50/50
Copyright © 2008 by Dean Karnazes
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Dean’s blood work summary, in Appendix E, is included courtesy of Bryan Bergman, PhD, University of Colorado Assistant Professor of Medicine.
Wellness Central
Hachette Book Group, USA
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at
www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com
.
First eBook Edition: August 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-446-53789-6
Contents
Chapter 2: Thank You for Your Support
Chapter 4: The Amazing Miracle Marathon Diet
Chapter 5: Here Comes the Future
Chapter 12: If It Stinks, Eat It
Chapter 13: Running for Others
Chapter 14: Trains, Planes, and Running Shoes
Chapter 17: You Never Forget Your First
Chapter 19: What’s My Motivation?
Chapter 26: The Art of the Stride
Chapter 30: The Clock Is Running
Appendix A: How Do You Train to Run Fifty Consecutive Marathons?
Appendix B: Endurance 50 Stats and Musings
Appendix C: Beginner’s Marathon-Training Plan
Appendix D: Personal-Best Marathon-Training Plan
Appendix E: The Results Are In: How Dean Held Up
This book is dedicated to my mom and dad,
who always gave me the liberty to wander freely.
May our adventures never end . . .
I’ll preface these acknowledgments by saying that I’m one of the luckiest men on earth. Why? Because I’m surrounded by some of the greatest people on earth. To them, I owe everything. The list is long, and at the top would be my wife, Julie, and my daughter and son, Alexandria and Nicholas. Your ongoing support, encouragement, and positive spirit have provided me with immeasurable inspiration and motivation. I can never thank you enough.
To the entire team at The North Face, and especially Topher Gaylord and Steve Rendle, I am forever grateful. It has been fun, and we’re not done yet!
Many thanks to Matt Fitzgerald for helping me with this book, and my gratitude goes out to Chris Carmichael and Jason Koop for helping me get through fifty consecutive marathons without a single leg cramp!
To the dynamic duo over at Grand Central Publishing, Natalie Kaire and Jimmy Franco; your tireless marathon efforts in bringing this book to life have been extraordinary. Thank you for all that you’ve done, and continue to do, every day. And I owe a world of gratitude to my faithful agent, Carole Bidnick, whose dedication and commitment has been unwavering throughout this very long run together.
Lastly, I want to thank the thousands of athletes who joined me along the road. Together, we made a difference.
Men’s Fitness
has stated that I might just be the fittest man on the planet.
Time
once claimed that I’m no mere mortal.
Wired
hailed me as the perfect human. Let me share a little secret with you: I’m really just average. Perhaps even a little below average. I know this better than anyone. I’m not bestowed with any superhuman powers. I don’t have any special gifts. There is no magic in my genetic makeup. I’m just an average guy.
So how am I able to run hundreds of miles at a clip? How was I able to complete fifty marathons, in fifty states, in fifty consecutive days? Just how do I do these things? I wrote this book to answer that question. There are lessons I’ve learned along the way that can help you achieve your own amazing feats of endurance, however you define them. Some of these lessons are nothing more than practical tips that I’ve picked up along the road, as all runners do; others come out of challenging experiences and help illustrate an approach or attitude that has proven effective for me. In either case, the aim of this book is to share with you the things that have helped me accomplish my goals, in the hope that you will be able to accomplish yours, no matter the scale.
Just remember, as extreme as some of my accomplishments have been, you are reading about an average guy. An extremely average guy.
Road Trip
O
n a bright Saturday morning
in February 2002, we set out on another road trip—Karnazes family–style. No bags were packed the night before our departure. No alarms were set to help us get an early start. Everyone rolled out of bed on his or her own schedule. And then chaos erupted. There was a mad scramble to fill bags and load them onto the Mother Ship, our beloved twenty-seven-foot RV. In the kitchen of our house, food appeared on burners, countertops, and tables and promptly disappeared into mouths. Children’s laughter rang out frequently, and the occasional ball or other projectile toy sailed across a room.
Every few minutes, my dad asked one of us if we’d seen some item he desperately needed and couldn’t find. The last of these items was the keys to the Mother Ship. He had just left the kitchen in search of them when my wife, Julie, entered.
“Is Popou ready?” she asked, her use of the Greek word for “dad” a sure indication that she was getting in the spirit of the weekend. The unstructured Grecian chaos of my family’s operations sometimes unnerved her, but at other times, like now, she happily joined right in and became one of us.
“Popou’s looking for the keys,” said Alexandria, our seven-year-old.
“Who’s got Nicholas?” Julie asked frantically, suddenly realizing she hadn’t seen our four-year-old son for quite some time.
“Popou said he’s already in the RV with Yiayia,” Alexandria replied, referring to her grandmother, my mother, in Greek as well.
Young as he was, Nicholas was already showing signs of having inherited his father’s insatiable wanderlust: He would walk right out the front door if left unattended for more than a few seconds.
