Learning

Ultramarathon Man (or) Super Freak

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

Dean Karnazes is a complete freak of nature, and I don’t think he’d mind me telling you so; I do it with the utmost respect. Before I talk about him, though, let me give you a little personal context.

My siblings and I are very tall and we look like we should be in good physical condition, capable of handling all sorts of rigors. In reality, we bruise like fruit, have no stamina, and get listless and crabby when our blood sugar plunges. Various ones of us have been known to cap off a strenuous afternoon at Disneyland by collapsing onto a bed, pasty-faced and trembling, for the remainder of our vacation. (Sadly, this is not a lie.) Our daintiness is a source of great irritation to our partners, each of whom has a fantastic, ox-like hardiness that calls to mind pioneer stock of the 19th century. My brothers and I, by contrast, would never have survived in an earlier era. We are barely making it in this one.

When we were kids, our coach-Dad tried valiantly to mold us into world-class track athletes, but we were just too puny. Running has remained my exercise of choice, into adulthood, but the most I have ever been able to eke out, with peak conditioning, were a few 10K’s. I have friends who regularly run full marathons, and I find their abilities profoundly confusing. (Also, their tendency to use words like “fun” to describe running long distances. I have been running for 30 years now. I don’t believe I have hit the “fun” part yet.)

Given my own physical frailty, you will understand why I am absolutely befuddled by the humanoid that is Dean Karnazes.

I learned of Karnazes when I bought and read his book Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-night Runner. His writing is solid enough, but you don’t read books like this for the writing. You read books like this to blow your own mind by what some human beings are capable of. Human beings who are not, you know, YOU.

Karnazes grew up in California, where he ran track throughout his school years but quit when he was in high school. Fifteen years later, on the night of his 30th birthday, Karnazes, a businessman who was married to a doctor, had a sort of mid-life-crisis moment. That night, he put on some old yard sneakers and took off, through the streets of San Francisco, and ran, off and on—all night. He loved it, despite the blisters and the shin splints and the strained muscles, and decided he would take up running again. But Dean Karnazes tends not to do things normally.

Did you, like me, think that the pinnacle of athletic endurance was perhaps an Ironman Triathlon? Guess again. Back in 1974, a man named Gordy Ainsleigh entered his horse in the Western States Trail Ride, a 100-mile equestrian race through the Sierra Nevadas. When Gordy’s horse went lame just before the race, ‘ole Gordy decided (as any sane person would) to run the entire course himself. Sans horse. On foot.

Almost twenty-four hours after starting out, Gordy revealed himself to be an extra-terrestrial being from a highly-advanced species finished the race. And a beast called “ultradistance running” was born.

By the time Dean Karnazes had his Come-to-Running birthday experience, Gordy’s little caper had evolved into the annual Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, a race that incorporates a total elevation change of a staggering 38,000 feet. (Lest you breeze on past that figure, let me give you this by comparison: the peak of Mt. Hood, which is the highest point in my mountainous home state, is just over 11,000 feet. Try to imagine running up and down for 3 1/2 times that height, in one race.) In order to even qualify to enter the Western States, you have to have previously run fifty miles straight in less than nine hours.

Look, I would love to dwell on how insane this all is, but I have bigger fish to fry. Because two years after he started running again, Karnazes completed that 100-Mile Run in twenty-one hours – and decided that it wasn’t enough.

A year later, he ran the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile race across Death Valley, where the asphalt temperature can reach 200 degrees. An hour into the race, his first pair of shoes melted off. Thirty miles in, he started vomiting. By the 42-mile mark, which he reached at 1:00am, the air temperature was 112 degrees. After 72 miles, Karnazes passed out and was hauled off the course. But the following summer he was back, and that year he successfully completed the Badwater race.

During the next seven years, while holding down a day job, Karnazes did the following:

Scaled Yosemite’s Half Dome.
Swam across the San Francisco Bay.
Did triathlons, adventure races, and 24-hour mountainbike rides.
Surfed, snowboarded, windsurfed, and climbed mountains.
Oh, and continued to run ultramarathons, to the tune of almost one a month.

