Dean Karnazes
is ready to make a major career breakthrough…except that some runner he barely knows, and, worse, can’t see, is screwing things up.
It’s just after 9 a.m. on this July day, and Karnazes has 15 miles to go in the 2004 Badwater Ultratmarathon, regarded as the United States toughest organized footrace. It’s 135 miles of climbing and clawing from Death Valley, California, to the flanks of Mount Whitney. It forces runners to go from below sea level to 8,360 feet above it. It’s run in temperatures that spike near 130 degrees.
And Dean Karnazes has never won it. He’s 0 for 6 at Badwater. He came close in 2003, when he finished second to defending champ Pam Reed, but he was still nearly 30 minutes behind her. In fact, he’s yet to win a major title in the 11 years he’s been competing on the ultra circuit. On this morning, though, he’s on the cusp of victory—that is, if he can somehow catch an unknown runner by the name of Ferg Hawke.
All night Karnazes has been after Hawke, a Canadian making his Badwater debut. It’s a situation complicated by the staggered start that saw Hawke begin the race two hours before Karnazes, making it difficult to get regular time checks. At midnight, the gap was an estimated 47 minutes. At dawn, it was down to around 12. Now, at mile 120, the difference is just three minutes.
Its a trajectory that bodes well for Karnazes, but for one simple fact: He’s cracking. He’s been running for 23 hours and 120 miles. His pace has slowed to 15 minutes per mile. Hours earlier he was going at an eight-minute-per-mile clip. And after a predawn low of 97 degrees, the temperature is again above 100; the relentless sun pounds thepavement as well as Karnazes’s body. He steps slowly, then stops. He leans over, resting his hands on his quads, which twitch involuntarily like mice in a trap. “I’m having a dark moment,” Karnazes says quietly. It’s not the first one. Earlier, not long after Monday had become Tuesday, not long after Karnazes had been running for 14 hours, he looked to his team driving alongside and said, “There are highs and there are lows, and this is definitely not a high” Then he laughed.
But this time, Karnazes isn’t laughing. And there’s the simple fact of all those miles, stacked up against each other like so much cordwood. The question is, when does a dark moment become something even darker, and not just the precursor to a lighter moment? Only Karnazes can decide but the fact is he looks in no shape to decide much of any thing right now.
Then, wordlessly, he does. Slowly, he stands. He turns his body toward the finish, a finish that’s nearly four hours away, a finish that can provide him with perhaps the greatest glory of his running career…if only he can make up those three minutes. Knowing all these things, Dean Karnazes lifts a swollen foot off the pavement And starts to run.
You’d think knocking off 15 miles with bloated feet and a beat-up mind might be enough of a challenge for Dean Karnazes. You’d think pursuing a major title like Badwater, after going 11 years without one, would be the perfect prod. You’d think...
Stop thinking. Because as much as Karnazes wants to win Badwater—“I feel selfish saying I want to win because 90 percent ofthe people are just trying to finish,” he said before the race. “But I really want to win this thing”—realize that he has even bigger ambitions. One day he wants to run 300 miles. Without stopping. That’s right300 miles…without stopping. That’s roughly 11½ marathons. Or two and a quarter Badwaters. Or the distance between Boston and Montreal. That far, inabout 80 hours, with no sleep. How hard is that? Try sitting on your fluffy couch that long without nodding off.
What’s gotten into this guy? For someone who seems all-too-grounded—he’s 42, lives in San Francisco, is married with two kids, puts in 60-hour weeks at the food company he founded—where did he come up with such an idea? “I’d sort of gotten in the habit ofrunning to the start ofraces,” he says. For instance, he once ran 100 miles to the Napa Valley Marathon, arrived just before the start, then covered the next 26.2 miles in three hours and 15 minutes.
Two years ago, after signing up to run, by himself,the 199-mile Relay from Calistoga to Santa Cruz, California, a race typically entered by teams of 12, he got an idea: To tack on 101 miles and go for 300. “It’s about 100 miles from my house to the relay’s start, That’s what got me thinking 300. It’s really a default distance,” Default? How about insane?
On the first 300 attempt, he went only 26 miles more, deciding to quit at mile 225 when he found himself sleep-running in the center of a two-lane highway. “It was just too dangerous to continue,” says Karnazes, with no apparent irony.
Then last October, he tried for 300again, with the Calistoga relay providingthe backdrop for the second time. At night, when he needed fuel and while his crew slept Karnazes would shuffle into a convenience store and pick up a doughnut or coffee. “I got a lot of weird looks,” he says. He also trooped through a 20-hour stretch of continuous rain that caused him to develop hypothermia. But once again, this time at mile 235, he stopped. “I was either going to fall down or fall asleep Karnazes says. “I got into the driver’s seat and just went down.” He napped for lust 15 minutes—then resumed running for another 27 miles for a total of 262 miles, or roughly 10 marathons. Take away the nap and he had been on the go for nearly 76 hours.
