Jogging is not my thing. Just thinking about it makes my knees hurt. So when my husband recommended I read a book about a guy who routinely runs over one hundred miles at a time, my patellas balked. It was hard to imagine finding any pleasure in such a story. But I was wrong.
Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner by Dean Karnazes is an amazing, almost impossible-to-believe chronicle of a corporate desk jockey who has a second life: a long, and I mean LONG, distance runner.
If mountain climbers scale mountains just because they are there, Karnazes seems to run ultramaratons just because they are held. The grueling Boston Marathon with its infamous "Heartbreak Hill" has nothing on the Western States Endurance Run, a one day 100-mile run, with elevation changes that are about the equivalent of running up the stairs of the Empire State Building 30 times. Karnazes even treats these ultraruns as a warm-up for a marathon. At one point he finished a 13-mile run at the starting line of a marathon with just minutes to spare and off he went for another 26.2 miles.
And if the running isn't amazing enough, the amount of food he eats will astound you. I think I gained weight just reading it. During one 100-mile run he will typically consume 28,000 calories. We're talking an entire pizza, 8 powerbars, gallons of Pedialyte, a bag of Doritos, a cheesecake, 3 burritos, a bunch of bananas, and more. His regular diet is very strict but his mid-run diet includes a huge amount of empty calories or his body will shut down. It literally would not be possible to consume enough "healthy" food to fuel his body. How many spinach salads would you need to eat to get the calories you enjoy in just one Snickers?
This book was a quick read and a glimpse into a lifestyle most of us would consider impossible, if not downright insane.
100 Miles And Counting
Jogging is not my thing. Just thinking about it makes my knees hurt. So when my husband recommended I read a book about a guy who routinely runs over one hundred miles at a time, my patellas balked. It was hard to imagine finding any pleasure in such a story. But I was wrong.
Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner by Dean Karnazes is an amazing, almost impossible-to-believe chronicle of a corporate desk jockey who has a second life: a long, and I mean LONG, distance runner.
If mountain climbers scale mountains just because they are there, Karnazes seems to run ultramaratons just because they are held. The grueling Boston Marathon with its infamous "Heartbreak Hill" has nothing on the Western States Endurance Run, a one day 100-mile run, with elevation changes that are about the equivalent of running up the stairs of the Empire State Building 30 times. Karnazes even treats these ultraruns as a warm-up for a marathon. At one point he finished a 13-mile run at the starting line of a marathon with just minutes to spare and off he went for another 26.2 miles.
And if the running isn't amazing enough, the amount of food he eats will astound you. I think I gained weight just reading it. During one 100-mile run he will typically consume 28,000 calories. We're talking an entire pizza, 8 powerbars, gallons of Pedialyte, a bag of Doritos, a cheesecake, 3 burritos, a bunch of bananas, and more. His regular diet is very strict but his mid-run diet includes a huge amount of empty calories or his body will shut down. It literally would not be possible to consume enough "healthy" food to fuel his body. How many spinach salads would you need to eat to get the calories you enjoy in just one Snickers?
This book was a quick read and a glimpse into a lifestyle most of us would consider impossible, if not downright insane.
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