I know, this is starting to sound ridiculous, ludicrous, and fictional. Just wait, it gets better.

In 2002, Karnazes realized that no one had ever run a marathon at the South Pole. You know, as in Antarctica, the coldest place on the Planet (officially, at -128.6 degrees.) I don’t know about you, but if I learned that no one had ever run a marathon at the South Pole, I don’t think my reaction would be: “Well, this simply will not do.” But then again, I’m not Dean Karnazes.

Yes, our intrepid athlete went to Antarctica, and yes, he ran 26.2 miles in the snow there. He celebrated by stripping naked and doing a quick loop around a barber pole that’s planted at the exact center of the South Pole, so he could say he’d run naked “around the world.”

This might be a good place to talk about Karnazes’ mental state. Clearly, he has some “drive” issues, to say the least. Here’s what he says about it:

The average obsessive-compulsive takes seven years to get help. The average runner covers 10,920 miles in that time. Whether my affliction was clinical is anyone’s guess; I never did submit to testing. Some seek the comfort of their therapist’s office, other head for the corner pub and dive into a pint, but I choose running as my therapy. It was the best source of renewal there was. I couldn’t recall a single time that I felt worse after a run than before. What drug could compete? As Lily Tomlin said, “Exercise is for people who can’t handle drugs and alcohol.”

That doesn’t fully satisfy my curiosity about his psyche, but it will have to do.

As for his physical biomechanics, the reasons he can do things that most of us couldn’t do no matter how hard we trained…who knows? Evidently doctors have determined that Karnazes’ body somehow reduces lactic acid as he exercises, which is contrary to normal physiology; but that is all the medical information I could find. Obviously he is made of different stuff than the rest of us. He doesn’t stretch before running. He says he’s never had an overuse injury. His resting pulse is 40. And so on.

Your guess is as good as mine, folks.

Anyway, in the last decade, Karnazes has completed a 199-mile Relay Race (normally run by teams of 12 men), single-handedly, six times. He has run 350 miles, without stopping, in less than 81 hours. He has run on a treadmill for 24 hours straight (the thought of which makes me want to poke my own eyes out with a sharp stick.) And in 2006, he ran 50 marathons, in all 50 states, on 50 consecutive days.

It bears repeating: 50 marathons. 50 states. 50 days.

He is also president of his own company, a motivational speaker, and a media darling. In his spare time, he keeps an active blog.

His book, Ultramarathon Man, is utterly fascinating, especially to a runner (can I still call myself that, after all this?) Karnazes discusses some of his feats in great detail, and he writes in depth about his training and diet. For example: he eats while running, consuming 28,000 calories during a typical endurance run. He actually has a post on his blog where he explains, very sincerely, how to order a pizza and have it delivered to you while you’re running. With a side of cheesecake, if you’re so inclined.

I have always loved learning about people who push themselves to do unbelievable things. It’s beyond inspiring, and it lifts me a little out of my daily drudgery; it lets me know that I’m capable of more than I dream. Reminds me that maybe I can manage another mile or two, metaphorically or literally.

Which is nice and all. But I don’t believe I’ll go running with Dean Karnazes anytime soon.

Snapshot – Architectural Digest

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

It all began with Brad Pitt. As so many things do.

Oh, all right, so there are actually not that many things in my life that begin with Brad Pitt (sadly) – (I kid, I kid!) – but my love affair with Architectural Digest sure did.

I was in Costco a year and a half ago, passing by the magazine rack, when I saw a photo of Brad peering out from under a hat, on the cover of Architectural Digest. This was right in the middle of his having-babies-with-Angelina brouhaha, and what can I say – I was curious enough to pick it up. Unlike all the other publications whose covers he was gracing, this one resembled an art catalogue – pretty and thick, with glossy pages throughout. The Brad article, about his efforts to help re-build New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, was not very in-depth or interesting, but the rest of the magazine consisted of page after shiny page full of photographs of enormous homes, professionally decorated. I am a voyeuristic sucker for beautiful homes. I bought the magazine.

