by the Italian climber Hans Kammerlander on his second – Jornet’s reflections on his double sojourn at the roof of the world are similarly laconic.

“I was happy and tired,” he says. “But when you’re up there you’re pretty much concentrating on the moment and thinking about getting down again. The emotion hits you more when you’ve come down again and that’s when you feel most satisfied.”

Everest, he adds, is “pretty high. Even the big mountains seem small from up there. But it’s pretty tough as there’s very little oxygen. But apart from that, it’s a mountain like any other – albeit taller”.

Jornet, who grew up in the Pyrenean region of Cerdanya in northern Catalonia, has been climbing since his parents took him into the mountains when he was 18 months old.

“My love of mountains has always come from them,” he says. “I guess they’re happy [about Everest]. They can see that I’m living a life that fulfils and that’s all any parent wants.”

The awe and sense of freedom he first felt as a toddler have never left him, while the years of climbing, skiing and long-distance running have taught him endurance, discipline and, equally importantly, how to deal with fear.

Even with the stomach cramps and vomiting that blighted his first ascent of Everest, he says he never felt afraid.

“I’ve spent years training and preparing and that gets you ready for being in exposed situations. But the important thing is to stay calm so that you make the right decisions on the mountain.

“If you run into problems, I think you need to be very cool and not let your emotions get the better of you. That comes with years of practice. That way, if there’s bad weather or other problems, you’re not scared.”

Although he had not planned to make two climbs, the idea of having another go occurred as he returned to base camp.

“As I was coming down after the first ascent, I thought, ‘I normally recover pretty well and if I’m OK and there’s a window of good weather I’ll give it another go’. You have to make the most of it.”

Jornet’s attempt to set new records for the fastest ascents of some of the world’s best-known mountains has already seen him scale Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn in Europe , Denali in North America and Aconcagua in South America.

But with the trail-running season under way, he is looking to mix things up a bit.

“I tend to live day by day and see what possibilities each one has. I look to do a bit of everything: competitions, climbing, skiing. Variety suits me, it’s about different feelings, different emotions.”

He says his motivation is simple and very personal. “I do it because I like it. Since I was a kid, mountains have always been the place where I feel happiest. I like to keep trying new things and doing different things that help you learn more about yourself.

“Going up into those mountains is an interior journey, it’s about knowing how far you can push yourself and how you face the fears that we all have.”

Leaving aside a youthful flirtation with separatism – “when I was a kid, I wanted Cerdanya to become independent because I was sick of people from Barcelona coming in at the weekends” – Jornet describes himself as semi-nomadic and a sceptic when it comes to flags, nations and the notion of staying still.

“I’ve lived almost all of my life in France and now I live in Norway , so the whole question of countries, borders and nationalities isn’t something I really understand too well,” he says.

Despite the wandering and perseverance, however, there are one or two fears Jornet has yet to conquer. “I don’t like cities very much and I’m not really a beach person either. Mountains suit me best.”

• Mount Everest

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Spanish ultrarunner Kilian Jornet takes on race against climate change

Known for his climbing feats, the elite athlete has started a foundation to protect mountain environments and pledged to restrict his own travel to reduce his carbon footprint.

Kilian Jornet is known internationally for his feats as a mountain runner and climber. In 2017, for instance, he summited Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen not once but twice, just six days apart.

Jornet’s resume includes being considered the best ultramarathon runner in the world, smashing records in races such as the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc and the Western States Endurance Run in California.

At age 32, this native of Sabadell, in Spain’s Catalonia region, has now decided to take on a very different sort of race against the clock: slowing down the degradation of the ecosystems that he knows so well.

This elite athlete has started his own foundation to defend the mountains from climate change , pollution and loss of biodiversity, but there is more: he has also made a personal decision to limit his own travel, and to stop after his trips have generated three tons of carbon dioxide a year, which he says represents " one international trip and one or two short-haul flights a year."

In a recent online conversation from his home in Norway, Jornet turned the camera to show the views from his window: a sublime mountain landscape dotted with peaks. Jornet, who grew up in a mountain lodge in the Pyrenees, explains that the mountain is his natural habitat , and that he cannot stand to be in cities for very long.

That is why he is saddened to admit that he, too, has played a role in the degradation of these natural environments: “My life in the last 10 years has been a disaster in environmental terms.”

