Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life.
—Haruki Murakami
“I began running home from kindergarten when I was just six years old,” says Dean Karnazes. “Running, to me, was freedom. It was a release, and a way to experience the world.”
At first, I thought this explanation of why a six-year-old from Inglewood in Los Angeles would be into running was suspiciously sophisticated. Why would such a young child need release? It’s more likely, I thought, that Karnazes has transferred his adult understanding of running onto the motivation of his six-year-old self. He has grown up to become an extraordinary runner, after all. But later he mentions that he’s a dyslexic introvert, and I start to think I underestimated his younger self. No doubt dyslexia can make childhood difficult and stressful, so I can see how running might provide freedom. I ask Karnazes if he felt different to his classmates. “I didn’t necessarily think I was different from other kids,” he says. “My passions were just elsewhere, that was all.”
Well, even if he wasn’t different then, he is now. And his passion for running is second to none. Here’s a selection of his achievements. On October 12, 2005, he set out on a run in Northern California. He stopped only on October 15, three days later, after running 350 miles. Karnazes spoke with a journalist from Runner’s World magazine during the run.1 From the transcription, a few moments stood out for me. At 3:29 a.m. on the Thursday, he reports seeing lots of skunk. And deer, bobcats, coyote, and possums. By 2:21 a.m. on the Saturday, he realizes he’s been sleep-running. “I suddenly woke up and realized I’m still running. And the really bizarre thing is that I feel like I got a little catnap.” By 9:07 p.m. he’s closing in on 350 miles. “Finishing this is as close to an out-of-body experience as I’ve ever had. Earlier on, the pain always brought my mind back, but for these last ten miles I’ve felt totally disassociated from my body.”
On September 17, 2006, he ran a marathon in St. Louis, Missouri. Fine—but then he ran a marathon every day for the next forty-nine days, each one in a different state, ending in New York. Then—and this is getting preposterous—saying he wanted to clear his head, he set off to run to San Francisco. In the end he stopped in Missouri, after 1,300 additional miles and twenty-eight days.
He’s also won the Badwater Ultramarathon, which proclaims itself the world’s toughest foot race. This is a maddeningly, monstrously difficult run through Death Valley, California—itself the record holder for the hottest temperature on Earth. The 135-mile race starts at 85 meters (279 feet) below sea level, and ends at 2,548 meters (8,360 feet) above, on the trail to Mount Whitney. Temperatures the day Karnazes won reached 49 degrees Celsius. For good measure, he’s also run a marathon in Antarctica, in regular running shoes, at temperatures that dropped to minus 25 degrees Celsius. His name is routinely prefixed with the words “superhuman athlete.”
“I truthfully believe that anyone can do what I do if they have the same passion, drive, commitment, and resolve,” he says. “I think I’m simply exceling at something I love, which is no different from what many other people do in different fields.”
Love lifts us up (where we belong). Love spins you right round (baby, right round). Love can carry you a long way, I get that. But with ultrarunners it’s more—it’s having a body that can propel you ever on while coping with incredible punishment, and a mind that can commit to relentless training and pain. If it’s love, it seems to be the kind that veers toward obsession, and a kind of addiction. I’ve never run farther than to the bus stop, but don’t get me wrong, I’m full of admiration for distance runners. It’s because I can’t do it that I want to understand how they can do what they do.
• • •
Like most people, I know the etymology of the word “marathon”—I know that a marathon is 42.2 kilometers/26.2 miles because that is roughly the distance from Marathon to Athens, and someone ran that distance to report on Greek success in a battle. Now I know, because a few ultrarunners have told me, that the someone is supposedly Pheidippides, who died in Athens after delivering his message.
The story goes on. A couple of days before the Marathon run, Pheidippides was sent with a message from Athens to Sparta, a distance of some 240 kilometers (150 miles), which took him two days. He then ran from the battlefield at Marathon back to Athens with his message of Greek victory over the Persians. It’s a bit more understandable that you might collapse and die after that sort of accumulated distance. This, by the way, was in 490 BC—more than 2,500 years ago.
But then I found out that there is no real evidence for any of this. The story of Pheidippides has probably been stitched together from snippets here and there and augmented over the centuries. No matter. It is such a good story that it ought to be true, and like all great stories, it has inspired millions of people ever since. If it wasn’t true then—if the feats it tells are not historically accurate—it has been made true now.
Hundreds of marathons are held all over the world each year. Running is a passion for millions of people. For some, running a marathon is a one-off, something they want to achieve once in their lives. For others it becomes a habit, something more than a hobby, and for some a mere marathon isn’t enough. For those who want to go full Pheidippides, there are dozens of ultra-marathons around the world, including the Spartathlon—a race that re-creates his supposed run from Athens to Sparta. This is a distance of 246 kilometers (153 miles). Another very impressive ultrarunner, forty-three-year-old Scott Jurek, has won the Badwater Ultra and—seven times in a row—the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, as well as the Spartathlon. But the record for the latter race—20 hours, 25 minutes—is held by a legend in the world of ultrarunning named Yiannis Kouros. He has run the four fastest times the Spartathlon has ever seen, and he is sometimes called Pheidippides’s successor (another nickname is the “Running God”).
