Ultramarathon Man

by Dean Karnazes

  This was irritating. I’d done well in cross-country without someone barking orders every time I ran. So after Bilderback had clocked me, measured me, evaluated my stride, and dissected my split times, I mentioned that there was really no need to scream out my times as I ran.

  “But if you don’t know what your split times are,” he said, “how do you pace yourself ?”

  “I run with my heart,” I replied.

  That was about the funniest damn thing Bilderback had ever heard. “He runs with his heart!” he whooped between gales of laughter. “He runs with his heart!”

  I wanted to punch the bastard. Instead, I walked off the track and hung up my shoes.

  I didn’t run again for fifteen years.

  Chapter 4

  Run for Your Life

  Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.

  —Socrates

  Southern to Northern California 1977-1992

  My running career ended, but life carried on without much remorse. With three high school kids in the house, there was no shortage of revelry. After running, things got unruly. I discovered alcohol and began throwing underage parties when the folks were away. Kraig and I started battling. He hocked my motorcycle to buy a new surfboard, and we got into a brawl in the living room over it, breaking china and putting a big hole in the wall. It was typically me or my brother who caused most of the ruckus, and I was clearly the worst offender, like the time I commandeered the family car and drove to Mexico without a license. Pary was always the stable one.

  Growing up the only girl in a Greek family was not easy. Our father was overprotective and rarely allowed her to stray far from home. It was especially hard for him because Pary was quite beautiful—long golden hair, deep brown eyes, olive skin, and a Julia Roberts smile. My poor father constantly worried about her safety, and about boys. Pary was unruffled by it, though, and never rebelled. She was comfortable with herself, and lots of people, like me, were drawn to her inner strength.

  Pary and I remained the best of friends throughout high school. She was my closest confidante and never judged me, no matter how far I deviated from her values or how badly I screwed up. And boy, did I ever screw up badly, being expelled twice for showing up to school functions intoxicated. My parents were livid, ready to ship me off to boarding school, but Pary stuck by my side, as if she knew this unsettled phase of mine would pass. I admired her whimsical way of always moving forward, never taking life too seriously. “They still love you,” she said, speaking about my parents—“just give it some time.” We were family, and even in the worst of circumstances, we had each other. That’s what mattered.

  High school graduation came and passed, and I headed off to college at Cal Poly, where the debauchery continued, only without adult supervision to get in the way. I was miles from home and carefree, not to mention careless. With a newly acquired fake ID, booze was easy to come by, and every night seemed cause for celebration. I surfed and windsurfed all day, occasionally attending class when time permitted, and then partied into the wee hours. My energy needed an outlet, and all-night binges filled that need.

  Julie and I remained together, but I could sense she was tiring of my ways. She had decided to attend Baylor University in Texas, and we vowed to keep our relationship alive, though I had doubts she would remain loyal, given the way I was behaving. And who could blame her?

  Then, early one morning, after a particularly wild evening, someone knocked on my apartment door. It was a priest. The night before, Pary had lost control of the convertible she was driving; she was thrown from the vehicle as it rolled, and killed. It was the eve of her eighteenth birthday.

  The blow to my family went beyond shock and sadness. One day she was a healthy and vibrant young lady, and the next she was gone. Her sudden disappearance opened a chasm of despair among us. The void it left in my own life was unbearable.

  The rift her death created in our family seemed bottomless. A part of us was missing, irreplaceable, gone forever. We had suffered through low points as a family in the past, but we had always maintained a certain optimism that the situation would change, things would get better. At the very least, we always had one another. Until now.

  My kid sister, Pary

  She was gone, and our family was destroyed. Gatherings were no longer a time of celebration, but of mourning. As the years passed, I tried to restore some sense of joy to our household. I cleaned up my act and started spending weekends back home. Kraig and I settled our sibling differences and became close friends. We adopted a new pet for our parents, a playful Golden Lab puppy. But nothing could console them.

  After years of trying, I finally gave up.

  A few years after my sister’s death, my dad started doing something curious. He started running. More precisely, he started training for the Los Angeles Marathon. He would run during his lunch break, after getting home from work, and early in the morning. He stuck to his routine with extraordinary conviction and gradually prepared himself for the challenge.

  When the gun went off, he was ready. The race hurt him bad, but he kept going. Wouldn’t stop until crossing the finish line, despite the pain. Though it was unspoken, I think it was his way of paying tribute to my sister. As they carried him into the medical tent, swollen and cramping, he was smiling defiantly.

  From that day forward, no matter that he ran less after completing the event, I always thought of my dad, foremost, as a marathoner. Which, to me, was the greatest distinction there could be.

  Eventually I graduated from college, more by dint of grit and sweat than of scholarship. After losing my sister, I couldn’t bring myself to saddle my parents with the financial obligation of putting me through school. It just didn’t seem right. So I paid for most of my education by hustling for scholarships and grants and working at the campus health-care center. I wasn’t the smartest kid in school, but few had more drive or worked harder. Partying was now the last thing on my mind.