Up until that point, architecture was a subject that had escaped my notice. I’m sure I had heard of Architectural Digest before, but the name makes it sound like it is full of blueprints and boring technical-speak. I discovered that nothing could be further from the truth. AD (as it refers to itself) is packed with article after article featuring beautiful custom homes. About half of the content covers architecture; the other half covers interior design and decoration (some of which is hideously over-the-top, which provides a whole other kind of enjoyment.)

For the next couple of months, I bought the magazine off the newsstands, which got a little expensive (remember – I have no income these days.) Then I discovered that my favorite used bookstore periodically gets up to a dozen back-issues of AD in at a time, and sells them for 25 cents each. This made me very happy. I started “dropping by” the store on my way to the park with the boys, a couple of times a week. Whenever I saw a new batch of AD’s on the rack, I grabbed them all and lugged them to the counter. By the second time I did this, the cashier was curious.

“Oh,” she said politely. “Are you an architect?”

“Oh, no, ha ha,” I said. No, I’m just a lunatic who gets obsessed with things. “I…uh…just…I’ve kind of gotten into the magazine. I like looking at the houses.”

I’m not overly eloquent in person.

Anyway, as the months passed and I kept reading the magazine, I started absorbing all sorts of interesting information. Having lived all my life in small, generic spec homes (which certainly have their place in the world), I never realized just how much thought great architects put into the buildings they design. The shapes they create are intended to serve functions but also to inspire emotional reactions. I cannot think of another medium in which art and technology meet in such a potent way.

For example: If architects place a small window at the end of a long hall, they do it to “draw the eye” down the hallway. They think about how the light will fall through each window, at every time of the day. They design entryways to serve as aesthetic “transitions” from the outside to the inside. When a house is built on an open plain, with mountains in the distance, they might create a curving roofline to rise up on one side, to serve as a “counterbalance” to the jagged mountain peaks in the background. Windows are placed to specifically frame views.

Through AD, I learned about brilliant, accomplished artists, people like Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi woman who, in 2004, became the first woman in history to receive the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel. People like Norman Foster, a British architect and fellow Pritzker Prize-winner, who has designed a mind-bogglingly extensive and diverse array of structures: office buildings, domes, train stations, apartment buildings, campuses, Wembley Stadium, and, just for fun, the Millau Viaduct in France, the tallest bridge in the world. You can see photos of just some of his stunning work on his Wiki page.

As my awareness of architecture expanded, however minutely, so did my appreciation. I now “get” stark modernism. You know those boxy structures that seem to be all metal and concrete and glass and sharp angles? I used to think they were ugly. Now, although I still wouldn’t want to live in one, I find great beauty in their clean, even severe, lines.

During this time period, I also happened to read The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett, a big, fat, incredibly detailed novel that describes the building of a cathedral in twelfth-century England. I must tell you, I visited several cathedrals in Europe when I was fourteen, and never once did I stop to think about how miraculous it was, that something so huge and heavy and complex could have been built with nothing but bare hands. No cranes to hoist heavy things a hundred feet in the air; no computers to give accurate measurements. Yet these buildings still stand, many hundreds of years later. It is extraordinary.

And so, my fascination grows.

For those who don’t know much about the subject of architecture, Architectural Digest provides a pain-free way to learn things while you’re looking at beautiful pictures – and who doesn’t love looking at gorgeous homes? Plus, you gain all sorts of fun new words that you can work into conversations, words like “clerestory” and “cantilevered” and “curvilinear.”

Okay, so I haven’t been able to use any of those words yet. But when the opportunity arises, and I’m confident that it will, Brad Pitt and I will be ready.

Sorry. I couldn’t resist.

Spotlight – North Sentinel Islands

Cathy LaGrow 12 Comments

I was at my brother’s house, standing in his newly put-together office, trying hard not to covet the enormous, gorgeous new map of the world covering the wall over his desk (also trying hard not to covet the fact that he HAS an office with an honest-to-God door that closes – also, wondering if the wall map would fit in the baby’s diaper bag when I left, and if my brother would miss it), and I learned something extraordinary.