Extreme endurance running comes in two different classes, categorized by distance or time. For example, there are 100-mile road races, 1,000-km track races, and 1,000-mile road races. On the other hand, there are 12-hour road races and 48-hour track races. Many of the men’s records are held by Kouros, and of his achievements perhaps the most extraordinary is his 24-hour track record.
These races are mind-boggling just to contemplate. You run continuously, around and around a track, for twenty-four hours. The aim is to run as far as you can in that time. In 1997 in Adelaide, Australia, Kouros ran 303 kilometers (188 miles) in that period. That’s an average pace of 7 minutes, 39 seconds per mile. It’s more than seven marathons strung together, without stopping, run at a pace not much over three hours per marathon. No one has come close to this record, and Kouros declared it would last for centuries. Someone should sequence that man’s genome.
• • •
Nicole Pinto is an exercise physiologist at the Human Performance Center at the University of California, San Francisco. She’s run a battery of tests on Dean Karnazes, including blood lactate and oxygen-consumption tests. The thinking was that as he seems to be so far outside the realms of normal achievement, even for ultrarunners, there may be something interesting going on in him physiologically. She explains what happens in your muscles when you exercise.
Glucose is broken down into a compound called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the unit of fuel used to power the contraction of a muscle. The byproduct of this is lactic acid, which breaks up to release hydrogen ions (hydrogen atoms that are positively charged because they have been stripped of an electron) and lactate. If there is oxygen present, the lactate can be converted back into glucose, and so used again as fuel. It’s not the buildup of lactic acid itself that causes problems in muscles, as I’d thought and which seems to be the common wisdom—it’s the accumulation of hydrogen ions. You’ve probably seen marathon runners going all wobbly as they completely run out of energy: the jelly legs are caused by hydrogen ions that acidify the tissue and interfere with muscle contraction. For athletes who rely on immediate strength and speed, such as weightlifters and sprinters, it doesn’t matter if they produce too much lactate, because they are not going to operate at that full-on capacity for very long. For endurance athletes it’s different, and for them the key is finding the balance between clearance and production of lactate. Better athletes can work harder for longer because they are good at recycling the lactate that’s building up in their muscles. They prevent hydrogen from acidifying their legs, basically.
“When we were looking at Dean we didn’t see anything we’d never seen in other ultra-endurance athletes, but we did find he was extremely efficient with his sweet spot,” says Pinto. In other words, Karnazes has a much better ability to convert lactate back into glucose than regular distance runners. “Dean’s ability to stay in lactate balance is what’s higher than normal,” Pinto says. His body doesn’t find activity as strenuous as normal people.
Dean also has a highly efficient, economical style and maintains a consistent, steady pace. This steadiness may be the key to his success. “His self-proclaimed style is ‘I don’t run fast, I run really far,’ ” says Pinto. “So he is really effective at these long distances, and as long as he’s replenishing his energy stores after hours and hours of running, he could run forever.”
Once more, I want to assess how much of a particular trait is innate and how much is picked up along the way. Karnazes says he thinks anyone can do what he does if only they have the passion and drive—but it’s not like these things can just be decided on. Genetics affects your drive and dedication just as it does anything else. Remember how we saw, in Chapter 6, that much of the effort people put into practicing can be explained genetically? No doubt similar genetic factors influence the effort you put into physical training. Despite media “explanations” of Karnazes’s ability as genetic,2 he confirmed to me that no one has sequenced his DNA to look at his genetic makeup.
Jonathan Folland is a reader in human performance and neuromuscular physiology at Loughborough University. “In terms of how important genetic traits are compared to the environment,” he says, “based on twin studies we know that inherited traits account for at least 50 percent of the variability of physical ability between people.”
Assuming that figure applies to running, approximately half or more of how good you are at running would depend on your genes. Twenty years ago, this led to quite a lot of excitement among early researchers that we might find a “running gene” that would explain a good proportion of individuals’ ability. But just as with other complex traits such as intelligence, no such gene has been forthcoming. In fact, there’s not been a gene variant discovered that even explains 5 or 10 percent of the variability between people.
“There’s been quite a lot of work to uncover the specific genetic variables that might be important for physical performance,” says Folland, “and that work hasn’t drawn much of interest so far.”
It turns out that there are a few genes that maybe occur more frequently in Olympic-standard endurance athletes, but the importance of those genes is limited: 0.5 percent, 1 percent, maybe 2 percent at most. “It could be that there are 100 or 500 genes that each explain a fraction of a percent,” says Folland.
