I asked Buzz Burrell to name the best trail he has ever run, and he said, “The next one.” I asked him what a mountain is, and he apologized for being a rotten guest. “A topographic prominence,” he said. “Sorry.” When I welcomed him as a legend, he corrected the record: “I’m a person who hasn’t died yet. That’s my claim to fame.”
It would be easy to hear all of that as evasion. It took me most of our ninety minutes together to hear it as a philosophy, and a consistent one. In 2000, before he and Peter Bakwin ran the John Muir Trail, Buzz went looking for the record and could not find one, so he settled on a phrase that admitted the limits of what anyone could know: the fastest known time. Today “FKT” is an everydayis everyday shorthand among trail runners, and Buzz cares far more about the third word than the first two. He has spent a lifetime choosing things for his own reasons, telling almost no one, and trusting the reasons to be enough. He gives away what he has learned in asides and one-liners, usually while apologizing, and this essay is my attempt to make up for some of his past evasions.
A dance with gravity
The topographic prominence was only the first half of his answer. The second half was the oldest line in the traveler’s book: no matter where you go, there you are. When I pushed back, he gave me a better definition. What we are doing out there, he said, is dancing with gravity. You feel it going uphill and you feel it going down, and on a river you feel it the whole way.
He has studied how each landscape asks you to dance. In climbing, bailing is always available: the weather turns, or something in you isn’t right, and you rap off. In canyoneering, once you pull the rope on the first rappel, you are committed to going through, and on a river, once you run the drop, you are going down. Most of us choose our terrain without asking what it gives and what it takes. For Buzz, the mountains give space and the option to retreat, and the canyon takes that option away.
Quitting everyone else’s game
Buzz’s story begins with a bad coach. In high school in Michigan the training was intervals on the track every day. At seventeen he was assigned thirty quarter-mile repeats in a single session on a cinder track, and at the district meet that Saturday he could barely walk. “The coach could have used a little coaching himself,” Buzz said. His conclusion: “This is stupid. I hate this sport. I quit.”
Is it really quitting, though? Plenty of us walk away from a sport, a team, or a coach and later find our way back to some version of the thing we left. Buzz draws the line precisely. “I like to run,” he said, “but it’s time to step out of this game. That’s everyone else’s rules.” He quit the game and kept the running. In 1969 he walked out his door in Kalamazoo and ran west toward Lake Michigan, a big body of blue water that pulled at him the way a summit pulls at a climber. He carried no food and no water. “I care about what’s in my heart. I care about my spirit. The rest of it, who cares?” He drank from lawn sprinklers, and about seven hours and thirty-eight miles later he reached the water.
“It was revelatory,” he told me. “It meant freedom. I had self-defined my life. This wasn’t about the number. This wasn’t about the time. This was entirely internal, that I could choose to do something and I could manifest my choice in the world. And suddenly I was free.” He did need a ride home, and a young woman from his high school class drove out to the lake to get him. She later became his wife. “So it had some meaning to it,” he said, with a Midwesterner’s gift for understatement.
For Buzz, quitting has meant walking away from someone else’s rules while keeping hold of what he loves underneath them. The skill is in telling the two apart: knowing whether you are finished with the thing itself or only with the version of it someone handed you. He has a private one-liner for the pattern: “I see what needs to be done, and then I do it and make it work, successful to the degree that I get bored. Then I quit, and someone else comes along and makes a ton of money.”
Leave early and pick a good partner
In 1999 Buzz and Peter Bakwin ran the Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango, 486 miles, in twelve days, when the fastest time anyone knew of was around seventeen.
Partway into that story Buzz stopped to deliver a public service announcement. People talk about safety in terms of the first-aid kit, the whistle, the signal flare, and he finds that ridiculous. “The first two things about safety: one, leave early in the morning. Two, have a good partner. Everything else is sort of details.” Peter, he said, was physically strong and also mentally and emotionally strong. Emotional strength rarely appears on a gear list, and in a long effort it often decides whether a partnership holds when things go sideways.
I asked him what made him believe twelve days was possible. The answer started with a spreadsheet, the first detailed one he knows of for a trail like that, with distance, vertical gain, and water sources, and little equations for how long each section would take. A month before the start, he and Peter ran the first seventy miles, from Denver to Kenosha Pass, between first light and dark. “Okay,” he said, “we’re kind of fit.” In my experience, most first ascents come down to a logical argument like that, assembled one piece at a time. He added a condition that is easy to skip: “You do have to have the skill set.” Fitness is common, he said; the rarer skills are reading the weather and a paper map pulled from your pocket.
Fastest known time
The next summer they took that skill set to the John Muir Trail, 223 miles through the Sierra without crossing a road. They planned to keep moving for the first forty-eight hours, stopping the first night for a three-hour bivouac, lying down in their puffy jackets and getting up to keep going. That style is now standard on long trails, and it is the part of the run he is proudest of.
The act he is best known for happened at a desk, before the start. He wanted to know the fastest time on the trail and could not find it. The world he described was “definitely not competitive, definitely cooperative, but non-communicative.” The people most likely to have done something remarkable out there were exactly the people least likely to have told anyone. So he declined the word record, because a record was a claim he could not honestly make. “This is literally the fastest time that is known,” he said. “We had to acknowledge maybe someone else had done it faster.” He credits a friend, Bill Wright, with using the phrase before him somewhere obscure. Buzz is the one who put it to work.