  Even though I hadn’t run in years, outdoor sports remained important to me. I did some mountain climbing and scuba diving, but I channeled most of my focus into windsurfing, winning some competitions and ending up on the cover of several magazines. I even managed to land a few sponsorship endorsements, which helped pay the tuition bills.

  When graduation rolled around, I was somewhat amazed to learn that I was the class valedictorian. When the dean first informed me, I thought it was a commencement prank. Clearly the honor belonged to one of my brainy classmates. My marks had been good, sure, but entirely on account of the extra effort I put into my studies. Academics didn’t come easy to me; I had to work doubly hard just to keep up. But it was true, I had finished at the top of my class.

  After my undergraduate degree came graduate school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. And after graduate school came business school at USF’s McLaren School of Business and Management. I now took school more seriously, which surprised even me. I was more interested in climbing corporate ladders than mountains.

  Julie and I remained together through college. After Pary’s death, our commitment to each other strengthened, and there was no breaking the bond. She moved back to California upon completing her degree, and we got married shortly thereafter. We settled happily in the city we loved, San Francisco, and life was cozy. I began rising up the ranks in the marketing department of a major health-care company, making decent money and living the idyllic yuppie lifestyle.

  The past slowly melted away. I tried not to think about anything beyond the immediate. For the moment, I was content—at least as far as I could tell.

  As the years rolled by, however, the job pressures began to mount, and the car payments and hefty mortgage didn’t help. Suddenly, work was stressing me out. The long hours and the travel were becoming mundane. At first it was glamorous, but somewhere among all the meetings, dinners, and cocktail receptions, I became aware of an inner hollowness. Something was missing in my life.

  Work wasn’t providing the satisfaction that I had
always thought it would. So what if I had an MBA and was pulling in six figures a year? There was an emptiness that my career didn’t fulfill. I began to secretly long to fill this void, even though I wasn’t sure what it was or how it could be filled.

  One day, as my thirtieth birthday approached, a call at my desk shook me from one of my increasingly frequent daydreams.

  “Dean, Dr. Naish here.” Naish was the CEO of a large potential client that I’d been pitching for months. “The board has had the opportunity to deliberate, and I am happy to inform you that you’ve been awarded the contract.”

  I silently pumped my fist in the air.

  “We’re looking forward to doing business with you folks,” Naish continued. “I’ll have my admin set up a meeting for later this week.”

  “Right on!” I shouted when we’d hung up. This was a contract my company wanted badly. The news would be celebrated. I called my boss to give him the good word.

  “Yes!” he yelled into the receiver. I could hear him punching numbers into his calculator. “You know how big your commission check is going to be?!”

  With a sudden sense of deflation, I realized that I didn’t care. My check might be big, but it seemed that the toll the job was taking on me was even bigger. Every day I’d field dozens of urgent voicemail messages and dozens more e-mails. Managing all of that incoming noise was nearly impossible. At some point the clamor had begun to manage me. Now I just reacted to the events of the day, not setting my own course in any substantive way, not feeling any real sense of accomplishment. At first the money mattered, because I had never had any. But now that I’d managed to accumulate a modest stockpile, I realized there had to be more to life than continually trying to bolster those reserves.

  For the better part of my adult life I’d been making deadlines and chasing the next deal. It had been so long since I had stopped to reflect, I wasn’t sure what was important any longer. Things were moving so fast that there was no time to look below the surface. Everyone around me seemed to be operating on the same level, and it just fed on itself. We were all caught up in a whirlwind of important meetings and expensive lunches, do-or-die negotiations, lucrative deals conducted in fancy hotels with warmed towel racks and monogrammed robes.

  I had grown accustomed to the upscale lifestyle, the bonuses, the hefty options package. My future looked bright as the perks continued to roll in. But I couldn’t ignore the nagging sense that something was missing. I was moving fast, that was for sure, but was I moving forward? I needed a sense of purpose and clarity—and, perhaps, adventure.

  Something snapped on the morning of my thirtieth birthday. It began pleasantly with Julie bringing me breakfast in bed.

  “Happy birthday, darling,” she smiled, pouring my coffee. “Can you believe you’re thirty years old?”

  That simple question, which slid so innocently from her mouth, sent me into an absolute tailspin. For the first time it hit me—I was thirty years old! How could it be? I felt as though I hadn’t even begun to live yet. How could I be thirty? Where had the years gone?

  At that moment I realized that my life was being wasted. Disillusioned with the trappings of the corporate scene, the things that really mattered—friendship and exploration, personal expansion and a sense of meaning—had gotten all twisted around making a lot of money and buying stuff. I hungered for a place where I could explore nature and my capabilities, away from a corporate office in a corporate building in a big city with crowded supermalls and people judging me by the car I drove (which, of course, was a new Lexus).

  What I needed was some breathing room to figure things out. Some space to determine what really mattered to me. I needed a chance to clear my vision and look at the world through fresh eyes.

  “Honey, is everything all right?” Julie asked. “You look like you’re a mile away.”

  “No, it’s not,” I replied. “I’m confused. I feel trapped by my routine of twelve-hour workdays. I’m not sure what’s important anymore. My fear is that I’ll wake up thirty years from now and be in the same place, only wrinkled and bald . . . and really fat. And bitter.”

