The Daily
'The Interview': Kílian Jornet on What We Can Learn From Pushing Our Bodies to Extremes
17 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, I'm Juliette from New York Times Games, and I'm here talking to fans about our games. You play New York Times Games? Yes, every day. There's this little tab down here called Friends, so you can add your friend. That feels new to me. It is. It's nice to have the social aspect. Oh my God, and you have all the times. That's crazy. You can look at spelling bee, wordle, connections.
Oh my God, amazing. Love that. I'll have to get the app. New York Times Games subscribers can now add friends in the Friends tab. Find out more at nytimes.com slash games. From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. Imagine yourself on an isolated mountain pass.
The wind is whipping, the air is thin, there's nothing around you except the sky and the sound of your feet hitting the craggy ground. Many of us have experienced the wonder and exertion that comes with being in the world's wild spaces. But for Killian Jornet, it is much more than that. Jornet is a professional ultramarathoner whose life's work is to literally run up mountains.
But even in that world of elite athletes, he is exceptional. He holds the fastest known time for scaling Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, to name just a few. He's gone up Everest twice in the space of a week, and he did it with no supplementary oxygen and without support. His physical stamina has been studied by researchers, and he's pushed the limits of what is considered physically possible.
And then, just last fall, he completed his most radical adventure, which he called States of Elevation. He climbed 72 of the highest peaks in the western United States over the course of just a month. And for good measure, he also cycled between all of them, a ride totaling over 2,400 miles. I mean, I'm exhausted just imagining it.
But as I discovered in our conversation, he also is a deep thinker who has important lessons to impart about what our bodies and minds are capable of when we push them to extremes and the joy and danger that effort can bring. Here's my interview with Spanish ultramarathoner Kylian Tournette. And Killian, you know, I am not a athlete, certainly not an elite athlete.
And I find what you do so incredibly unusual. When you tell people what you do, how do you describe it?
I always said that I just love to be in the mountains and like it's where I feel home and it's where I feel like connected with the landscape and the environment and what I do is just like to explore them and I think like running or climbing or like biking or... It's just tools to explore those mountains.
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Chapter 2: What unique experiences does Kílian Jornet share about pushing physical limits?
And as humans, we are made to walk and to run and to do that for hours. That's what we did for thousands of years, just hunting. And now we don't need to do it. So we find the sport as the excuse to continue moving our body. But really, for me, just to be out as long as I can in the mountains.
You've written in your book that what made me fall in love with traversing mountains at high speed is the feeling it gives me of being naked and inconsequential, unrestrained. It brings me freedom and connection. What are you connecting with?
I think in the most, in the first essence, it's to connect with oneself. We live in a society that we are over...
overconnected with so many things and like we are every day getting like every second like we are getting information like in social media on the news on on everything of things that they are very far away and we don't find the often the time to connect with ourselves with our body with our mind And with our, yeah, the people that we love.
So often when I go to run in the mountains is to find this connection. And it's through this connection with the landscape that we find ourselves.
You've been connected to the mountains since you were a child. You grew up in a mountain lodge in the Pyrenees. Your father was a mountain guide. Your mother was a teacher. What did your parents teach you about how to be in nature?
What's funny is that both my parents, they were really far away from competition. They had the background of classical mountaineering, and it was never about competing and winning, but it was always about exploring. I remember when we were kids, often before going to bed, we were...
going out to the forest with my mother and we were going out for a few minutes and then we were closing our lights our headlamps and then we were like getting back to the to the lodge at the beginning we were very scared like me and my sister like okay we don't have any any light how we will find our our lodge and my mother was there like saying no just like listen to
see the nature through other senses, like with the wind, with the sounds, and we get more comfortable there. So what they probably teach us was to accept the environment, to accept to be there.
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Chapter 3: How does Kílian Jornet define his connection with nature?
In terms of sport, it's kind of the same. I mean, it's some things that you can't explain rationally. I remember when I was crossing in the Pyrenees and in the Alps in the last years, I had a lot of episodes of deja vus. And deja vus, they lasted for a very long time. And I remember one time climbing in the Himalayas. I was completely without any nutrition.
