Fitzgerald Matt - 50/50: secrets I learned running 50 marathons in 50 days--and how you too can achieve super endurance!

Copyright 2008 by Dean Karnazes
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Deans blood work summary, in Appendix E, is included courtesy of Bryan Bergman, PhD, University of Colorado Assistant Professor of Medicine.

Wellness Central
Hachette Book Group, USA
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First eBook Edition: August 2008

ISBN-13: 978-0-446-53789-6

This book is dedicated to my mom and dad,
who always gave me the liberty to wander freely.
May our adventures never end...

Ill preface these acknowledgments by saying that Im one of the luckiest men on earth. Why? Because Im surrounded by some of the greatest people on earth. To them, I owe everything. The list is long, and at the top would be my wife, Julie, and my daughter and son, Alexandria and Nicholas. Your ongoing support, encouragement, and positive spirit have provided me with immeasurable inspiration and motivation. I can never thank you enough.

To the entire team at The North Face, and especially Topher Gaylord and Steve Rendle, I am forever grateful. It has been fun, and were not done yet!

Many thanks to Matt Fitzgerald for helping me with this book, and my gratitude goes out to Chris Carmichael and Jason Koop for helping me get through fifty consecutive marathons without a single leg cramp!

To the dynamic duo over at Grand Central Publishing, Natalie Kaire and Jimmy Franco; your tireless marathon efforts in bringing this book to life have been extraordinary. Thank you for all that youve done, and continue to do, every day. And I owe a world of gratitude to my faithful agent, Carole Bidnick, whose dedication and commitment has been unwavering throughout this very long run together.

Lastly, I want to thank the thousands of athletes who joined me along the road. Together, we made a difference.

Mens Fitness has stated that I might just be the fittest man on the planet. Time once claimed that Im no mere mortal. Wired hailed me as the perfect human. Let me share a little secret with you: Im really just average. Perhaps even a little below average. I know this better than anyone. Im not bestowed with any superhuman powers. I dont have any special gifts. There is no magic in my genetic makeup. Im just an average guy.

So how am I able to run hundreds of miles at a clip? How was I able to complete fifty marathons, in fifty states, in fifty consecutive days? Just how do I do these things? I wrote this book to answer that question. There are lessons Ive learned along the way that can help you achieve your own amazing feats of endurance, however you define them. Some of these lessons are nothing more than practical tips that Ive picked up along the road, as all runners do; others come out of challenging experiences and help illustrate an approach or attitude that has proven effective for me. In either case, the aim of this book is to share with you the things that have helped me accomplish my goals, in the hope that you will be able to accomplish yours, no matter the scale.

Just remember, as extreme as some of my accomplishments have been, you are reading about an average guy. An extremely average guy.

Road Trip

O n a bright Saturday morning in February 2002, we set out on another road tripKarnazes familystyle. No bags were packed the night before our departure. No alarms were set to help us get an early start. Everyone rolled out of bed on his or her own schedule. And then chaos erupted. There was a mad scramble to fill bags and load them onto the Mother Ship, our beloved twenty-seven-foot RV. In the kitchen of our house, food appeared on burners, countertops, and tables and promptly disappeared into mouths. Childrens laughter rang out frequently, and the occasional ball or other projectile toy sailed across a room.

Every few minutes, my dad asked one of us if wed seen some item he desperately needed and couldnt find. The last of these items was the keys to the Mother Ship. He had just left the kitchen in search of them when my wife, Julie, entered.

Is Popou ready? she asked, her use of the Greek word for dad a sure indication that she was getting in the spirit of the weekend. The unstructured Grecian chaos of my familys operations sometimes unnerved her, but at other times, like now, she happily joined right in and became one of us.

Popous looking for the keys, said Alexandria, our seven-year-old.

Whos got Nicholas? Julie asked frantically, suddenly realizing she hadnt seen our four-year-old son for quite some time.

Popou said hes already in the RV with Yiayia, Alexandria replied, referring to her grandmother, my mother, in Greek as well.

Young as he was, Nicholas was already showing signs of having inherited his fathers insatiable wanderlust: He would walk right out the front door if left unattended for more than a few seconds.

Wait a minute, Alexandria continued. If Nicholas and Yiayia are already inside the Mother Ship, they must have the keys. How else could they unlock the door?

She was, of course, correct. Being outwitted by a child was hardly a blow to Popous pride, however. He didnt really care; he just wanted to get on with the adventure and was glad that someone had finally located those stinking keys hed been searching all over for, for the past ten minutes.

At last we buckled ourselves into the Mother Ship and Popou began to guide the vehicle northward with sure hands. We sang and joked and quoted movies as he expertly piloted the craft along the highway.

Over the years, what Ive come to realize is that the difference between a runner and a jogger is that a jogger still has control of his life. A scant hour after we had left our home in San Francisco, I was already stirring, my initial contentment replaced by a familiar restlessness. Pull over, I said.

Having anticipated the inevitable, I was already dressed in my running gear. At the first available turnout, Dad guided the Mother Ship off the road. We had perfected our routine on many past family road trips. Sometimes I would leave home on foot before the family, and theyd pick me up along the roadside a few hours later. Other days I would wait until we reached our destination and then take flight. Once in a while, I would run all night and meet them in the morning. Today the formula was pretty simple: Id run up the highway while they went shopping for supplies, secured our campsite, and prepared a gourmet lunch.

I gave Alexandria and Nicholas each a quick peck on the cheek while dashing toward the exit. I squeezed my moms hand, embraced Julie, and saluted my dad.

See you guys in a bit, I said, and I was out the door.

Today I would cover twenty-six or twenty-seven milesroughly a marathon. The ultimate challenge for many runners, this distance represented a typical weekend long run for me. Sometimes I would run a marathon on Saturday and another on Sunday. I had run two hundred miles nonstop more than once and I was completing several one-hundred-mile races in extreme environments each year, so a leisurely run of just a fraction of that length wouldnt take much out of me. I could just enjoy the hypnotic cycle of my breathing, the rhythmic contractions of my muscles, and the splendor of the day. It was a typically perfect Napa Valley winter morning, not a cloud in the sky, the air dry and neither cool nor warm, a gentle breeze refreshing my exposed skin.