Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Ultramarathon man!

Today I'm going to have lunch with Dean Karnazes, who ran 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days. I guess he is pretty insane, and I am excited to ask him questions like, Don't your feet hurt sometimes? and, Don't your knees hurt sometimes? and also, How much do you have to eat to make sure you're getting enough calories?

I also feel like I am going to come away from lunch feeling much less proud of myself for running 2 miles in 17 minutes last night.

UPDATE: Dude was not the greatest public speaker ever, but that's ok - what I wanted from him was not anecdotes, but information. He orders Hawaiian pizzas delivered to him on the road when he runs (good call Vanessa!); during a 262-mile run, he ate 28,000 calories in two days and still lost 5 pounds; he may go as slow as 18 minutes a mile uphill, but the 262nd mile of that run took less than 6 minutes!

He has some physiological advantages - his steps are solid, without any pronation or whatever is the opposite of pronation (supination?), and obviously he has the kind of slow-twitch muscles of which long distance runners are made. It's still unbelievable that he's never been injured, though - and he no longer takes chemical painkillers (ibuprofen etc). He said that when he ran the 50 marathons in 50 days, the last one - the New York Marathon - was his fastest. In short, his body got stronger along the way. He chalked it up to the power of the human body to heal and adapt blah blah blah, but I really think that he is just freakish.

1 comment:

Vanessa said...

OMG! Ask him about how he orders whole pizzas and eats them while he is running! And how he puts superglue on his feet when he gets blisters!

According to this one article in Wired, anyway.