Question. What does the mountain represent for Kilian Jornet?

Answer. It is my element, the place where I was born and raised, where I feel at ease. I can feel at home in the Pyrenees, in the Alps, in the Himalayas.... but in a city or a large village, I’m going to feel really stressed out.

Q. Is it possible to pay attention to the mountains when you are competing?

A. Not during the race, evidently. But the year that I competed the most I had around 50 races, which means 50 mornings out of 365 days. The rest of the time I am on the mountain, training without the stress of competition, and that’s when you enjoy it.

Q. What is the most fascinating aspect of these natural spaces?

A. Their variety. It’s surprising how different they can be. It’s impossible to compare the highest part of Khumbu in Nepal with the rocky towers of Monument Valley in the United States, or with the fjords and mountain faces here in Norway, or with any great glacier region of Greenland. They are completely different areas, but then again the mountain I have before me also changes from day to day. Now it’s all yellow, but in the winter there will be days when it is icy, and other days when it will be framed by northern lights. The fascinating thing about the mountain is how it changes, how it adapts.

Q. Why should we be concerned about the mountains?

A. There are three things that are a source of concern. One is the effects of climate change , which can be clearly seen in the glaciers, which are getting smaller or disappearing entirely. Besides the fact that glaciers are very pretty, there are relevant consequences such as rock destabilization and the transformation of ecosystems, and with them, of biodiversity. Then there is pollution. Here in Norway, I am lucky to be able to go running and drink from any river or lake without care. But there are many regions of the world, even mountain regions, where the water is polluted. And then there is the great challenge of the way man interacts with nature and what the tourism model and lifestyle model is in those mountain regions.

Q. What have you seen in the mountains that has pained you the most?

A. It is shocking when you go to a basecamp out of season, in the summer or the fall [because everyone goes in the spring], and find trash everywhere. But also when you are climbing a mountain in the Pyrenees and you see some kids on snowmobiles chasing down chamois.

Q. Taking a plane to reach the mountains of the world also generates emissions that contribute to climate change. How do you deal with this contradiction?

A. Just like with all other contradictions: they hurt and you need to find a balance. In recent years I have tried to reduce the number of trips that I take, and now I have decided not to travel any more than whatever generates three tons of carbon dioxide a year, which basically means one international trip and one or two short-haul flights a year.

Q. That makes some mountains out of reach.

A. It’s the commitment that I’ve made and I want to honor it; my sponsors have to accept it. In the end, it’s about deciding which competitions and projects are so important to me as to warrant travel. If it’s about training at a training camp, I can do that by racing near my house. And I can find other travel alternatives such as the train.

Q. A commitment like that must change the year’s planning quite significantly.

A. Yes, quite a lot. But we need to think about the model being followed in sports. These days, it’s all about taking a relatively stable group of people and moving them from place to place to do the same thing. I don’t know. Couldn’t it be a more local model that saves the trips for the finals? I think the time has come to discuss the future model that will make sports more sustainable.

Q. Is that why you created the Kilian Jornet Foundation to preserve the mountain environment?

A. I had been taking individual action for years, either through other associations or by trying to raise awareness among my followers on social media . But the birth of my daughter [in 2019] perhaps made me feel the urgency more intensely, and I asked myself what would be the best way to use whatever weight I might have. And I realized that maybe the most useful way was by creating a foundation.

Q. Is the retreat of ice from the mountains a warning sign that we are ignoring?

A. Around 40% of glaciers are already lost, and we will not be able to recover them, but 60% can still be saved. I am generally an optimistic person. We need to accept that there are going to be changes, but there is no need to be resigned, we must fight to revert the situation. I think that my daughter and her generation will enjoy the snow and the glaciers in a different way, but they will still be able to.

Q. For someone who grew up in the Pyrenees , at a mountain lodge where your father was the watchman, how do you feel about the fact that the glaciers there are utterly condemned?

A. It’s sad, it’s sad, because they are beautiful, and because they have a role to play. It’s sad to know that it is also my fault. My family raised me with this kind of awareness, but my life in the last 10 years has been a disaster in environmental terms. Why do we always wait so long? We need to look at the mistakes that we’ve made, but not just that, also work to revert them.

