FHM
June 2005

THE RUNNING MAN
Going Long—Really Long—With Ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes

It’s 8 p.m. on a Friday night in San Francisco and while the liquor is flowing at bars in North Beach, Dean Karnazes, 42, is ready to party all night long—in his running shoes. Karnazes is stoked to get in his version of a short run—a twelve-hour jaunt that’s a staple of his training from San Francisco to Sonoma 70 miles away. Running two-and-a-half marathons in a row would be a lifetime achievement for most elite runners, but for Karnazes, who has run 200 miles seven times in his lifetime, it’s just another workout. “My 70 mile runs are training runs, a little taxing but not that tough,” he says.

Most wives don’t appreciate their husbands pulling solo all-nighters but Karnazes’ wife Julie, doesn’t mind. “It only causes problems when he doesn’t go,” she says. Instead of staying up all night wondering where her husband is, she sleeps soundly then wakes up in the morning, loads the kids in the Honda Element and drives to the end point of Dean’s run with their children, Alexandria, 9, and Nicholas, 7, for a day of family fun. Usually Dean doesn’t even take a nap before he busts a hang with the wife and kids. Tomorrow is Alexandria’s tenth birthday so the family won’t be along tonight. Instead of wrapping presents and baking a cake, Karnazes loads his North Face hydration pack with the essentials: a small flashlight, a headlamp, and his Treo cell phone. Freezing rain dumps into the 50-degree air but Karnazes, clad in running shorts, a long-sleeved shirt, and his hydration pack doesn’t seem to notice.

At 5-foot-10, 165 pounds, Karnazes is far more solid than your average anorexic marathoner. Karnazes’ vein-wrapped calves are the size of softballs, his perfect six-pack is harder than Pittsburgh steel, and his broad shoulders and back are knotted with ropes of sinew. His greatest gift, though, may be his size 10 ½ feet that hit the ground perfectly level so he can run injury free. His physique helps him dominate the world of ultra marathons, aka running events that stretch longer than 26.2 miles. Usually much longer. The staple events for most ultrarunners, like the Western States trail race and the Badwater race across Death Valley are 100 to 150 miles in length and so brutal that most athletes consider simply completing them a crowning achievement.

But Karnazes often brushes the hundred-mile mark on training runs and when he goes long he shoots for distances of 200 miles or more and hopes to one day run 300 miles. To race the distances he’s best at running he’ll sometimes enter in multi-hundred mile relay runs designed for teams—because no one can conceive of an individual completing them—and then run the entire distance himself without stopping. Last fall Karnazes completed the longest run of his life—262 miles, the equivalent of 10 marathons, in 72 hours. “That was three nights I ran without sleep. It was psycho,” he says of as he tightens up the laces on his Air Pegasus’ outside his immaculately appointed Victorian townhouse in a tony downtown San Francisco neighborhood and pulls down the garage door. “It rained for 22 hours straight. There came a point where if I stopped, I would go into hypothermia in 20 seconds and just start shaking uncontrollably.”

Karnazes paces himself at about 7:30 per mile as he jogs through the Presidio in the rain.
As he approaches the gated pedestrian access point on the Golden Gate Bridge, a siren screeches as if the Unabomber has escaped and a voice over the intercom informs him that the bridge is closed to pedestrians for the night. Karnazes catches a ride across and continues his run on the other side in Marin and heads down towards Sausalito in rain that feels like spikes of ice on naked skin. As he runs near the shark-infested waters of the bay, the humps of forested mountains where he sometimes trail runs at night demarcate the star-filled sky to his left. FHM follows behind. On a bicycle.

Karnazes ran a 4:52 mile in seventh grade bu quit running after a run-in with a Bobby Knight-esque track coach in high school. Fifteen years later, on the night of his thirtieth birthday, he was happily married and raking in dough at his corporate sales gig, but his financial success left him feeling empty. “I looked around and thought, what am I doing getting drunk at a bar? There has to be more than this game.” He stumbled out of the bar and started running. “I ran to Half Moon Bay 30 miles away. I was wearing some silk jockey briefs and Reebok crosstraining shoes I used for gardening. When I finished everything hurt. It was complete body pain—my chest, my arms, there were rashes up and down my legs. I felt really happy.”

Longer distances were the next step and so he entered—and won—a 50-mile race. When he finished, he crawled into his Lexus LS400. “I got violently ill and projectile vomited all over the steering column. I was baptized in my own bile. It felt glorious.” His body easily adapted to the workload of longer distances and heavier training. He just couldn’t get enough.

Now he’s two hours into his 70-mile training run clicking off 7:30 miles like a metronome when he dashes into a convenience store and grabs a bag of trail mix and a bottle of sports drink. He’s out the door and running again before the guy behind the counter can shut the cash register. “I’m not really burning the calories yet. I’m kind of cold and want to really get into it,” he says as he nibbles the trail mix on the move.

