Kilian Jornet explores the fine line between risk and death

In an extensive interview with New York TimesKilian Jornet opens up and speaks calmly about some of the most defining moments of both his life and career. Jornet begins by recounting his love for nature and for traversing mountains, pushing his body to its limits. "What made me fall in love with crossing mountains at high speed is the feeling of being naked and insignificant, without restrictions. It gives me freedom and connection," says the athlete.

The Catalan athlete recalls that his relationship with nature stems from his childhood. He grew up in a mountain refuge in the Pyrenees, with a father who was a mountain guide and a mother who was a teacher. He remembers that, as a child, they would go out into the forest at night and turn off their headlamps to learn to trust their other senses. This taught him to feel comfortable in nature, not as an external visitor, but as something that belongs to him. "I remember when we were little, we would often go into the woods with my mother before going to sleep, and then we would turn off our headlamps to make our way back to the shelter. At first, my sister and I were very scared. 'We have no light! How will we find the shelter?' And my mother would say, 'You listen to nature with your other senses.' What she taught us was to accept the environment."

His love for nature comes from his parents, but he developed his competitive spirit on his own. Jornet explains that from a young age he had a tendency to push his body to the limit. "I've been very competitive since I was little. I liked to suffer, to go out and push my body to the limit. Not many children like to do this, especially teenagers. I liked to ride my bike for six or seven hours. My dream was a climb that never ended. I just wanted to climb on my bike or run forever. I remember many days of running to school, which was 25 kilometers each way."

Along the same lines, the ultramarathon runner recalls an episode in which, when he was in school, to test his body, he stopped eating for a whole week and drank only water, and after five days he fainted while running. "I think exploring is part of our nature. And probably my curiosity was about exploring my body to understand it better. I remember saying to a friend, 'Take all the food out of my bedroom, and if I don't faint, don't give me anything, even if I beg you.' Four or five days later, I was training normally and training normally and..." Jornet recounts another episode, from a couple of years ago, on an expedition to Everest. "I wasn't climbing the normal route, but a different one. I was alone, and at 8,200 meters I was caught in an avalanche and broke some ribs. I had a very long descent ahead of me—more than 15 hours from that point. The weather wasn't good. I hadn't eaten for, I don't know, 15 hours, and I was completely alone. Normally. But somehow you find resources in other ways. It's like when a father or mother can lift much more weight than they thought possible if their child is in danger, or how in life-threatening situations we are capable of developing a strength or endurance we didn't know we had—something we don't want to reach, because death is likely to follow.

A tragedy that marked him

Death has been a constant presence in his life, especially since the death of his friend Stéphane Brosse in 2012, who fell from a cornice in front of them in the Alps. That event deeply affected him. "We lived close by, and that's why we started doing projects together. We had this project of crossing the Mont Blanc massif in one go on skis. We were almost finished and we were happy, on the summit, enjoying ourselves. There were some birds flying, and I remember it was very funny. We were walking and it wasn't very fun. Stepping on a cornice. With the strong wind, the snow is compacted by the rock. We were walking there and the snow broke under our feet. You don't really understand that, yes, it was about twenty years. He was forty, and had a family, and felt that it would have been much easier if I had died instead of him.

For a while he took excessive risks and turned to alcohol to cope with his grief. "Around that same time, after every race I would go to the after-party and drink a lot of alcohol. And I don't like alcohol. I don't like the taste." But for a couple of years, I got drunk a few times after the racing season, just to try to escape and cope with the grief." Today, with children, he acknowledges that his relationship with death has changed. He isn't afraid of dying himself, but he is afraid of leaving his children without a father. Faced with the current deterioration of the mountains due to the effects of climate change, he admits that he now questions the risks more and feels a new responsibility he didn't have before.