As most longtime Slowtwitch readers know (this would be anyone who's read us for more than three months), we adopt a broad interpretation of what falls under the umbrella of multisport (which fortuitously increases the breadth and reach of possible advertisers). Also, we are a little kooky. Nowhere will both truisms appear more evident than in the following serialized article.

I resist hedging in triathlon. I prefer to call it multisport, and even that encumbers the idea I prefer to harbor in my psyche. I believe in ideas and types—notions best described in a series of novels by the English writer Charles Williams, the best of which is "The Place of the Lions."

The Idea I’m trying to portray here is that of an endurance life: a life well lived, with a strong endurance component to it and with elements of adventure, discovery, and a bit of danger sifted in. The archetype is John Muir. Anybody reading about Muir (better yet is to read Muir himself ) can't come away without a sense that he earned his living half as a scientist and half as a professional multisport athlete. More on him later.

I've tried to build a Type in my mind's eye, starting with Muir and encompassing others who exhibit the familiar qualities of explorer, extreme endurance athlete, thinker-scientist, and pixie imp. They are presented roughly in chronological order.

Over the next few days and weeks I'll plug along, fleshing out each of these men one at a time. Perhaps at the end of this exercise—if I've performed it well—our readers will understand what ties them all together and makes them all of a type.

Cabeza de Vaca
David Douglas
Jedediah Smith
John Jeffrey
Hugh Glass
Snoeshow Thompson
John Muir
JulieAnne White
Chief Joseph
Ernest Shackleton
Jon Krakauer



CABEZA DE VACA

The first thing that made me stop in my tracks and take notice of this Spanish explorer was his name: Cow Head? That, however, is the least atypical thing about him.

Those of us living the endurance life today set out to achieve goals. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca took a very unintended journey. Cabeza de Vaca made his first—and last—trip to America in the spring of 1528, landing near Tampa Bay as second in command to Panfilo de Narvaez, a veteran conquistador. The mission was to explore, conquer and settle lands. A fully expected dividend of the trip was the enlargement of their retinue through the enslavement of Indians along the way. They started north with a complement of 400 men and 80 horses.

They were to reunite with their ships at a harbor to the north, but the parties were separated and, after a year of searching, the ships continued on to New Spain, never to see their companions again.

The Spanish eventually fell in with Appalachee Indians around present-day Tallahassee, and in due time fell out with them. Illness and the deadly accuracy of the Appalachee bowmen, whose arrows could pierce Spanish armor, took their toll. (It later became evident to Europeans that Florida Indians were the best and most accurate long-bowmen in the world at that time. Some were brought home to Spain to demonstrate their amazing skill.)

The only hope of survival for the 240 remaining soldiers was to make their way back to Mexico along the coast. They fashioned ropes from palmetto fibers and horsehair, used their shirts for sails, and made barges from horsehides. They dragged their vessels over and through the marshes and, in September of 1528, set out to sea.

Two of the waterlogged vessels landed on Galveston Island in November, without the benefit of arms and also without their commander Narvaez. In an ironic twist, coastal Karankawa Indians enslaved the remaining Spanish, including Cabeza de Vaca.

During the next several years Cabeza de Vaca survived and, in a manner, prospered by developing a reputation as a "medicine man." Although all his former companions had died or were disbursed, he eventually reacquainted himself with three of them—two Spaniards and the Moorish slave of one of them, Estevanico—as he traveled from one village to another.

The foursome resumed their attempt to reach Mexico and in the process learned Indian languages and ways. They posed as healers and miracle workers, and their fame spread before them. They were escorted from village to village as they made their way, best as they could determine, in a direction more or less toward Mexico. During their journey Cabeza de Vaca had grown to resent the enslaving, conquering ways of the Spanish and began to consider himself no longer a pretender but a legitimate healer of the Indians he met.

They traveled eastward along the coast, ascended the Rio Grande, made their way across New Mexico to Arizona (none of which had yet been reached by the Spanish), and eventually turned south. They found their way to the west coast of Mexico and the present-day Sinaloan town of Culiacan. In the process they became the first Europeans to cross the continent from the east to Mesoamerica.

In the spring of 1536, Spaniards hunting slaves in northeastern Mexico came across a black man (Estevanico) and a white man (Cabeza de Vaca) dressed as Indians with a trailing escort of 600. Only by explaining to his Indian escort the evil intentions of his countrymen was he able to save them. The Indians didn't understand how a celebrator of life, Cabeza de Vaca, could be related to the agents of death, the Spaniards. They barely escaped.