Later that day he vowed to try 300 again.
It’s unclear whether Dean Karnazes is after some uncharted mark. There is no listing for “longest nonstop run” in the Guinness Book of World Records. Another thing: it’s a record difficult to define. “Who’s to say what constitutes nonstop?” muses Don Allison publisher of Ultrarunning Magazine. “What about peeing? What about changing shoes? It’s just too amorphous to get a handle on.” For his purposes, Karnazes is defining nonstop as not stopping to sleep. Still,
Allison admits, “Ifhe does it, it will be a hell of a thing. He’s definitely pushing the limits of what’s possible.”
What enables Karnazes to run so far—farther than even his ultra compadres? Tim Twietmeyer, five-time winner of the Western States 100, who once ran that course with Karnazes in the dead ofwinter, says for part of the answer you just have to look at the guy. “His build really helps him. When you’re out there for 40 hours, you need that musculature to counteract the stress.”
To say the least Karnazes is quite possibly the ultimate ultrarunning specimen, the flesh-and-blood embodiment of what you would envision if you were constructing the perfect long-distance running machine. He’s compact—five feet, nine inches tall, 156 pounds—and yet almost statuesque. He suffers none of the withered framework common to many ultrarunners. His calf muscles are bulbous knots; his shoulders broad and ropy; his abdominals worthy of a Tony Little infomercial. His body is the product of more than just mega-running miles. In the ultrarunning world, Karnazes’s 70 to 110 weekly miles aren’t that unusual (although twice amonth he’ll leave his wife and kids in the middle of the night for a 75-mile training run to Napa). He is, though, acommitted cross-trainer, mixing in swimming, biking, and wind-surfing to his regimen. Windsurfing, for instance, “is like doing lat pulls. And while developed lats may reduce speed,” he says, “they help with endurance”
Jeff Shapiro, M.D., may know more about the man’s makeup than anyone beside Karnazes. An anesthesiologist who specializes in critical care medicine, Shapiro also directs the Calistoga relay and has known Karnazes since 1995 when he green-lighted Karnazes’s first bid totry the race solo. Over the years, the two have performed a number of tests in an effort to determine how to keep Karnazes’s body and mind operational.
The average human loses two to four pounds of fluid during an hour of exercise. Karnazes, his body attuned to such rigors, is on the lower end of average. But that still means a loss of 12 or so pounds of water and electrolytes over a six-hour period. Yet upon receiving a single 250 cc (a bit more than a half pound) IV bag of water and salt, he felt so good that he ran another 15 miles. “It was astounding,” says Shapiro. “And that was just water and salt. No calories. Imagine if we’d put calories in there. It would he almost unlimited what he could do.”
Of course, discovering how far a human can run is not as simple as lacing up your shoes and installing an IV (and Karnazes has no plans to use such a device in competition or in attempts at 300 miles). Shapiro uses the term “systemic fatigue” to describe the whole-body and mind exhaustion that eventually forces everyone—even Karnazes—to lie down and sleep. ‘From a medical perspective, it’s organ fatigue,” says Shapiro. ‘People use the term shut-down, but medically, that doesn’t mean anything. The lungs are still working; they just need a nap.”
And yet, beyond his build, both Shapiro and Twietmeyer understand something else gives Karnazes an endurance edge. “To do this kind of stuff,” says Shapiro, “you have to have sheer determination on a level most people will never know.” Adds Twietmeyer: “He finds ways to keep himself motivated long after most people go home. I have no idea how he does it.”
Ask Dean Karnazes what drives him, and he’ll give you au uncomplicated, if self-deprecating answer. “I’m not inherently talented,” he says. “I’m not the brightest guy” — even though he graduated as valedictorian from California Polytechnic State University, later earned an MBA, and is the founder of EnergyWell, makers of low-carb cheese puff, crisps, and a soy jerky branded under the label Carb-Be-Gone. “Really, the only thing I have is endurance, and I feel like the one thing I can offer the world is to run for great distances,” Many of Karnazes’s runs are organized as Fund-raisers for charities; he estimates he’s raised $100,000 over the past few years.
But dig a little deeper, and you’ll find there’s more to his motives.
Karnazes has always been athletic—and competitive, he rail cross-country for his Los Angeles-area high school, helping his team with a league championship. But perhaps more telling were his unstructured exploits. Karnazes’s younger brother, Kraig, a financial consultant in southern California, remembers the time Dean was refused a ride to a new skateboard park in Carlsbad 30 miles from his family’s home. Eight hours later, the Karnazes’ phone rang: It was Dean. He’d skateboarded to the park and needed a ride home.