“Wait a minute,” Alexandria continued. “If Nicholas and Yiayia are already inside the Mother Ship, they must have the keys. How else could they unlock the door?”
She was, of course, correct. Being outwitted by a child was hardly a blow to Popou’s pride, however. He didn’t really care; he just wanted to get on with the adventure and was glad that someone had finally located those stinking keys he’d been searching all over for, for the past ten minutes.
At last we buckled ourselves into the Mother Ship and Popou began to guide the vehicle northward with sure hands. We sang and joked and quoted movies as he expertly piloted the craft along the highway.
Over the years, what I’ve come to realize is that the difference between a runner and a jogger is that a jogger still has control of his life. A scant hour after we had left our home in San Francisco, I was already stirring, my initial contentment replaced by a familiar restlessness. “Pull over,” I said.
Having anticipated the inevitable, I was already dressed in my running gear. At the first available turnout, Dad guided the Mother Ship off the road. We had perfected our routine on many past family road trips. Sometimes I would leave home on foot before the family, and they’d pick me up along the roadside a few hours later. Other days I would wait until we reached our destination and then take flight. Once in a while, I would run all night and meet them in the morning. Today the formula was pretty simple: I’d run up the highway while they went shopping for supplies, secured our campsite, and prepared a gourmet lunch.
I gave Alexandria and Nicholas each a quick peck on the cheek while dashing toward the exit. I squeezed my mom’s hand, embraced Julie, and saluted my dad.
“See you guys in a bit,” I said, and I was out the door.
Today I would cover twenty-six or twenty-seven miles—roughly a marathon. The ultimate challenge for many runners, this distance represented a typical weekend long run for me. Sometimes I would run a marathon on Saturday and another on Sunday. I had run two hundred miles nonstop more than once and I was completing several one-hundred-mile races in extreme environments each year, so a leisurely run of just a fraction of that length wouldn’t take much out of me. I could just enjoy the hypnotic cycle of my breathing, the rhythmic contractions of my muscles, and the splendor of the day. It was a typically perfect Napa Valley winter morning, not a cloud in the sky, the air dry and neither cool nor warm, a gentle breeze refreshing my exposed skin.
There were two pieces of mandatory equipment I always carried with me on these runs: a cell phone and a credit card. Three hours into my workout, the phone rang.
“Hey, hon, we forgot to get Parm—” A convoy of semis roared by, drowning out the rest of her sentence.
I stuck a finger in one ear and pressed the phone against the other.
“Say again?”
“We forgot to get Parmesan. You know, cheese.”
“Ohhh!”
“Could you stop and grab some on the way?”
“Sure thing.”
When I sauntered into the campsite some ninety minutes later, the others were just finishing their preparations. It was a beautiful spread of fresh pasta, sourdough bread, Caesar salad, vine-ripe melon, and cookies hot from the microwave (the Mother Ship didn’t have a conventional oven, so they improvised). They had it all set up outside on a picnic table.
“Did you get the Parmesan?” Alexandria asked.
“Darn it! I knew I forgot something,” I said, slapping my forehead.
“Daaad!” my daughter scolded smilingly, then dashed behind me and reached into the running pack on my back. She had me totally figured out.
After lunch, we took a long hike. My thoughts wandered in a familiar direction as we picked our way along a narrow trail bordered by a row of trees. These family road trips were like a taste of heaven for me. They had it all: my favorite people, adventure, freedom, and plenty of opportunities to run great distances. We made four or five such trips each year, usually within California, but some had extended as far as Oregon and Colorado. Other times the whole family would fly to a more distant state, where we would rent an RV and enjoy the same mix of camping, sightseeing, and, for me, running. On each of these jaunts, I sooner or later found myself wishing it could last longer and extend farther. But this time, I went a step beyond the usual wishing: I got a clear picture of what this perfect vacation could look like.
One thing that I truly live for is challenging myself to complete epic tests of endurance that sound totally impossible. Always searching for a new challenge to embark upon, my imagination now suddenly dreamed up the quest of attempting to run a marathon in each of the fifty United States in only fifty days. Every day would be just like this one, except in a different place with a new landscape and a new local culture. It would be a test of endurance for the whole family, with all-night drives of hundreds of miles punctuated by my solo trots of 26.2. The kids and my folks could join me for short segments along the way, as they sometimes did. Even Julie could participate, although she typically runs only when being chased. My mind was awhirl with possibilities.
Then I hit my head on a branch. What was I thinking? There was no way we could ever afford to execute this half-baked scheme. Julie and I both worked to make ends meet. And what about school? Nicholas was getting ready for kindergarten, and Alexandria was a very studious second-grader. Not to mention, my mom still worked as a public school teacher down in Orange County. She could never take that much time off work, and her retirement was four years away. There were just too many obstacles to overcome. So that day I cataloged the idea in my mind as a dream. A crazy, far-fetched dream.
But over the next few years, a series of fortunate accidents breathed life into this dream, and ultimately took it farther than I could ever have imagined.