By day, Karnazes is the president of a company called Good Health Natural Foods, which sells about $20 million a year of more than 200 products including olive oil potato chips and apple chips. During long runs he has to cram in huge amounts of calories as quickly as possible—a task that requires eating like the world’s most gluttonous couch potato. “You eat fiber and you’ll get filled up before you have enough calories. You need empty calories. It’s like jet fuel—the most amount of calories in the smallest amount of girth.”

18 miles into the run the rain hasn’t dampened Karnazes's spirit or his pace and he pulls out the Treo phone he uses to text message, e-mail, and make calls while he runs and calls information to find the closest Roundtable Pizza while he jogs past a Domino’s.
“I estimate where I’m going to be in thirty minutes and give them a street address in whatever town I’ll be in. I like Roundtable’s pizza because if you give them a street address, they’ll bring it. Domino’s will only deliver to a residence,” he says as he waits to be connected. “Hi, I’d like a large pepperoni and mushroom, please.” He gives the address, tucks the phone into his backpack and keeps running. Like clockwork, thirty minutes later the pizza guy stands in front of a grocery store with the warm pie. Slowing down long enough to pay, Karnazes hits the road balancing the pizza box in one hand while he folds slices in half and quickly scarfs down half the pie. “When I’m running 200 miles I usually have my family follow me in a support car with food and water,” Karnazes says. The crew keeps a list of Roundtable Pizza joints handy.

“My first 200 miler was the Calistoga Saturn relay from Calistoga to Santa Cruz. I decided to do it to see if I could. I didn’t think my body could withstand so much punishment and keep going. On some of the hills you’re climbing up 2500 feet from sea level so if you can do 25-minute miles you’re doing pretty good but then you can clip off 6 minute miles down the backside. When I ran 262 miles it was a sixteen-minute mile average on a tough course with rain.” At points he found himself falling asleep while running. “That was three nights I ran without sleep. It rained for 22 hours straight. There came a point where if I stopped, I would go into hypothermia in 20 seconds and just start shaking uncontrollably.”

35 miles down the road and well into his second marathon, Karnazes drops down a road that snakes through a redwood forest. It looks like the perfect setting for a teen axe murder flick, but it’s actually the home of the Ewoks. Return of the Jedi was filmed here and Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas’ movie studio, is a stone’s throw away. He plugs along breathing as easily as someone walking down the street, his pace so smooth and his demeanor so cheery that he seems peppy. “The hardest part is stopping because you get cold and it’s hard to restart the engine. It takes a bit of warmup to get back into it,”
he says.

As he pushes along a meadow through rolling hills on a long straightaway, a pickup hauls ass in a drunken slalom and swerves directly into his path. Unphased, he jumps into the swampy grass on the shoulder and keeps running then pulls down the front of his shorts and pees while he’s still moving. At the next 7-Eleven at mile 50 he pounds another coffee and nails an apple fritter. This is nothing compared to a 262 miler. “You can only train your body to withstand so much. After that point, it’s more of a mental battle. It feels like the equivalent of being in a train accident with the worst hangover you’ve ever had. I had to go to work the next day. But two days after, this mental euphoria takes over. I’ve never tried heroin but you get this runner’s high which I imagine is like heroin and that can last two or three weeks.”

Must be some great high. Dawn breaks at 7 AM as Dean climbs a steep mountain road near Sonoma. “I feel fine,” he says when a Volvo flies around a blind corner and nearly hits him. The car skids to a halt a and it looks like Karnazes might have to fight. A 6-foot plus dude in tights hops out and sprints up the road screaming, “Dean! Dean! I’m a big fan!” Karnazes stops for nothing except calories, but he’s happy to talk shop with the fan. “You’re an inspiration to all of us—keep running, Dean. Keep running.” And that’s exactly what he does. Karanazes’s tenacity and dedication are inspiring and with the release of his book, Ultra Marathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner, his star is just beginning to shine.
At 7:30 a.m. when he charges into the luxurious Mission Inn spa in Sonoma, a Spanish style resort with guests leisurely strolling the grounds in white robes, the staff have set up a finish. As he breaks through the line, his hands raised in victory, he looks, talks, and runs just as he did when he started nearly twelve hours earlier. Is this guy human? “You just ran sixty miles?” says an astonished staffer in a black suit. “How do you feel?”

“My eyes are a little dried out from the wind but I feel fine. I don’t think this will require much recovery,” Karnazes says. He doles out a few training tips to the staffer and a manager who is an Ironman triathlete and patiently answers all of their questions as relaxed as if he was a robe-wearing guest at the Inn. Before he slips into the car with FHM to head back to San Francisco for his daughter’s birthday party, the guy in the suit has one more question. “Why do you do it, Dean?”

“To me life is about struggle. If you’re not pushing yourself, if you’re not struggling, if you’re just content, I’m not happy. I’ve always had that predisposition to push myself because there’s a lot of happiness in suffering.”