So ended Cabeza de Vaca's eight-year sojourn.

Estevanico was to return to New Mexico as a guide for the Spanish, dying there at the hands of Indians. Cabeza de Vaca never returned to North America.



DAVID DOUGLAS

For those who thought the tale of Cabeza de Vaca was off topic, at least you must grant this: He interfaced with both the terrestrial and the aquatic medium as we triathletes do—although in the latter case he might have been disqualified for using a flotation device. The rules were different in the 16th century, one supposes, especially when life and limb were at stake.

Everything noteworthy achieved by David Douglas occurred on land, as far as I know. (And I hope I shall be forgiven for straying further yet from the topic, or, as they often wrote in Douglas' time, topick.)

Douglas was of a particular species of explorer/naturalist of which I've grown fond. The early 19th century saw a proliferation of what has been called the Victorian Scientific Travelers. Best known among them are Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Alfred Wallace, Joseph Hooker, and Joseph Banks. Perhaps these men—and their missions—tend to be more well-known because of the ground-breaking theories that sprang from their discoveries—most obviously the theory of evolution, co-discovered by Darwin and Wallace, expounded upon by Huxley. Also, such missions tended to take place in more exotic Southern Hemisphere locales, such as the Amazon and sub-Saharan Africa.

I have a softer spot in my heart for a lesser known "sub-species." All, or most, were Scottish. They include David Douglas, Thomas Nuttall, John Jeffrey and the best known—if least science-specific—of them all, John Muir. While the better known Victorian scientist/explorers were not necessarily Scottish, it seems that the plant and tree hunters of the Western U.S. almost exclusively were, for some reason I have yet to uncover. They seemed to want to float over to the New World and traipse over and through mountains in search of new trees and plants.

David Douglas may have been the first. Ponderosa and sugar pines—the largest and tallest of the world's pine trees, respectively—were first described by him. His name is attached to the Douglas fir, one of the world's tallest trees and the signature tree of the Northwest.

There is something incongruous about the way history treats this class of scientists. Their preeminent place in the world of botany overshadows the mere fact that men like Douglas were the first to see the trees of the West, and that means—by definition—that they were the first to see much of the West. Nothing against the "discoverers" of the West like John C. Fremont, but David Douglas had seen, mapped, sketched, and hauled away 125-pound sacks of seeds a generation before Fremont first crossed the Sierra.

Funny enough, the tree named after Douglas was not first seen or described by him. Douglas would not see the tree until 1825, while Archibald Menzes first described it in 1792. But Douglas did catalogue it for science. He fell into a pit meant to snare wild animals in Hawaii shortly after making his discoveries and was trampled to death by a wild bullock. As you will read from here on in, so many of those I admire didn't live very long, and died while engaged in the pursuits that made them famous.



JEDEDIAH SMITH

To me, it is not just what Smith accomplished that is so compelling, but that he did it all while so young.

William Ashley ran the preeminent fur trading enterprise of the West, and in 1826 sold his interest to three who had worked for him. The new firm was called Smith, Jackson, and Sublette. The deal was constructed the same year David Douglas was traversing the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges finding and cataloguing never-before-seen trees.

Jedediah Smith was a partner in the firm, and the following year set out to explore—and, for business purposes, catalogue—the beaver populations of rivers to the southwest. In so doing he became perhaps the first non-Spanish person to cross Spanish territory into San Diego.

The best way to read about Smith is to read Smith himself. His eminently readable journals of his Southwest Expedition describe in vibrant tones his trek, and his day-to-day events include, for example, catching a boat ride to Catalina Island with Richard Henry Dana.

Smith was hardy beyond measure. A chance encounter with a bear was the proximate cause of flesh being peeled back from his face. Conscious throughout, he talked a companion through the process of sewing him up.

But Smith is best known for his trip across the Sierra and the Great Basin back to the Rockies. In so doing he became the first white man to complete the hardest part of the transcontinental crossing.

Smith died some years later in a run-in with native Indians. After all he had accomplished as an adventurer, businessman, writer, explorer and discoverer, this sparsely educated man had only reached the age of 32.



JOHN JEFFREY

I remember the day I saw my first tree. I was perhaps 37 or 38 years old. I was running in a forest in the Sierra Nevada, and of course I'd seen trees before, but I stopped dead in my tracks and stared at this one particular tree for ten or 15 minutes. That started it for me.

