The Limits of Human Endurance
I just finished reading Ultramarathon Man, Dean Karnazes' story of increasingly insane tests of endurance. The final chapters tell the story of The Relay, a 199-mile footrace from Calistoga to Santa Cruz. Members of each twelve-person team were responsible for three of thirty-six legs of the race. Karno ran the race solo, in forty-six hours and seventeen minutes. And then he took his kids to an amusement park.
When I think about what this guy puts his body through, it makes my head spin. In order to train for events like this, as well as hold down his nine-to-five job and spend time with his family, he sleeps about four hours a night. During races like The Relay, he shovels junk food like pizza, cheesecake, cinnamon buns and Doritos into his mouth--while he's running--because it's the most efficient way to replace the 600 calories per hour he burns while running. (He includes his 27,934 calorie food log from The Relay at the end of the book.)
I bring all this up because, until this morning, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the upper limits of what the human body is capable of enduring*. Then I read about Charlie Engle, Ray Zahab, and Kevin Lin. They just wrapped up their four-thousand mile, 111 day run across the Sahara Desert. They averaged over a marathon a day for sixteen weeks in both sweltering heat and freezing cold, passing through six separate countries and nine different ecosystems.
I need to go to the gym.
* I'm quite sure Dean is capable of a run like this. I mean, the man's a machine. He ran a marathon to the south pole, for chrissakes.
When I think about what this guy puts his body through, it makes my head spin. In order to train for events like this, as well as hold down his nine-to-five job and spend time with his family, he sleeps about four hours a night. During races like The Relay, he shovels junk food like pizza, cheesecake, cinnamon buns and Doritos into his mouth--while he's running--because it's the most efficient way to replace the 600 calories per hour he burns while running. (He includes his 27,934 calorie food log from The Relay at the end of the book.)
I bring all this up because, until this morning, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the upper limits of what the human body is capable of enduring*. Then I read about Charlie Engle, Ray Zahab, and Kevin Lin. They just wrapped up their four-thousand mile, 111 day run across the Sahara Desert. They averaged over a marathon a day for sixteen weeks in both sweltering heat and freezing cold, passing through six separate countries and nine different ecosystems.
I need to go to the gym.
* I'm quite sure Dean is capable of a run like this. I mean, the man's a machine. He ran a marathon to the south pole, for chrissakes.
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