BLOG IN YOUR FACE

A while back I wrote a little article about an ultra marathon runner named Yiannis Kouros. I couldn’t believe how much of an animal this guy was! When The Proclaimers wrote their hit song “I’m Gonna Be,”  Yiannis Kouros was probably like: “So, let me get this straight-you are going to walk 500 miles…and then walk 500 more, just to be the the man who walked a thousand miles to fall down at someone’s door? I don’t get what the big deal is…I run 1000 miles and set world records doing it. It’s not even that hard.”

Well, Yiannis…I’m sorry, but you just don’t seem like as much of a bad-ass as you used to. I have found someone else to take your place. I am soooo  over you. That someone is my new hero and motivation in my quest to complete my half marathon. His name is Dean Karnazes.

I hope this guy donates his body to science when he dies. But to be honest, it doesn’t really seem like he can  die. The feats he has performed are un-human. How a mere mortal could pull off some of the things he has pulled off is far beyond my scope of understanding. Lets look at some of his accomplishments:

1) By age 11 he had hiked the Grand Canyon from rim to rim and had also successfully climbed Mount Whitney which is, ya know, only the HIGHEST FRICKING  mountain in the United States!

2) By age twelve he was cycling 40 miles a day and while still in junior high he went to the California State Long-Distance Championships and WON (as in beat everybody  there) the one-mile competition.

3) In his Freshman year of high school he ran his first marathon.

4) Won the Badwater Ultramarathon: As my friend AxsDeny from The Vax Cave suggested in a previous thread, anyone who is interested in supreme athleticism should watch the documentary Running on the Sun which is about this particular race. Its a 135 mile foot race starting at 282 feet below sea level in Badwater Basin, CA and ends at Whitney Portal; a incredible 8360 feet above sea level! On top of this 135 mile run you have temperatures of 120 or more!

5) Won  the Vermont 100, a race in Vermont that covers nearly 15,000 feet of elevation changes when it is all said and done.

6) Ran 148 miles on a treadmill in 24 hours.

7) Ran 350 miles in 80 hours. Without stopping…

8 ) Has ran the 1000 mile/10-day “Buckleholder Run” 11 times!

9) He has swam across the San Francisco Bay.

10) Ran the 1st annual (inaugural) South Pole run, a marathon in one of the coldest places on Earth, in tennis shoes while all others wore snow shoes.

11) And the most bad-ass of all…in my opinion anyway: He completed the North Face Endurance 50.  Never heard of it? Let me explain: 50 marathons in 50 consecutive days!!! The final marathon was the New York City marathon and when he was finished he decided that instead of hopping on a plane back to San Francisco, he would simply run ALL…THE…WAY…BACK. But maybe he is human afterall: He stopped in St. Charles, MO because he missed his family and flew the rest of the way home.

I don’t have too many regrets in my life. In fact, if I had a time machine I would probably hang my towels on it or throw a sheet over it and make it into a coffee table. I think the only thing I would go back in time for would be this past Sunday morning where I would promptly walk up to myself, kick myself in the junk and use a staple gun to staple a picture of Dean Karnazes to my forehead and tell myself to shut the hell up and quit whining about the measly 3 miles I just ran.