Kilian Jornet’s Western States story now comes with an injured knee, an imperfect build, and a question that feels larger than race fitness: what happens when the plan breaks?
Photo by Mike McMonagle
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re having a computer issue with our aircraft and unfortunately need to return to the gate.”
The announcement dropped like a lead balloon. We had already left the gate late, then spent half an hour creeping toward the runway. Now we were headed back. I had a long run waiting in Colorado, and the temperature was climbing by the minute.
A few days earlier, the same airline had kept us on the plane in Chicago for 90 minutes after landing because of “mechanical issues.”
I was fuming.
I thought about something Rachel Entrekin said in an interview I’d read recently while researching for a story. Last year, when things got hard at Cocodona, she didn’t like who emerged. So she worked on changing that.
I knew what she meant. I can be an ass when things don’t go my way. Not ideal in ultrarunning. Not great anywhere else either.
When the plane finally took off, I opened a Kilian Jornet video I’d saved to watch for this week’s column. He was talking about his injured knee.
The lead-up to Western States hasn’t been clean. He raced Zegama, a race he loves and has won so often he feels stitched into the place. But this year his leg stopped cooperating. He felt fine climbing. On flats and downhills, he couldn’t control it. Then it started to hurt. So he backed off, took in the crowd, thanked people, and treated a bad day at a race he loves like something other than an emergency.
I watched that while stewing over my delayed flight and felt, again, called out.
After Zegama, Kilian finally got an MRI. He said he’d avoided one for years. The scan showed a damaged external meniscus, edema, thinning cartilage, and inflammation (source: Kilian’s Substack). His team told him to stop running. Four weeks out from Western States, one of the greatest mountain runners ever wasn’t running. His response was almost unnervingly calm.
Kilian Jornet’s Western States Gamble
“It’s a bit of a gamble,” he said. “But we are here to play.”
That sounded like someone who knows perfect plans are fiction.
Kilian Jornet’s childhood probably helps explain some of this. He grew up in the Pyrenees, with a mountain-guide father and a mother who climbed, ran, and moved freely through the mountains. He and his sister were always outside: forest, snow, rock, skis, trees. By five, he was learning ropes, crevasses, crampons, ice axes, and glaciers. By his teens, he was out for 15- or 16-hour days with little food or water.
That is not a childhood hobby. That is an education.
The mountains teach some lessons gently and others the hard way. Weather turns. Legs go bad. Food runs low. The route does not care about your mood. You can burn energy being angry, or deal with what’s in front of you. Kilian seems unusually good at the second option.
In his video, he talks about pain almost casually. Not recklessly, but definitely without much romance. If you train a lot, something is always hurting. Some people hate racing with discomfort. He seems able to go with it and see. I don’t think that’s medical advice. It may be terrible advice for the rest of us. But as a window into Kilian, it’s useful. He isn’t pretending the knee is fine, Western States is ideal, or four weeks off is normal prep. He just seems curious about the problem.
Can he perform well at Western States after four weeks off running and maybe two weeks back before race day? That’s how he framed it. Not an excuse. A challenge worth trying. That’s the kind of story that gets me excited heading into race day.
I want to see what happens if the race won’t let him be the Kilian people think they know.
What Western States Will Ask of Kilian Jornet
Western States is not Zegama, Hardrock, or UTMB. It is hot, runnable, fast, and very good at exposing whatever problem you bring. A bad knee there is not a footnote. It could be the whole story of his day. Or it could be a 2019 Tiger at the Masters kind of day. I’m rooting for the latter. But either way, I’m inspired by how Kilian handles the setback.
My flight got to Colorado. I got my run in. It was hot. I stayed irritated too long. Nobody benefited from that, least of all me. And somewhere during that run, I kept thinking about Kilian Jornet calling Western States a gamble and what I could learn from it.
Not every delay is a crisis. Not every bad patch deserves the worst version of us. Sometimes the plan breaks, the knee hurts, the plane turns around, the day gets hotter, and the useful thing is to stop wasting energy and see what can still be done.
We are here to play.