I got books on trees—identifiers, field guides, everything I could find. Then I happened upon an author who is the Shakespeare of New World trees. Donald Culross Peattie's masterpiece is "A Natural History of Western Trees," written in the 1950s. It is the closest thing I have to a devotional. I read it and reread it. I have friends who don't share my enthusiasm for trees yet are enthralled by Peattie's book.

It may be used as a field guide, but it tells more than simply how to know one tree from another. Peattie set about describing a foxtail pine, and before I quote from him, I should say something about this tree. If you start walking up into the Sierra from, say, Fresno, and you want to see evergreen trees, you will first come to digger pines, at about 3,500 feet in elevation. Then you'll reach Ponderosa pines, perhaps white firs, incense cedars, sugar pines and, if you're lucky, giant California bigtrees. Further up, as you leave any hint of paved road and permanent structure you'll see red firs, Lodgepole pines, and in the windswept heights, whitebark pines. As you crest ridges and reach the treeline, with nothing but glacial ponds and moonscapes around you, you'll finally reach the foxtail pine. You'll have walked for days, in the roughest terrain of the West, to get this far. No stores. No cabins. And this is now, in the 21st century. Imagine it 150 years ago, when there was—for all practical purposes—no such thing as Los Angeles (as we know it), let alone Fresno.

In Peattie's description of the foxtail, he remembers that first person who found and described this tree for science: "In the days when there were few roads of any sort in California, one region was as inaccessible as another, and botanical explorers, though few in number a century ago, expected nothing but hardships in the West, wherever they went. So that John Jeffrey, the Scottish explorer and discoverer of this species, made his way to the stands of this tree in the Scott Mountains, as early as 1852. Jeffrey was always a lonely man, collecting far out ahead of civilization, claiming few friends. Thus he was not quickly missed when he disappeared forever, having set out from San Diego to cross the Colorado desert in search of new plants. He was either killed by Indians or died of thirst. No trace of his end has ever been found."

Those few words, that small paragraph, is all I know about John Jeffrey. My attempts to find out more have been thwarted. But I wonder about him. As he wandered the Sierra in the late 1840s and early '50s I wonder what a lonely, solitary, scientific explorer might have thought about the Mexican-American War waged in California as other explorers, such as John C. Fremont, took up the charge against Californios whose families had lived there for centuries. Or about the greed and folly of the Gold Rush—just underway—with the subsequent wiping out of California's Native Americans on a scale unmatched anywhere else in North America.

Or maybe he didn't think about any of that. I don't know. In a way, I hope I never know. My most enduring heroes are the ones I thankfully don't know very much about.



HUGH GLASS

There are a few things I don't do. Like any race that is a multiple of the Ironman distance. Or 100-mile running races. Let's face it, 100-mile cycling races are hard. And then there's Hugh Glass.

He was so described by a fellow mountain man: "In point of adventures dangers & narrow escapes & capacity for endurance, & the sufferings which befel him, this man was preeminent..."

But you could use the same terms to describe Jed Smith, Joe Meek, Jim Bridger, Joe Walker, in short, just about any of these intrepid fellows. As to the particulars of Hugh Glass, I'll liberally pepper my tale with quotes from Robert M. Utley's, A Life Wild and Perilous.

In the 1820s Andrew Henry led a party of mountain men overland, Hugh Glass included, through the high plains to the mouth of the Yellowstone River. Glass mistakenly encountered a grizzly sow and her cubs. She mauled him from head to toe.

"He lay on his back, bleeding from gashes in his scalp, face, chest, back, shoulder, arm, hand, and thigh. With each gasp, blood bubbled from a puncture in his throat...

"He should have been dead by now. The men bandaged his wounds but could do little else. By the next morning he still had not died. Henry could tarry no longer. At any moment he could encounter Arikaras. Fashioning a crude litter, the men hoisted Glass on their shoulders and resumed the march. They made agonizingly slow progress. Finally, after several days, Henry resolved that he could no longer risk the entire party for a man certain to die. He offered an enticing sum to anyone who would volunteer to stay behind and care for Glass until he died. John S. Fitzgerald and nineteen-year-old Jim Bridger stepped forward."

These two who stayed behind eventually caught up with the others, with Glass' rifle and possessions, stating the Glass eventually died and was buried. But he hadn't.

Glass "... could not walk but he could crawl. Berries and a torpid rattlesnake smashed with a stone provided his first nourishment. The Grand River supplied water. He dug edible roots with a sharp rock. Chance turned up a dead buffalo with marrow still rich in the bones. Later wolves brought down a buffalo calf that he succeeded in seizing. In a six-week demonstration of incredible strength, fortitude, luck, and determination, Glass crawled back to Fort Kiowa, nearly two hundred miles."