  “Wow,” she said. “Is the coffee too strong?”

  “I read a story in the paper yesterday about the first mountain climber to scale Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen,” I said. “Nobody thought it was remotely possible to climb the highest mountain in the world without using bottled oxygen, but this guy went and did it anyway. A reporter asked him afterward why he had gone up there to die, and you know how he responded? ‘I didn’t go up there to die, I went up there to live.’”

  She listened politely, but I could see my ramblings weren’t entirely clear.

  “I miss my sister,” I said, “and the good times we used to have together. I want my family to come back together. I’m sick of work being the center of my life, it’s just not doing it for me. Something’s missing. Is thirty too young to be having a midlife crisis?”

  We spent the rest of the day kicking around the city, not saying much. I picked at my food when we stopped for lunch at an outdoor cafe.

  That evening we joined friends for drinks at the Paragon, a swanky nightclub in San Francisco’s hip Marina District. The city was hopping, all the trendy bars mobbed with self-important young professionals like myself. Julie, who isn’t big on nightlife, decided to walk home early. I stayed out with the boys and proceeded to get seriously loaded for the first time in years. At one point a beautiful young woman said hello to one of my friends, and he introduced her to me.

  “This is Dean. It’s his thirtieth birthday.”

  It was an embarrassing statement, and I hoped that she would ignore it. But she didn’t.

  “Well, hello, Dean,” she said, squeezing my hand most pleasantly. “How’s it feel to be thirty?”

  Extremely troubling, I thought. But I blurted out, “Great!” with a phony, drunken grin on my face.

  She lived in San Francisco, too, and worked downtown. She told me that she rarely went to bars, which I doubted. I bought her a drink. And then she bought me a drink. We toasted my birthday. In the back of my mind, the part that was still sober, I could see where things might be heading, and I really didn’t want to go there.

  Then again, I was drunk. And depressed. And this girl was really cute. The bar was pulsing to a jazz band, and we swayed along, chatting away. Soon enough, she was rubbing against me, her face lit up by a seductive smile.

  “I have a confession to make,” I managed to say. “I’m married.”

  “I know,” she smiled. “I saw your ring. So am I.”

  She held up her left hand to display a massive rock on her finger.

  “So, can I buy you another drink, birthday boy?” She pressed herself against me again.

  My mind was whirling. “Hold that thought,” I said. “Let me run to the restroom.”

  As I worked my way through the crowd, my heart began to speak. When I reached the restroom, I didn’t stop. I kept going, into the kitchen, where, behind the gas stoves and walk-in coolers, there was a delivery entrance. I pushed my way out through this door into the tradesmen’s alley, then made my way among the food remains and rubbish to the street.

  And kept walking.

  The cool night air cleared my head almost immediately. The streets of San Francisco were quiet, except for the foghorn on the Golden Gate Bridge, reverberating off in the distance. Light trails of mist swept down the streets, and the moon appeared, and then disappeared, behind the clouds. It was late and dark, and very still once I got out of that bar.

  When I reached my house a few blocks from the bar, I saw that Julie had left the porch light on. Our Victorian looked warm and inviting, and safe. I began walking up the stairs, like I’d done a thousand times before, but I only made it a few steps.

  There was something transforming about tonight. A switch had been flipped inside me. I wasn’t going to check my messages and then slip into the comfort of my warm bed. There was a determination to make tomorrow m
orning different, too. I wouldn’t be showing up at the office as usual, only to exchange gripes with my colleagues about how our jobs had taken over our lives and how there was no time left for anything else.

  I’d no longer stand for it. This was my life, and I was damn well going to live it on my terms. Over the years I’d softened, lost my edge. But that was all about to change tonight.

  I went to the garage and cautiously made my way through the darkness to the back porch, where I kept an old pair of sneakers used for yard work. I deliberated for a moment about what else to wear. After some thought, I undid my belt and pulled off my pants. I had on a pair of loose-fitting jockey briefs, which would be comfortable enough. I took off my sweater but left my undershirt on. The socks were a problem. They were black silk knee-highs. I folded them down low around my ankles, then put on the sneakers.

  In my pants pocket I found a twenty-dollar bill. It had started the evening as a hundred-dollar bill, but the bar had consumed the balance. Folding it up neatly and stuffing it into my shoe, I took a swig of water from the hose, and made my way back to the street.

  As I started jogging south, I turned to take one last look at my house. Inside was my beautiful wife, peacefully asleep. I blew her a kiss and strode out of sight.

  It was tough going. I hadn’t run any real distance in fifteen years. But I kept at it. That night I just knew I had to keep at it.

  So I ran, and became filled with emotions and memories. I thought about my sister, Pary, and how much I missed her every day, even now, almost a decade after her passing. I thought about the time I had teased her about not liking ketchup, and wished that I hadn’t. And I thought about the time Pary, Julie, and I had ditched school and driven to Disneyland, eaten cotton candy and gone on all the rides, joked with Mickey—because he knew we were playing hooky and didn’t mind—and held hands and skipped through Tomorrowland, singing, “Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!” and then snuck Julie back into her house afterward. Was I ever grateful for that day.