North Face Speaker Series: Dean Karnazes

The other night I went to see Dean Karnazes give a talk at Symphony Space as part of the North Face Never Stop Exploring Speaker Series. Having read Dean's book "Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of all All-Night Runner" a couple of years ago, I was intrigued to see what Fitness Magazine claims "might just be the fittest man in the world" looks like in person. Dean seems to be quite a controversial figure in the ultrarunning world. He has raised awareness of the sport through his book and media appearances. On the other hand, some people resent the attention he receives at the expense of more competitive runners. There is no doubting he is an impressive athlete: running 350 miles non-stop and winning the Badwater 135 mile race in Death Valley in 2004. When someone asks how your run was, how often do you get to say it was OK for the first two nights, but the third night without sleep was a little psychotic?

Seeing Dean in person makes me realize he is clearly at a very different level of fitness and conditioning than the rest of us, in the same way that the Kenyan runners who lead the pack of the New York marathon are physically very different to the runners that follow. As well as being very lean, he is also surprisingly muscular. He doesn't look like a skinny runner. As a former weight lifter who likes to drink beer, I found this quite heartening. I wanted to go to the gym and lift some weights after seeing him. 

Since most of the audience were runners, the majority having run  marathons or longer races, I was hoping to hear Dean talk about what it takes to run crazy distances like 350 miles. What sort of training is needed for such an event? How much harder is it running 350 miles than running 50 miles or 100 miles? How do you explain to your wife that you want to go on a three day run? What we saw was a video of Dean on the Dave Letterman show, which was entertaining, and some anecdotes about his 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days tour.  He did talk a little about the why's and how's of extreme running, but not enough in my opinion.  I would really like to hear him talk about his achievements from the point of view of someone who one day might also be tempted to do something a little crazy. Overall I had an entertaining, if not enlightening, evening.