Further on, in a demonstration of incredible restraint, he forgave those who abandoned him. Hugh Glass eventually died at the hands of the Arikaras, those Indians Andrew Henry's party was trying to avoid, ironically and inadvertantly causing Glass his fateful run-in with the bear.

And you thought the Natural Energy Lab was tough.

I hope Utley and his publisher will forgive my liberal use of his words, and that Slowtwitch readers might consider reading the rest of Utley's hugely interesting book, and might also think about the other master work of this genre, Bernard DeVoto's Across the Wide Missouri.



SNOW-SHOE THOMPSON

As it happens, I spent many years in the Sierra Nevada mountains, much of them just south of Lake Tahoe. I did so while enjoying a mini-career as a mediocre nordic ski racer. One cannot ski cross-country in the Tahoe basin without hearing the legends of Snow-shoe Thompson.

John Thomson (his name's actual spelling, but his memory will be forever fettered with the "p") was a Norwegian-born immigrant to the American West. He started hauling mail over the Sierras, from Placerville (in the Sacramento foothills) to Genoa (Nevada) in 1856. He would continue this route for 20-years, until his untimely death of illness at 49-years-old.

He never took money for carrying the mail, even when it was offered. He did it for the challenge, and for the sense of accomplishment. He had no sleeping bag, no tent, not even a warm coat. He relied on constant motion, and the occasional campfire, to keep him warm during the journey. It would take him two-to-three days to do the trip, and I seriously doubt many "adventure racers" of today could duplicate the route in that period of time in the dead of winter without re-supply.

This is especially true when you consider that he built his fir-planked skis while relying on his childhood memories. They were 10-feet long, 5-inches wide, and 2-inches thick. Anyone who has ever seen a pair of jumping skis close up would have an idea of their massive dimensions (but not their much more massive weight).

Thompson himself was a giant of a man, so it appears. He not only did the journey countless times, he did it with 50- to 80-pounds of mail on his back. There are plenty of stories of how Thompson saved or rescued this person or that during his travels through the deep winter snows of the Sierras. Remember, at this time there were no roads cutting through the passes. Only 30-years prior to Thompson's initial mail-run had the first white man -- Jed Smith -- ever crossed the Sierras from west to east at all.

If you go to Genoa -- a small Nevadan hamlet at the base of a steep Eastern Sierra peak -- you'll see Snow-shoe Thompson's headstone, with a pair of nordic skis engraved in the granite.

JOHN MUIR

As my life changes -- as my perception of things (or might I flatter myself by saying my understanding of things?) changes -- I keep running into John Muir.

He was a Scot. Many of the people on my list of endurance heroes are Scots, and although I am about three-eighths Scottish I don't feel any resultant affinity or nationalism. It just seems that California appealed to a brand of Victorian-era Scottish wanderlust, and it was to California's mountains they came to explore and experience.

The John Muir I envy most is the young man living in Yosemite about 130-years ago, who would think nothing of climbing up the sheer face of Half Dome; scaling Yosemite, Vernal, or Bridal Veil Falls; who'd arise early and set off for a 2- or 3-day jaunt up and around never-before-trod-upon (at least by white men) mountains and valleys.

"Early in the morning I tied my notebook and some bread to my belt, and stole away full of eager hope, feeling that I was going to have a glorious revery. The glacier meadows that lay along my way served to soothe my morning speed..."

That passage comes from his own "My First Summer in the Sierra," one among Muir's many volumes on his travels that crackle with adventure, understanding, and awe. As one reads Muir one can sense the evolution in the relationship between a singular man and his environment. First comes noticing, and many never get this far. I didn't get this far for the first 35-years of my life. I loved the mountains and their flora and fauna for years, but only in a macro sense. I noticed trees in general, but not in the particular. Muir saw the forest and the trees.

Throughout Muir's life noticing his environment gave way to an understanding of it; to a mature appreciation of it; and finally to his to responsibility it. When he no more could gallup his way through his beloved Sierra he spoke on its behalf -- appealing to Teddy Roosevelt for its protection, and founding and becoming the first president of the Sierra Club.

Muir was a geologist, glaciologist, botanist -- and more than that, a plant ecologist, when this wasn't even a discipline -- explorer, conservationist, lobbyist, and an inventor. While I revere him for all the above, the John Muir I currently admire is the one who struggled midway through all the above as a farmer and businessman in the flatlands of California. I admire his decision to live away from his beloved Sierra, as I am forced to do, to honor his responsibilities to his family.