Dean Karnazes brings up the Greek marathon legend when I ask him about genetics and ultrarunning: “I’m 100 percent Greek and my father insists we’re from the same village in the hills of Greece as Pheidippides.” The problem with this, as I’m sure Karnazes knows, is that even if he is related to a semi-mythical ancient runner, Pheidippides’s genes will have been diluted over time almost to a vanishing point in Karnazes.
More seriously, and despite his insistence that anyone can do what he does, Karnazes accepts that genetics may play a role: “There is a saying that the best thing you can do as a long-distance runner is to choose your parents right.” That certainly chimes with what Folland says.
Not only does his father possibly hail from the ancestral village of Pheidippides, Karnazes’s mother’s family is from the island of Ikaria. This has been named as one of Earth’s Blue Zones: a place with a high proportion of centenarians, where people live longer on average than elsewhere, for genetic and other reasons. (We’ll examine Blue Zones in depth in Chapter 8.)
Folland, who has coached athletes at the international level, says there are three main physiological factors that determine endurance: maximum oxygen uptake (known as VO2 max); something called fractional utilization, which is essentially the proportion of VO2 max that a person can sustain over a long period; and running economy, the biochemical and biomechanical factors that determine the amount of oxygen you consume when running.
“Those three factors combine together and explain a high proportion of the variability in endurance performance,” says Folland, “whether you’re talking about 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters, or 10 miles. Those three factors probably explain more than 80, 90 percent.”
VO2 max is typically measured as milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body mass, per minute. The average healthy man has a VO2 max around 35–40 ml/kg/min, the average woman 27–31 ml/kg/min. The difference is down to the larger physical lung size of men on average, and the fact that men have higher levels of hemoglobin in the blood. Basically, the higher your VO2 max, the more oxygen you can deliver to your mitochondria, the energy-producing units in your cells, and the faster you can run. Training certainly helps improve your VO2 max. Elite runners reach 85 ml/kg/min (men) and 77 ml/kg/min (women).
So if genetics explains a good half of running ability, and there are dozens, scores, or even hundreds of contributing gene variants, it’s quite possible that there are people who end up with a high proportion of them. There may even be whole groups of people who share these traits—people who would be, if not born runners, then certainly well disposed to running.
• • •
The Sierra Madre Occidental is a range of deeply canyoned mountains reaching from Arizona to the west coast of Mexico. The intersection of geology and elevation brings rainfall to what would otherwise be arid land, and the region is noted for its high biodiversity, even nowadays in the face of anthropocene pressures such as mining and agriculture. Jaguars and ocelots, two dusky, beautiful wildcat species, are still sometimes seen. The Mexican wolf is here too, but limited to the southern part of the range. These mountains are also the home of the indigenous Tarahumara people, who call themselves the Rarámuri—the name means something like “foot-runner” or “those who walk well.”
Sounds romantic, right? It does, when put like that. Add that the reclusive Tarahumara are a people with a culture of running, and that some of them can do it really well, and you’ve got the makings of a potent myth. In 1993, a previously unknown Tarahumara runner named Victoriano Churro won one of the more grueling ultramarathons in North America, the Leadville Trail 100. He was fifty-two at the time, and it was the first time the Tarahumara had raced outside Mexico. Just to clarify why the Leadville is more grueling even than a regular ultramarathon, its route, in Colorado, goes through the Rocky Mountains and runners slog up and down 4,800 meters of elevation over the 100-mile course. The dropout rate is high: around half of the starters fail to finish within the thirty-hour time limit. The following year, 1994, another Tarahumara runner won the race. After that they disappeared,3 but their legend was established.
The journalist Christopher McDougall brought the Tarahumara to the world’s attention in his book Born to Run, and the stories about them began to snowball, particularly in the running community. Since they tend to run in very basic sandals called huaraches, which are simply flat soles tied to the runner’s foot with straps, the Tarahumara have inspired a whole movement of so-called natural running—either barefoot or wearing huaraches, or minimal footwear such as Vibram’s FiveFingers, rather than cushioned running shoes. The Tarahumara use pieces of leather or car tires for the sole. McDougall argues that cushioned running shoes contribute to foot-strike injuries, and that the footwear (or lack of it) of the Tarahumara is much more conducive to healthy running.
He has the support of Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University, who studies the biomechanics of endurance running, with particular regard to running barefoot. Such is the interest from the running community, he created a website which presents the pros and cons of barefoot and cushioned running.4 Wearing shoes completely changes the way you run, says Lieberman. “By landing on the middle or front of the foot, barefoot runners have almost no impact collision, much less than most shod runners generate when they heel-strike. Most people today think barefoot running is dangerous and hurts, but actually you can run barefoot on the world’s hardest surfaces without the slightest discomfort and pain. It might be less injurious than the way some people run in shoes.”