Q. Are people looking above all for a life of comfort, regardless of the impact?

A. Yes, we want comfort, but we are also creatures of habit [at this point in the interview, his daughter’s smiling face shows up on the screen]. I don’t think that taking a different form of transportation is going to be less comfortable. Or like now, we are doing the interview like this, and it’s also comfortable. I think it’s not so much about comfort as about a change of habits.

English version by Susana Urra .

More information

Kilian Jornet: the Spanish ‘superman’ who climbed Everest twice in six days

“You have to let your craziness out to feel something:” Kilian Jornet

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Kilian Jornet: The Everest Interview

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The renowned mountain runner Kilian Jornet last month summited Everest twice in one week. We sat down to talk with him in Chamonix, France, to learn more.

Kilian Jornet was back home in Chamonix, relaxed, casually chatting with his Salomon teammates below the serrated silhouette of the Mont Blanc massif. His frame small, his personality unassuming.

For those not in the know, you would be hard pressed to pick him out of a lineup as the guy that barely a month ago summited Everest not once, but twice inside a week with no ropes and no supplemental oxygen.

The quintessential mountain athlete, Jornet has spent a lifetime mastering his mountain skills, first as a ski mountaineer, then as an ultra and mountain runner. In 2012 Jornet turned it up a notch with his “ Summits of My Life ” project, applying his minimalist mountain running style to mountaineering.

Jornet Speed-Climbs Everest, Twice In One Week

Without oxygen or fixed ropes, Kilian Jornet summited Everest for the second time in one week. Read more…

With Mont Blanc, Denali, and Aconcagua complete, Everest was his crown jewel.

In the month since Everest, Jornet’s presence skyrocketed from being well-known within the ultra scene, to being one of the hottest athletes in the world. Everybody wants a piece of him.

Sitting on a media panel at a post-race venue, GearJunkie bellied up beside the undisputed king of the mountain as part of an informal discussion.

Kilian Jornet Interview

The interview with Kilian was gathered from a two-part discussion with questions asked by Trail Runner, Outside, Gear Patrol, Everyday Outdoor, Competitor, Elevation Outdoors, and GearJunkie.

PANEL. Do you feel like you’ve recovered from Everest?

Kilian Jornet: It was a very short expedition. It was 28 days from door to door … we were like 10 days on Cho Oyo and then like 17 days on Everest, with very short travels between. From the summit to training was like 3 days … we could start training early and recover early.

Have you suffered at the Everest level previously in the mountains before? What did you learn about your ability to push through or overcome challenge?

Suffering is … never objective. It’s a feeling. There are a lot of different ways to suffer, mentally or physically. On Everest, there were tons of both. You could suffer one time from the cold but you acknowledge afterwards that yes I was feeling cold …but didn’t get frostbite and I didn’t die.

So next time you are in this situation, you are familiar and don’t suffer at the same level like the time before. You can feel confident in situations where before you were afraid.

I suffered from stomach cramps … but the suffering was exactly the same as if it was at home. The only difference was I was on Everest.

But I knew I didn’t have edema and I was well acclimatized … I wasn’t cold, so it wasn’t a problem and I knew that I would not die from a stomach cramp. I just needed to go slower and stop more times.

How much of a lifetime of suffering was helpful on Everest?

It gives you confidence in new situations. In the last two years, I’ve been trying to put myself in uncomfortable situations to build confidence, like 20-30 hours alone in the mountains.

At the moment you are able to take away any emotion, then you are ready. If you have euphoria or are happy, you are more likely to make bad decisions because you will not see all the risks. If you are scared, you will panic or start to lose control.

You need to be able to ask yourself if you can technically and physically do the climb. If you can, you can evaluate the true risk and make a rational decision. The only way to get to this point is to spend hours and hours preparing for these situations. It’s a sort of meditation, but you come out with more knowledge for future experiences.

How much water did you bring while climbing Everest?

It’s always a compromise. You don’t want to carry too much weight. But you need fluids. I took two liters of water … but one froze.

Going down, for the last 15 hours, I didn’t eat or drink anything because it made me throw up. Without eating and drinking, I just had the pain but wasn’t throwing up.

For the second time on Everest I brought four hydration flasks … and two froze.

You are known for innovating gear; for Everest, what did you bring that we might see in the future?

We started thinking about the footwear for Everest on my trip to Denali. We wanted to have a running shoe that we integrated into our layering as I went higher.