Why does Muir make my list? Beyond everything listed, he was an athlete. Make no mistake about that. The competitive event wasn't there -- but his ability certainly was.

One reads over and over how Muir would thrust a crust of bread under his belt and take off for days, with no tent or bedding. It tempts my imagination just wondering at the distance and difficulty of terrain he traversed in a given span of time -- and with such little sustenance. Were I limited to eating bread on a multi-day mountain journey I'd haul foccaccia loaf the dimensions of a small mattress. If I was limited to a roll thrust under my belt I'd resort to the baguette the length of a javelin my local french bakery whips up. I am awed not only by Muir's ability to undergo hardship, but in the way he relished the experience while ignoring the discomfort.

Most of all I'm appreciative of the way Muir engaged in a total experience: covering more of the mass of the central Sierra than just about anyone could during a lifetime while collecting truckloads of specimens, and while formulating controversial -- eventually proven true -- theories on glaciation, and on the evolutionary cycle and historical range of giant sequoias. And he did it all on the run. But he was equally at home sitting silently for hours observing his favorite Sierra native, the water ouzel: a tiny bird, always happy, never forlorn or complaining, at perfect peace and rest while spending its entire life in the tempest of a Yosemite waterfall. Muir's life and that of the water ouzel -- no doubt he noticed the parallel.

JULIEANNE WHITE

A woman who reads Slowtwitch wrote me not long ago and asked, "How come all your role models are male? Aren't you ignoring your female readers?"

I have two replies. First, these are not THE long distance role models, they are MY long distance role models. Through accidents of gender -- or due to the bias of historians and journalists -- the lives and stories of these people have exercised an influence over me.

That said, I do have females I look up to. Perhaps my bias is uncovered in that I thought of my role models sequentially: male first, and then female.

But that does not mean the females influence me less because they've come later in this series.

I do remember a case in point -- an English runner about whom I write in an article on Sufferers. But there is another female English runner whose travails and triumphs, habits and disciplines, influence me every day. My wife.

I've known a lot of world class athletes, and in a certain way I respond with a bit of awe toward all of them. To the degree that I know them I'm less "impressed," and I mean that in a literal way. They make less of an impression on me, simply by virtue of my level of familiarity with them. And then I've got the world class athlete I know best of all, the one with whom I've lived for the past ten years.

After awhile the process goes in reverse. The awe doesn't wear off, it grows. You start to see how a person operates in his or her daily life -- work, health, chores, family, weather, all impinge. They all ask for time and energy. They all weigh. And yet I see JulieAnne stick to her routine, day after day.

Like day before yesterday. I was inside, typing at this computer, and it was raining like a Moen shower head outside. And it was cold. JulieAnne was out there in it, somewhere in the middle of a 23-mile run (She ran 102 miles last week).

"Let's reason through this." Upon looking at the black clouds moving toward us in the morning, that's what I'd have said to myself during one of my internal dialogues if I'd have been the one with a 23-miler on the schedule. She has no internal dialogue. Hers is a monologue. Only one opinion gets to hold the microphone. And that's the difference between she and I, and between any world class athlete and those of us who watch and aspire.

I must speak of another female distance runner who I admire, and who also -- luckily for me -- is somebody with whom I have the pleasure to live. That would be Grete, JulieAnne's partner for any of her runs up to six or eight miles. Except Grete tops out at four miles, nowadays, as she's on chemotherapy. Grete had her cancerous spleen removed just under 4 months ago. We have the doggy oncologist, and the doggy chemotherapy (two types) and the doggy recovery formulas, and all that. Grete, not knowing that she's supposed to be sick, was ready to run again within 3 days of her surgery. We made her wait 10 days, though, and then slowly brought her back. She hasn't missed a day since. We don't know how long we'll have her, but she remains a joy to us, and even though she's a dog, there's something inspiring about anything that gets up and can't wait to go out and run. We've got six dogs, and they all like to run, but there's something about the way this dog loves to run that is unique to her.

There's something both humbling and inspiring about living with those who can keep to a schedule. Yes, JulieAnne has a lot more than simply her diligence going for her. Lots of people have that and yet can get nowhere near a 9:08 Ironman. But I know far more who have the talent, but not the discipline. My wife has both. Having seen the entire package up close, I'm quite sure the discipline counts for more.

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