We were gazing at the new map when my brother casually pointed to a little spot in the ocean near Indonesia, and said, “That’s the North Sentinel Islands.” Then he stepped back and said, “The people who live there have never been touched by civilization.”

Oh, how he knows what gets me going.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

My brother, who teaches high school English, assumed his classroom voice and held both of his hands up to make air brackets. He is extremely tall, so when he takes this stance, it’s very dramatic. “There is an indigenous tribe of people living there who have never been contacted by anyone from the outside world,” he said. “Every time outsiders have approached the island by boat, they are driven off. Helicopters have tried to circle overhead, and they are met with a hail of arrows.”

“WHAT?” I squawked. (I tend to squawk when presented with brand-new and intriguing information.)

He leaned over and tapped on his computer, pulling up the Wikipedia page for “North Sentinel Island.” Sure enough, this small island remains a mystery, in the year 2010. It is unknown exactly how many people live there, or what language they speak. They have never interacted with fellow natives on the islands surrounding them. The Indian government made repeated attempts to engage them, before officially giving up in the 1990’s. They are considered to be the most isolated people in the world.

Perhaps I should not admit it, but this information positively floored me. It had never occurred to me that there are pre-historic people still living on this planet.

My brother pulled up a couple of poorly-shot Youtube videos made by researchers who have tried to reach North Sentinel. The first video looks almost fake, with its blurry white beach and dark, stick-figurish natives prancing on the shore, legs akimbo, bows held high. In the second video, the researchers actually crept onto shore and left some gifts, then retreated to their boats and watched as the natives retrieved the offerings. That is as close as anyone has ever come to the North Sentinelese. In 2006 the natives killed a couple of fisherman who got too close to the island and since then, the world has left them alone.

A few days after I learned all of this, I sat on my back patio, reading a memoir called Disturbing the Universe, which was written by a physicist who did work on government nuclear projects in the 1950’s. The more I tried to read about the splitting of the atom and the possibility of interstellar travel, the more my mind kept returning to that little island in the Indian Ocean. I finally leaned back in my chair and listened to the sounds of civilization around me – the drone of a lawn mower, the buzz of a prop plane passing overhead, my air conditioner switching on with a thump – and I thought about the Sentinelese. The same sun warmed their skin and mine, yet our lives might as well be centuries apart. They never hear anything but the dull roar of the ocean, and each other’s voices. They know almost nothing.

As early as 340 B.C., Aristotle hypothesized that the earth was finite, and round; but for all the Sentinelese know, the ocean stretches on forever. They don’t know what an atom is, or a horse, or a paper clip. They don’t know about the Dark Ages, or the Middle Ages, or any of the Ages. They don’t know that World Wars have taken place. They’ve never heard about a man named Christ. The North Sentinelese have missed every single event that has happened outside of their tiny island. Even as I write this, I find it difficult to fathom.

I know that there are millions of people in third-world countries who do not have access to education or technology or medicine, people who don’t know much about history or science. But those individuals have still become a part of the whole – they are still connected to the rest of us, however tenuously. They have still, perhaps, seen a drinking glass or a piece of paper. They are somewhat accessible. The North Sentinelese are not.

Of course, if you really want to tumble down a rabbit-hole, you could pose the question: Are we better off than the Sentinelese? It’s an interesting thought. They have food, and water, and companionship. The “advances” that we take advantage of are not needed for survival. Of course, all of our technologies do make life easier – um, until they don’t.

Ultimately, I would choose my life over theirs, simply because I am a knowledge junkie. I have a curious streak as long as our galaxy. The more I learn, the more I want to learn. If, at its core, civilization is nothing more than knowledge, then I will stay on the side of civilization.

Every now and again, though, I still think about those North Sentinelese, and I wish I could drop them a line. They wouldn’t believe what we’ve been up to…