"Not even science can explain what Kilian Jornet does."

Barcelona"It's crazy," said Hans Troyer, a 25-year-old American athlete who recently became the U.S. champion in the 50-mile race, a roughly 80-kilometer mountain climb. A few weeks ago, Troyer and Chris Myers, two athletes who specialize in summit climbing, greeted Kilian Jornet at the foot of Pikes Peak, a 4,300-meter peak in the Colorado Rockies. The Catalan arrived by bicycle after pedaling for hours. He had just climbed another peak of over 4,200 meters. He arrived, drank water, greeted the two athletes with a laugh, and told them they could get going. Two hours later, they had reached the summit and were on their way down. Afterward, Jornet took a 30-minute nap, woke up, climbed back on his bike, and headed for the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. "It doesn't make any sense to see how he was climbing, at such a high pace, after so many kilometers on the bike. After so many days without resting," Troyer said. At that point, Kilian Jornet wasn't even halfway through his States of Elevation challenge, in which he has climbed all the peaks over 14,000 feet (about 4,000 meters) in the United States, excluding Hawaii and Alaska. The 72 summits were crowned by Jornet in 31 days.

The same day that Jornet climbed the last of the 72 peaks, Mount Rainier, in Washington State, many miles from home, a race was run the Salomon Ultra Pyrenees, the race where he started to make a name for himself by winning it for the first time in 2012. He was then a young athlete who was doing impressively in every race he entered, when the trail He wasn't as popular as he is now. This year, the athlete who emerged victorious in Bagà was Briton Jonathan Albon, who often trains with Jornet in Norway, where they both live. "Is it over yet?" he asked. "Kilian can't explain it. Not even science can explain how he does it," he joked with British humor. It's true that science analyzes Jornet's results after his goals, to try to understand how he does it, to find out why his body goes further than others.

When Jornet took on a similar challenge in the Alps, climbing 82 peaks over 4,000 meters in just 19 days, he was accompanied by a team that studied his body to gather as much data as possible. The team was made up of Jesús Álvarez-Herms, PhD in biology and biomedicine, professor at the University of the Basque Country, and Sergi Cinca, Health and high-performance sports advisor. Cinca explained that "Kilian has an exceptional mental side, with a very decisive resilience and focus. But he loves doing what he does. From the top of the mountains, Kilian feels liberated from everything," and emphasized that the mental side is just as important as the physical side. In fact, the experts concluded that "although he has better genetics than most people, he is not extremely exceptional. What makes the difference is epigenetics. Having grown up in a mountain environment has shaped his physiology and adaptive capacity." Epigenetics is a branch of genetics that studies how an individual's environment and history influence gene expression. And it's true that Jornet grew up on the peaks because his father worked at the Cap del Rec refuge and his mother was a mountain sports instructor. At the age of 5, he had already climbed Aneto, at 3,404 meters. "Being born in a mountain refuge leaves its mark on you. My parents were already passionate about the mountains. Sport appeared later in my life, but you could say that in a way I was already doing sport from the moment I learned to walk. When I went out for walks, the objective wasn't to reach the summit, it was to find a specific flower, interpret a noise... to learn." It was a game, he explained to ARA a few years ago.

In the coming days, Jornet's team will be analyzing the challenge he achieved in the United States, even more surprising than that of the Alps. "It would be like doing a stage of the Tour and then climbing a 4,000-meter peak. Going down and doing a new stage of the Tour. And so on," Albon explained this weekend. "He is happy doing these things," added the Briton. Another Briton, the journalist from The Guardian Andy Cochrane has been following the Catalan's adventures in the United States. When he interviewed him before leaving, Jornet told him he was deeply curious to explore the limits of his body, but also to discover the wild American wilderness. He wanted to explore those landscapes, traverse them without a trace, and chat with the country's people to learn more. That's why he planned the States of Elevation in detail, climbing peaks and riding on roads with more than 25 local athletes, who shared the secrets of every corner. Jornet wanted to learn. And he wanted to do it, as he told Cochrane, following "the most aesthetic path." He meant seeking beauty.

Jornet has highly valued some sections of his journey where "for days you didn't meet anyone," as happened when he cycled from Colorado, where most of the peaks over 4,200 meters were concentrated, to California, crossing the desert areas of Nevada. He always followed routes as far removed from humankind as possible, to find "only lakes, rocks, and the sky," although at one point he rode along the famous Route 66. Many want to do it by car or motorcycle. He did it by bicycle after climbing more than 45 peaks. An exception was on asphalt, on an adventure in which Jornet made video calls with his daughters, who followed him from Norway, where he lives with his partner, the Swedish athlete Emelie Forsberg.

The athletes who accompanied Jornet on sections of his adventure were surprised by his good humor. When he was alone, he would listen to music to motivate himself. As a father, on this journey he's listened to many Norwegian children's songs, which his daughters, who speak Norwegian, Swedish, and Catalan, hear at school. It's a way of feeling close to home. But he's also experienced difficult days, with strong winds and bad weather, which have meant that, especially in the Colorado region, he's had to be patient and slow down his pace on some days. Nevertheless, Jornet finished the States of Elevation two days ahead of his team's schedule. On average, Jornet has slept about three or four hours a day. In the last 10 days, he only allowed himself one normal night, when he arrived in the California town of Bishop, in the eastern Sierra region. He took a hot shower for the first time in days, slept in a modest hotel, and went to a roadside supermarket where he bought a pizza and four other things for dinner. The next day he was already climbing toward White Mountain, which he would summit and find the snow-capped peak, which meant it took him longer than he had expected. Jornet has surpassed all predictions, but he feels he could have done it even faster if he hadn't caught "the strongest cold wind" he could remember at times.

Now science will analyze his body, which doesn't usually lose weight. See what conclusions can be drawn about his diet or his efforts. Keep learning. But everyone who knows Jornet is clear about this. One of the keys is that he enjoys doing these things, as if it were a return to his happy childhood in the Pyrenees. "If you have a bad day, you look around and see the rising sun, the setting sun. And you see beauty," explains a man who admits he also suffers from moments of stress, but due to things like "work or family matters": "You have to find a balance. I often don't train on weekends to be with my family, as it is every day. Every day is different, so is every challenge. "When you explore and see new things, these things can be both outside and inside of us. "I love seeing new landscapes, and when you run, you travel with your feet, and that's beautiful," he told American journalists who had gathered to see him in action. "It's hard to explain what he does. He's a man unlike any other. What I know for sure is that he does it because he enjoys it. You could see it in his eyes," said Hans Troyer.