We needed a system that was flexible for the approach, but something that we could layer for insulation and would be rigid enough for wearing a crampon. The average climbing boot weighs 42 ounces, crampons weigh 28 ounces, an approach boot weighs another 35 ounces. Our entire system weighed 38.5 ounces for everything.

The same tweaking was applied to my down jacket, ice axe, and backpack. I was able to go to Cho Oyo and Everest with a 50-pound kit.

What is your training like?

I’ve been training by myself since 17-years-old. I studied sports science in school to understand the basics.

November through May I’ll ski two to four hours in the morning, followed by an hour in the afternoon. In the summers I’ll go on longer run or climbing in the mountains, anywhere between two to three hours, up to nine to 10 hours.

If I go less than five hours in the morning, I do an additional hour in the afternoon. I average 1,200 hours and 600,000-700,000 meters of climbing a year.

But I also like to try a bunch of different things, like go without eating for five days while training for five hours a day. I like to explore training at the extremes to learn more about my body.

For “Summits of My Life,” all of the other speed ascents were bottom to top and then back down — round-trip records. For Everest, do you count your last ascent towards “Summits of My Life?” 

The first climb we did a round-trip from Advanced Base Camp. But it was more interesting to me to do it in the style that I did … I learned that it was possible to recover or potentially change summits. I was proud of learning how to acclimatize and train, and learn that it’s possible to climb in the Himalaya like you do in the Alps.

Kilian Jornet Climbs Everest In 26 Hours

One of the world's best ultra-runners scaled Mount Everest today, pushing the limits of what is humanly possible. Read more…

Do you think you will go back to Everest?

I don’t know about Everest, but I want to go back to the Himalayas. There’s so much to do. It was a success to go and learn that my body can perform at 8,000 meters without spending two months at basecamp. But I don’t know if that will be Everest or other things.    

 Is there a bucket list trip or adventure that you want to do?

It’s always evolving … that’s the problem! The more big things you do, the more ideas come … my list grows.

I don’t like to specialize … I’m happy doing big mountains and expeditions, and mixing it up with a short race and long race … and skiing in the winter. It helps me grow physically and emotionally. I would really like to go to Pakistan, Alaska, [and] Greenland has big potential.

Looking back at the 17- to 19-year-old Kilian, how have you changed? What’s next?

I’m still competitive, but I was more focused on winning when I was younger. I used to rest the day before a race. Now if the weather is good in the mountains, I’ll just go climbing the day before.

Because of experience, I can keep [in] shape. I see racing as training to stay [in] shape. It’s good training. It’s not my priority, though. Everything has similar priority.

Kilian shared that he’s taking the rest of his summer easy. Of course, this doesn’t mean he’s slowing down.

After we chatted, Jornet toed up to the line at Sunday’s Marathon du Mont Blanc, setting a blistering 3:45 pace to take the win. Next month he’ll be in Colorado to race Hard Rock 100 followed by the Sierra-Zinal and races in the UK and Scotland, doing it the only way Jornet knows how: Exploring his limits and having fun all the while.

Steve Graepel is a Contributing Editor and Gear Tester at GearJunkie. He has been writing about trail running, camping, skiing, and general dirtbagging for 10+ years. When not testing gear with GearJunkie, he is a Senior Medical Illustrator on the Neurosurgery Team at Mayo Clinic. Based in Boise, Idaho, Graepel is an avid trail runner, camper, angler, cyclist, skier, and loves to introduce his children to the Idaho outdoors.

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A biography of kilian jornet-cefr.

Read a biography of mountain runner Kilian Jornet, who climbed Everest in a day, to practice and improve your reading skills.

Definition-

Are you a proficient (CEFR level C1) English learner? You can practise reading in this part to improve your comprehension of lengthy, complicated books that cover a wide range of topics, some of which may be unfamiliar. Specialized articles, biographies, and summaries are examples of texts.

What likely comes to mind when you think of mountain climbers conquering Mount Everest are groups of climbers being led to the summit by Sherpa guides while carrying oxygen masks, supplies, and tents. You'd be mostly correct because 97% of climbers utilise oxygen to reach Everest's summit, which is 8,850 metres above sea level. At 3,500 metres, the majority of people experience breathlessness because to the thin air at high altitudes, and the vast majority of climbers utilise oxygen above 7,000 metres. A normal climbing party will consist of 8 to 15 individuals, with almost as many guides, and they will spend weeks ascending the mountain after arriving at Base Camp.