Kraig says his brother inherited much of his drive from their father, Nick, a one-time Los Angeles Marathon finisher who at 68 still runs a strong 10-K, But another piece of Karnazes’s psychological makeup came from the untimely death of the brothers’ younger sister, Pary, who was killed in a car accident on the eve of her 18th birthday. Dean was 20, and close to his sister. “It was devastating,” he says. “And there was no communication among the family. It just became this taboo topic, this huge divide between us.” It also imparted Karnazes with the hard truth of life’s fragility. “Your game can be up at any moment. I felt I needed to pursue whatever my heart told me to pursue.”
At the time, Karnazes turned away from running and put most of his energy into graduating from college, settling down in San Francisco with his high school sweetheart, Julie Abbott (whom he married in 1988), and getting his career going. After earning an MBA, he took a job in the marketing department of GlaxoSmithKline, a global pharmaceutical company. His life seemed in perfect order. Too perfect, in fact. After a few years of closing one business deal after another, Karnazes says, “I felt like I was just playing the game for the paycheck. There was a real lack of intensity in my life. It was boring. I was bored”
That all changed on the night of his 30th birthday, August 23, 1992. Karnazes celebrated by getting trashed at the Paragon, a San Francisco club popular among yuppies. Late in the evening, drunk, depressed, and in the midst of what he now describes as a midlife crisis he walked home. On the back porch of his Victorian home, he shed his pants and sweater, laced up an old pair of sneakers and, wearing a cotton T-shirt, boxer shorts, and black knee-high silk socks, began running for the first time in nearly a decade. He didn’t stop until he had reached Half Moon Bay, 30 miles south of San Francisco, “I was wired, totally pegged the whole night,” Karnazes says. “All my senses just came alive. I knew something big was happening.”
Once he’d recovered from his birthday epic, Karnazes fell into a more sustainable running routine, clocking five to six miles four days a week, It was during one of these outings that he came upon a pair of Army Rangers doing repeats on one of San Francisco’s notoriously steep streets. Intrigued, Karnazes asked what they were up to. Their answer would change the trajectory of his life: training for the Western States 100. In hopes of qualifying for the race, he ratcheted up his mileage and altered his diet to exclude all refined sugar. In the fall of ’93, he qualified for the 100-miler by running the Gibson Ranch 50-mile race in eight hours and 27 minutes—after which he threw up on the dashboard of his company Lexus. “it was baptism by fire,” Karnazes says. “I just felt the need to throw myself at the most intense events I could find.” The next year, Karnazes finished the Western States 100 in 21 hours, one minute, and 14 seconds.
For those close to him, the makeover from disgruntled corporate executive to manic ultrarunner was not surprising. “His personality dictates that he’s going to be the supreme best at anything he does,” says Julie. “Can’t is not a word that comes up a lot.” Although her husband’s bullheaded drive can be overwhelming Julie says she enjoys watching him get revved up by absurd events and appreciates the pains he takes to ensure his training and racing don’t negatively impact the family. “He doesn’t leave mc hanging, even if it means he has to get up at four in the morning to run,” Julie says.
Still, his running career hasn’t been without its share of controversy. In January 2002, he and fellow ultrarunner Richard Donovan of Ireland competed in the first ever South Pole Marathon. Karnazes wore running shoes while Donovan wore snowshoes that he had borrowed from Karnazes. Donovan finished the grueling race first in 8:52:03. Karnazes came in second in 9:18:55, But according to Donovan, organizers decided after the race to “create divisions and called Karnazes the winner of the ‘running’ division and me the winner of the ‘snowshoe’ division.” He protested, and filed a lawsuit to earn both the victory and the $25000 prize. A year later, a court ruled in Donovan’s favor, But today, Karnazes still carefully claims on his Web site to be “the first and only person to run a marathon to the South Pole in running shoes.”
Maybe its his desire to try oddball antics like 300-rnile runs or South Pole marathons. Or maybe, as he says, “100 miles is too short. Running longer is what’s in my heart.” Whatever the reason Dean Karnazes has been unable to translate his ability to run super-long distances into a major ultra victory, that is, until Badwater 2004.
Badwater has earned premiere status in the ultrarunning community. It dishes out almost as much cumulative vertical climbing as Western States 100 (13,000 feet versus 15,540 feet), and 35 more miles than either Western States 100 or the Leadville Trail 100, neither of which is conducted in temperatures that approach 130 degrees. And it’s a race that rewards with reputation, not remuneration. (After her victory in 2003, Pam Reed found herself on the Late Show with David Letterman explaining to Dave that the prize for winning Badwater is a belt buckle. Dave looked at her and said, “Well, sign me up!” with a look of unmitigated incredulity.) So, if you want to make your bones in ultrarunning, there’s no better way
to do it than by winning Badwater—and Karnazes, as well as the 78 other elite ultrarunners from around the world, knows it.