Run to Win

In 2006, Dean Karnazes was the second person to run 50 marathons in all 50 states on consecutive days. You can now watch a documentary of his exploits on the big screen, which is titled after his book, Ultramarathon Man:
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After a few days off from the site to run the marathon (during which time I got a lot of traffic, surprisingly enough), I wrote up my thoughts and experiences from New York City while Scott began the next month’s topic on injuries.

• The first thing to note about New York City was that the crowds disappointed me. Until the last few miles, I have never seen that many people that had so little interest in what they were watching. I’m sure that they were more animated for the leaders ahead of me and for the crowds behind me, but I have never once had so much trouble trying to get a crowd to react to me. On the whole, though, the race was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed the experience.
  1. Pre-Race Experiences
  2. Race Experiences
  3. Post-Race Experiences
• In other racing news, RIT placed 3^rd at regionals, while the women’s team had a team-history best 6^th place finish.
• Scott began out month of injury articles by discussing the difference between strains and sprains, as well as the most common causes of each and (more importantly) how to recover from them.
• Dean Karnazes used New York as his final marathon in the Endurance 50. Of course, as soon as he finished he decided to run home from New York. He didn’t make it, but he’s still been busy over the past year.
• This week two years ago, I answered a common question that I am asked about whether you should lift first or run first? I try to lift first whenever I can, unless there is a workout-specific reason to swap the two. I also reviewed the GMap Pedometer. It has been updated quite a bit over the past couple of years, but it still lags behind some of the other solutions that are out there and that are much better. A third article that I wrote this week two years ago discussed how important it is to act like a child on occasion in order to stay fit and healthy. Getting burned out is so much more difficult when you are actually enjoying what you are doing.

This week last year touched on a whole range of subjects, from weight lifting to drugs to accidental cheaters and how purposefully bonk during a workout.

• I shared my experience of lifting weights after breaking my ring finger. It had had a week to heal, and while there were no rings that were going to fit on it at that point, I managed to lift and control the bars all right. In other weight lifting news, I found a new animated push-up demonstration.
• Continuing on the sleep theme, I suggested that you never go to bed hungry. You won’t sleep well, and you’ll have trouble getting up and being useful in the morning.
• I also wondered why they only make belts sized for people larger than myself? I still have to spend way too much time finding a belt that isn’t at least 3 inches too long.
• Brian Morrison unfortunately had a little help maintaining forward motion in his last quarter mile of his Western States 100 Mile win. Even more unfortunately, he was disqualified for it and the win was given to Graham Cooper. A race of 99.75 miles was lost due to just a little too much trouble in that last 0.25 miles. That has to be rough. In other large sports event news, Jan Ullrich was barred from the Tour de France following suspicions in the Spanish doping scandal.
• In the performance side, I discussed research about whether or not bonking during training was a worthwhile pursuit or not. Bonking is the process of running out of fuel during a workout.
• I pondered whether or not to pony up the $100 after the Endurance 50 registration opened. I wound up getting hurt and being unable to run, so I’m glad that I decided that it wasn’t worth it for me.
• Two years ago was centered on marathoning, such as a book review and a website review, my list of marathon candidates for Autumn, and my discovery that I was near meeting the requirements to join the 50 States Marathon Club. I also won the Literacy 5k, which I believe has since folded.

Dean Karnazes has finished his Endurance 50 event by running his 50^th marathon in New York City. Apparently he was only about 10 minutes behind me or so, but I did not wait around to talk to him again. He ran his final marathon in just over 3 hours.

When I was reading the race coverage in the New York Times, they listed a number of celebreties and notable people who had run the race. I was surprised not to find Dean’s name on the list. You can read about his final race and you can see some statistics about his run the day after.

What I find interesting is that he began to exhibit withdrawel symptoms from not running a morning marathon within a few hours of skipping his first run. He ran the original NYC course in Central Park the night after the race; I wonder if he means he did all 5 loops or if he just ran one or two of the loops? My guess is the latter.

I am looking forward to the documentary, and finding out what sort of crazy stunt he is going to run next. Maybe he will try doing 7 marathons on 7 continents in 7 days. I know that that one has been done before though; there were a few mountain climbers that did that 3 or 4 years ago if memory serves me.

I have written previously about how Dean Karnazes and Sam Thompson were running 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days. By the way, Sam finished his marathons on the 22^nd of August.

Today, I am going to use those 50 marathon events as examples of why doing something like that is impressive. The reason that I feel a need to mention this is because Adeel at Complete Running thinks that 50 marathons is not impressive at all. Adeel has a very well thought out article, and I recommend that you read it in full. However, I think that he is interpreting the news in completely the wrong way. To keep this (somewhat) brief, I am going to only concentrate on one facet of why I disagree with Adeel’s stance, since some of the other reasons are appearing in the comments of that thread and I do not want to write something that will take 30 minutes to read.
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I am running the New York City marathon in early November, and will plan on pacing a friend of mine into a 3 hour first attempt. The training to get me there centered around running a marathon two and a half weeks earlier than that as well, with Dean Karnazes as he does his 50 Marathons in 50 States in 50 Days promotion. He will be running the Maine Marathon course on October 17^th.

It hadn’t occurred to me that it would cost anything to run with him when I had first heard about it, but I can completely understand why it does as they will be having a rolling road closure for the crowd around him as he runs the course. When I first heard that registration was open, they apparently had not updated their website yet there was nowhere to actually register. Now that there is, I checked again, and it is going to cost $100 to run with him on this promotion.
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