I told him the word “known” always sounded to me like deference, like scout’s honor built into the grammar. He lit up. “It’s the acknowledgment that someone might have ghosted it,” he said. “Ghosting is a total thing.” We both know hard women and hard men who do extraordinary things and simply don’t care whether anyone hears about them. The fastest known time holds a door open for those people permanently. It is a scoreboard that bows to everything a scoreboard cannot see. Buzz traces the idea to Lito Tejada-Flores’s essay “Games Climbers Play”: we invent the rules ourselves, for ourselves, so the game stays fair and we can learn and grow.
The big tent
Running, Buzz says, is the biggest tent in sport, big enough for Olympic finals and for the ninety-five percent who just want “a good time with my friends.” He does not rank the corners. “Everybody is welcome. You find your place in it.”
He turned one of my own ideas around. I had told him I don’t believe my run through Chamonix differs in any fundamental way from the run of someone much faster: same trail, same wind on the face, same sun on the skin. Buzz suggested my experience might be the better one. The elite athlete may not feel the wind at all, because they are watching a split. Even Kilian Jornet, who looks to everyone like he is simply having fun, is relaxed partly because, as Buzz put it, “he’s probably going to win.” The joy we admire at the front of the field may depend in part on being at the front.
When I asked which recent FKT captures what he meant by the term, his answer was a question: “What does it mean to you? What did this bring out in you?” He told me about a woman who, as he remembered it, came out of three hard years in the Navy and ran the coast of California alone in about twenty days, figuring it out as she went. He called it “liberation and self-manifestation.” The seventeen-year-old drinking from lawn sprinklers would recognize her.
As for where the sport is going, he gave me the image I haven’t been able to shake. “We’re like this flock of geese. We’re migrating. No one can figure out where they’re going or why they’re doing it, but there’s something going on up there, and it’s probably going to be okay.”
No free pass
In 2023, home from the World Masters Mountain Running Championships, Buzz felt a tightness in his chest. For about forty-five days he knocked on medicine’s door. His blood pressure was 110 over 77, his resting heart rate 48, and he could jog up a flight of stairs, so the doctors told him he was healthy. His wife insisted, he walked into an emergency room, and the next morning a cardiologist went in through his wrist, found his left anterior descending artery, the widow maker, ninety-five percent blocked, and left a stent behind. He took three lessons from it.
The first is to recalibrate the numbers. Reference ranges are built for the general population. “At five percent I’m better than they are,” he said of his nearly closed artery, and unless someone recalibrates for an athlete, “they’re going to miss you.” The second is that fitness buys no free pass. Endurance training makes you stronger and happier and very likely extends your health span. “That is not in doubt.” It does not prevent arteriosclerosis, so diet, other risk factors, and testing still matter. The third is to keep knocking. “If in doubt, you walk into the bloody emergency room.”
My parents grew up on a farm and a ranch, and the family joke was that you didn’t see a doctor unless you were on death’s doorstep. Many athletes carry some version of that joke, and fitness makes it more dangerous, because our excellent numbers give our denial something to stand on. The man who built humility into the sport’s scoreboard was nearly undone by a scoreboard of his own.
Letting yourself be known
Before the interview began, Buzz told me Kilian had not done as much in the mountains as I have. I said I’d had a few good days in the mountains. “Alright, okay,” he said. “Like a true climber.” He had caught me deflecting within five minutes.
For the next ninety minutes he did the same thing himself: the claim to fame of not being dead, the rotten-guest apology, “not that good a climber,” “a slow learner.” Near the end I set my questions aside and told him what I see. He helped raise the poles of the tent all of us now stand inside, arranged some of its furniture, and named some of its games. I told him that, for whatever it is worth, he had my permission to be proud of that.
This time he let it land. He paused, and then he took his own habit apart in front of me. “Self-deprecation is part of my personality type, which is a way of being disarming, which is a way of sometimes not being honest. And so I think you kind of called me on that.” Then, because he is who he is, he appended a legal defense: “My only defense is I’m from the Midwest.”
Then he turned it around and encouraged me to answer the same questions myself. I had named his habit without quite noticing that I share it. Many of us who came up in the mountains learned early that the mountains punish pride, and we carry the lesson into rooms where it no longer protects anyone. Buzz showed me that self-deprecation can be a small dishonesty, and that the way out is to accept a true thing when someone offers it.
I move
At the end I asked how he wants to be remembered. He answered by describing where he is now: eight surgeries, counting the stent, and ten-minute miles. “What do you do? You just let go. You let go of expectations. You let go of goals. And I say, who am I? What am I? Well, I want to move. That’s who I am. It’s not an accomplishment, not a goal. It’s how I manifest in the world. I move, and I’m going to keep moving.”
That answer is the Lake Michigan run, nearly six decades later. At seventeen he quit a coach’s game and kept the running. In his seventies he has let go of goals and expectations and kept the motion. When a sport, a result, or a body stops giving you what it used to, his life suggests you look for what you still love beneath the rules you’ve outgrown, and keep that. Along the way he gave the rest of us a scoreboard humble enough to admit what it cannot see. He spent most of our conversation hiding inside jokes, and then, for a minute near the end, he let himself be known.
The geese don’t know where they are going either. There is something going on up there, and it is probably going to be okay.