The Definition of Crazy: Dean Karnazes

So maybe you heard of this guy. Mr. Karnaze ran 50 marathons in 50 days earlier this year. The final marathon was of course the Manhatten Marathon, and when he finished the Manhatten Marathon he decided "hmm... that was fun, I'm just gonna run home." In case you're wondering where he lives... SAN FRANCISCO! That's right. He ran 26 miles * 50 consectutive days = 1300 miles. But that wasn't enough. He than decided why not run another 2,906 miles to California.

This man is an inspiration. He used to run like me. Pick it up every once in a while, get into it and eventually stop for for no reason. On his 30th birthday he was drunk and someone handed him a shot of tequila. He shot it and walked home. In his kitchen he saw his running shoes, laced em up and in the middle of the night decided to just run.

15 miles down the road in Daly City he realized he had been running for like 2 hours, drunk. He was amazed. He immediately thought I wonder how far I can run. His run ended in Santa Cruz, 35 miles away from San Fran. Called his wife, she came and got him and he is obsessed with running ever since. What an inspiration. The stories this guy has are boundless. Check him out.

What impact does this have on me? Well I went running predawn for the first time in my life today, and I plan on going running every weekday morning from now on. It's pretty incredible because while I woke up a little tired the run woke me up and I wasn't groggy all day. I feel pretty good about it actually. I am gonna keep this up. I have said this before but I am gonna run a marathon. Before we moved to Chicago I was running TEN MILE jaunts and now I'm back to two and a half. I am gonna get back to TEN miles, running a half marathon and push forward. I wont name the Marathon but I will run a marathon. rock? roll.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This book should not exist

Image
It's late on a mid-October 2015 night and I am struggling with whether I should buy a $1,200 last-minute ticket to California to be with my family for my mother's emergency brain surgery. A week prior everyone was together in my house for an adventurous weekend climbing a wind turbine and celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday, now we are on the eve of my mom going under the gamma knife for emergency brain surgery. Turns out she has a size-able tumor growing on the surface of her brain.   It's a bit of miracle that the tumor was discovered in the first place as my mom's routine cancer screenings didn't usually include brain scans; however, she had been complaining of blurry vision and balance issues, plus she had become quite irritable having been pushed to take FMLA from work to deal with what she thought was post-cancer "brain fog." Thankfully her doctor had the good sense to add it all up and include her brain in her next cancer scan. Sure enou...
Read more

Finding "Clarity" in 1999

Image
I distinctly remember Tuesday, February 23, 1999. I was still living in Iowa and immediately after school let out I road with a friend to Best Buy so he could pick up Eminem's freshly released second album. Always down for a hang, I road along as there was one album I had read about and wanted to see if it was in stores. That album was Jimmy Eat World's Clarity . On the ride home I didn't bother asking to put in my purchase as my friend was not a rock fan. So for the next hour or so of cruising we blasted Slim Shady at painful volumes. For those uninitiated, this was the "Hi! My name is (ticka ticka) Slim Shady" album. I was indifferent to rap so it got a little long and tiresome by roughly the third time through the album. When I finally listened to Clarity it underwhelmed. Nothing on the album is lyrically hook centered on kinetically riff focused like later Jimmy Eat World releases. For a 16 year-old ska and pop punk super fan, Clarity go...
Read more

My Favorite Creative

Image
As I type this two drastically different things are happening; I'm in California for a film festival and my mother, Linda Boberg, is lying in a Des Moines hospice bed. In fact she started hospice care the day I flew out here. As you can imagine, I'm experiencing quite the emotional tug of war. When you have a kid you commonly examine where they get certain traits. I've always been able to parse that I get my emotional, empathetic tendencies from my mother and my pragmatic, compartmentalizing skills from my Dad (another raging tug of war at the moment). This list could go on forever, but one thing I've never fully understood is where my creative drive came from. Now with the writing on the wall, it's obvious my mom flipped the creativity switch. It wasn't until my Mom self-published a novel at 65 years old that I understood how creative she is. In the last three years she's self published half a dozen books and written many more. Her first bout of cancer in 2...
Read more