I had not been drinking or eating anything for more than 30 hours. And I was at 1,200 meters. I was in the middle of a storm, and I was hallucinating. I had a vision of a second person that was following me, and I couldn't see what was this person. I knew that it was an hallucination, but I somehow needed to save this person. I felt very responsible of this person.
I'm happy that I had this hallucination because somehow like having the responsibility to save this person, I didn't give up and I survived that day that if not, probably I would be dead in the mountain. So like sometimes it feels that it's our unconsciousness that it's finding tools to keep us like moving, to keep us alive. Some people would say it was a miracle.
Yeah, you could say it's a miracle. You could say that it's just that when your rationale is not working anymore, that your unconsciousness is taking over and acting for you. So you can call it whatever, but then there are some ways that we have to keep going and that normally in our daily life we are not able to activate.
What are you thinking about when you're putting one foot in front of the other and you're in these wild spaces? What is on your mind? Mm-hmm.
I mean, if it's a very demanding or very technical route, then it's really like you are just thinking about the next movement. And it's just like, if I go this direction or this direction, if I do this move that way, and what's the danger in the next two steps? So it's not really any deep thoughts. But then it's like, I would say most of the time, It's just like enjoying it.
And I was doing like the past September a long project here in the US, like from Colorado to Washington.
States of Elevation.
Yeah, exactly. Like I was biking and running and mostly on all these national parks. Like it's so wild, the nature. And it wasn't technically demanding, so I could like really enjoy the landscapes and just like arriving to a summit and seeing a nice sunrise and the shape of the mountains and having an encounter with an elk or any wildlife like goats in the summits.
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Chapter 4: What lessons did Kílian learn from his upbringing in the mountains?
We were in Mont Blanc area in the Alps, and Stefan was first an idol. When I started ski mountaineering, he was winning all the races. It was something that I looked up to. And then he became a friend. We were living nearby, so we started to do some projects together. And we had this project of crossing the Mont Blanc range in one push in skis.
And we were like in the, before last summit, so we were almost finishing and it was like, we were happy, we were like just in the summit, like enjoying and like, it was some birds that they were flying around and we were just like, I remember like we were like smiling and laughing about where we were and how fun it was.
And we were walking on that ridge, and we didn't notice that we were walking on a cornice. So it's this snow that with the wind, it forms in the ridges. And because the wind is strong, the snow is compact, but it's not holding into the rock. So we were walking there and the snow break in between our feet. So he fell like 600 meters and I was in the other side and I stayed on
the snow um and for me it was kind of yeah the first time like i grew up in a family of mountaineers so i i knew about the risk i knew about what death is but uh Not until that point that it really happened close to me. I really understand that, yeah, that's something that is real and that it's happening and it's happening here. And at that point, I was like 20 years old.
He was 40 years old with the family. And I felt like it would be so much easier if I died instead of him because, like, yeah, my parents would be sad. But I didn't have that many connections. I mean, like, so I, yeah. It took me a time to accept that and probably the years after I was taking too much risks in the mountain just to try to see if it was a mistake that he was dying instead of me.
What do you mean? Can we just stop here? Because it's interesting to me that you didn't deal with that death by taking a step back. You actually pushed yourself harder. Why?
I don't know. I think it's like probably for me it was more like to... to try to see if it was a mistake. If it was me that was mean to die in the mountain that day and he was just in the wrong side of the ridge. And somehow mountains is the place where I felt connected, where he felt connected to. So it's not a place that I would abandon because it's dangerous. It's just...
I think I was just dealing with the grief when I was young. And at the same period, I was racing, and after every race, I was going to the party of the race and drinking a lot of alcohol. And I don't like alcohol. I don't like the flavor. I have never drank. And for a couple of years, I was just getting drunk a few times a year after the race season.
It was just ways to try to escape and to deal with the grieving.
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