But without an oxygen mask or fixed ropes, ultramarathon and mountain runner Kilian Jornet Burgada scaled the summit by himself in May 2017. 

Oh, and it was completed in 26 hours. 

with foodborne illness. 

Then, five days later, he repeated the feat in just 17 hours. 

Kilian, who was born in 1987, has spent his entire life preparing for Everest. Since he was raised at the ski resort of Lles de Cerdanya in the Pyrenees, 2,000 metres above sea level in Catalonia, northeastern Spain, that truly does mean his entire life.Kilian was on skis while most kids his age were learning to walk. He completed a five-hour hike with his mother at the age of one and a half, fully on his own. When he conquered his first peak and took part in his first cross-country ski event at the age of three, he further distanced himself from his contemporaries. He had conquered a 4,000-foot mountain by the age of seven, and at eleven he completed a 42-day Pyrenees trek.

He claims that he began to "take it seriously" when he was 13 years old. He trained with the Ski Mountaineering Technical Centre (CTEMC) in Catalonia, competed, and worked with a coach. At age 18, he began to train alone for ski mountaineering and trail running, with only a few weeks off every year. He may put in up to 1,140 hours of endurance training annually, in addition to strength and technical sessions, race-specific training, and other activities. He prepared by ascending the mountain ten times until he knew every aspect of it, even where the sun would be shining at each time of the day, for his record-breaking ascent and descent of the Matterhorn.

Kilian Jornet seems practically superhuman despite barely getting seven hours of sleep per night. His resting heartbeat, which is 33 beats per minute as opposed to the normal man's 60 or an athlete's 40, is incredibly low. He also breathes more effectively than the normal person, inhaling more oxygen with each breath, and recovers from activity considerably more quickly thanks to his body's rapid breakdown of lactic acid, the acid in muscles that causes discomfort after exercise.

All of this is attributable to his upbringing in the mountains and to genetics, but it is his exceptional mental toughness that makes him stand out. He frequently sets tests for himself to see how long he can withstand trying circumstances in order to properly comprehend what his body and mind are capable of. For instance, he barely avoided renal failure after a 100-kilometer run in temperatures of about 40°C despite only consuming 3.5 litres of water. 

To detail all the competitions, prizes, and mountains he has scaled would require a book. And even here, Kilian's accomplishments are above average because he manages to find time to blog about his job and has written three books, including Run or Die and The Invisible Border.

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Kilian Jornet Survives an Avalanche Below Mount Everest

The legendary trail runner and mountaineer was trying to climb the world’s highest mountain from the west ridge.

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Legendary trail runner and mountaineer Kilian Jornet was attempting to summit Mount Everest from the seldom-climbed West Ridge on May 24 when he was caught up in a small avalanche.

He survived without injury after the slide carried him 50 meters down the mountain, but that was enough for him to curtail his solo summit attempt after a journey of 30 hours climbing above Camp 2 (elevation 21,300 feet). Jornet said he triggered the avalanche himself as he walked over a wind slab section of snow in the Hornbein Couloir.

The 35-year-old Catalan athlete, who lives in Norway, was trying to approach the 29,032-foot summit from the West Ridge along the Hornbein Corredor—a route named for Tom Hornbein, who opened the route in 1963 along with fellow American mountaineer Willie Unsoeld.

The West Ridge route to Everest is the least common route for mountaineers to take because of its technical difficulty and long exposure to altitude. It’s a very vertical route, too, with considerable amounts of exposed rock and ice terrain. Jornet, as in his previous Everest climbing odysseys over the past seven years, was not carrying supplemental oxygen.

(Watch Jornet’s video as he treks across a high-altitude ridge wearing crampons, a full-body down suit and a helmet while carrying an ice axe.)

“I didn’t reach the summit I was aiming for, but everything else,” Jornet said in a post on Instagram . “I’m a big believer in the how is way bigger and more important than the what, and in that sense the climb was just perfect. Like a big puzzle with all the pieces but one, the summit one.”

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Kilian Jornet (@kilianjornet)

Jornet had made several previous expeditions to the Himalayas, the last two in 2019 and 2021, which helped him explore the terrain and check the different possibilities before attempting the West Ridge.

He made his first expeditions to Mount Everest in 2016 and 2017, the latter of which culminated with an alpine-style double ascent in a single week without assistance or supplementary oxygen.

Hornbein and Unsoeld’s West Ridge route begins by gaining the ridge from a couloir a little bit above Camp 2 on Everest’s normal route. Jornet’s journey to the Hornbein Corredor started by climbing a steep couloir to reach the west shoulder, where he reported the conditions to be “horrible, blue ice underneath with a top layer of deep snow, two steps up and one down for 1,000 meters.”

“When I reached the ridge it was very windy so I stayed under a cornice for three hours to calm down while enjoying watching the queues of climbers from both Nepali and Tibetan normal routes making their progression,” Jornet said. “After the wind calmed I continued the ridge and traversed on mixed terrain towards the feet of the Hornbein couloir. I felt great and conditions were perfect. After a few hundred meters on the couloir, a wind pocket (I suppose recently created from the morning winds) broke and I got carried down in the avalanche for about 50 meters. I doubted whether to continue or to turn around and decided the latter.”

Jornet said he descended in a heavy snowfall, a challenging downhill climb that he called “interesting.” He said he used the “back to start” feature on his Coros watch to guide him through low visibility that only allowed him to two to three meters in front of his face.

“Many of us would be infinitely happy to walk a single footprint of the open path through Hornbein and the Unsoeld, and you have walked many more,” said Joan Maria Vendrell, a fellow Catalan ski mountaineer and climber, in a comment on Jornet’s post.

“What a project! It’s the journey that counts,” said renowned adventure film director Julie Raison. “Well done for a great performance and incredible ride. Very happy to have been able to share these moments with all of you and I can’t wait to see what’s next.”

Hornbein passed away on May 6 in his home in Estes Park, Colorado, at the age of 92. Unsoeld died in an avalanche during an Outdoor Education Winter Expedition climb of Mount Rainier on March 4, 1979.

Jornet said he was thrilled to see the route first-hand after he had been dreaming about it for so long. He said he knew very few details of the exact route, mostly learning what he could from photographs or descriptions in mountaineering books.

“It was a pleasure to follow their footsteps for a little,” Jornet said. “It was a great day in the mountains, where everything is beyond perfect except I didn’t reach the summit.”.

Aside from his mountaineering exploits, Jornet is also a world-class ultrarunner, mountain runner and ski-mo racer. He’s a four-time winner of the 104-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc race in Chamonix, France, and a five-time winner of the Hardrock 100 in Silverton, Colorado.

As a mountaineer, Jornet has set numerous Fastest Known Times on the world’s highest peaks, including Mount Kilimanjaro, Mont Blanc, The Matterhorn, Denali, Aconcogua, and Mount Everest. He’s also won world championships and high-level races in ski mountaineering and high-altitude skyrunning.

RELATED: Kilian Jornet Breaks His Own Time Up Everest

In early 2021, Jornet launched a new trail running shoe and apparel company called NNormal. He’s also known for his environmental activism through the Kilian Jornet Foundation.

According to a new story called “Pure Alpinism” on NNormal.com , Jornet arrived in the Himalayas on April 19 accompanied by his wife, Emelie Forsberg and their two young daughters, ages four and two. Together, they progressively trekked from the Nepali village of Namche Bazaar (elevation 11,286 feet) to Pheriche (14,340 feet) to acclimatize to the altitude. From Pheriche, Jornet did four solo rotations that worked as training and helped him acclimatize for his climb to higher elevations.

In the last rotation before approaching the West Ridge, he reached Camp 4 (25,919 feet). He then had to wait several days for an optimal weather window before he began climbing toward the Hornbein Corredor.

“Besides being the best MUT [mountain ultra trail] runner of his generation, and mountain athlete, and starting a new running company, Kilian traveled to Nepal with his wife Emelie, who is also one of the best MUT runners, along with their two daughters ages one and four,” said renowned American trail runner Buzz Burrell, co-founder of the Fastest Known Time concept. “So they can go for family walks and play board games together. That’s next level.”

RELATED: Kilian Jornet Isn’t the G.O.A.T. of Trail Running Just Because He Wins Big Races

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