A study specifically of the Tarahumara found that the type of shoe changed the way their feet struck the ground. When running wearing huaraches, the forefoot and the midfoot struck the ground first 70 percent of the time, and the hindfoot struck first the remaining 30 percent, but when wearing cushioned shoes, the hindfoot struck first 75 percent of the time.5 If you are not a runner this might all be puzzling, but hindfoot strike is a big deal, because it is linked to a variety of repetitive stress and other injuries, such as Achilles tendonitis. Indeed it was a foot injury that started McDougall’s investigation into the Tarahumara.
This is all very measured and sensible. But there is an unfortunate tendency to romanticize indigenous cultures. According to one account, the Tarahumara have “a diet and fitness regimen that has allowed them to outrun death and disease.”6 A documentary about them claims they don’t have cancer, diabetes, or hypertension.7 Other reports state that the Tarahumara are able to run huge distances in one go, delivering messages between widely separated villages, or to run down deer.
Make no mistake, some Tarahumara can certainly run well. At the first World Indigenous Games, which took place in Brazil in 2015, Tarahumara runners came second and third in the 10,000 meters.8 In the 2016 Copper Canyon Ultramarathon, a 50-mile race founded by a legendary runner named Micah True, Tarahumara runners took the top three places. Yes, they have ability—the question is, are the Tarahumara innately talented runners? It’s a key question: For those who can run well, how much is genetic, and how much is trained?
Dirk Lund Christensen, a physiologist in the Global Health section at the University of Copenhagen, has studied the health and fitness of the Tarahumara firsthand, after coming across them by chance in Mexico some twenty-five years ago and becoming fascinated by their culture of running.
In 2011, Christensen and colleagues organized a 78-kilometer (48-mile) race to test scientifically the running prowess of the Tarahumara. His team recruited ten men from the village of Choguita, Chihuahua, and briefed them on the task. They were to run a flat loop of 26 kilometers (16 miles) three times, starting from a hospital, the Centro Avanzado de Atención Primaria a la Salud, in the town of Guachochi at an altitude of 2,400 meters (7,900 feet). At 5:55 one November morning, the runners, all but one wearing homemade huaraches and loincloths, set off. If you believe the hype that the Tarahumara have innate talent, then runners would sail around—they would float around. After all, 78 kilometers should be a breeze for them.
“About half of them had difficulties completing the race and they had to walk a considerable part of the distance,” says Christensen. The scientists took blood from the runners before the race, immediately afterward, and at several points in the following hours and days. They measured the runners’ VO2 max and other parameters such as blood pressure. Since we’ve learned about VO2 max, it might surprise you to find that the average of the Tarahumara runners was 48 ml/kg/min—not very high, says Christensen, for runners capable of completing an ultra-distance race of 78 kilometers.9 Elite Western runners, remember, can have a VO2 max of 85 ml/kg/min. If the Tarahumara were innately skilled runners, you might expect higher. Clearly, the Tarahumara who win races are trained athletes.
In another study, Christensen and colleagues tested sixty-four adult Tarahumara for cardiorespiratory fitness. They found that hypertension and diabetes do indeed exist in the Tarahumara.10 Sadly, for the myth of a super-healthy tribe, but more for the people themselves, the obesity epidemic that has swept the world has not left them untouched. “Studies going back more than fifteen years have shown that obesity is a considerable problem in Tarahumara women,” says Christensen. “An epidemiological transition has been going on for quite some time.” A transition, that is, from a lifestyle based around running to a sedentary one.
“The results,” says Christensen, “clearly show that being a Tarahumara does not guarantee superhuman running abilities.”
Christensen bemoans the impression given by those in the running community, and some academics, that the Tarahumara are free from cardiometabolic diseases. “A look into hospital records from the area where the Tarahumara live as well as scientific studies show that this is untrue,” he says.
And it’s not just obesity that threatens the Tarahumara’s well-being. In 2015, the Copper Canyon Ultramarathon, held in Tarahumara lands in Mexico, was canceled because of the danger of drug violence.11 Much of their land borders the Golden Triangle, an area of intensive heroin, poppy, and cannabis cultivation, and drug cartels have been actively targeting young Tarahumara men to act as traffickers.12
“Maybe we in the Western world have an urge to glorify people who in some ways live like we did many generations ago,” says Christensen, “a ‘pure’ life free from chronic disease and with exceptional physical stamina due to lack of motorized transport.”
Lieberman’s work may inadvertently tap into this yearning. As an evolutionary biologist, his perspective is that we didn’t wear cushioned running shoes for the vast majority of our history, so those rearfoot-strike injuries were probably far less common. It may be true that the huarache-wearing Tarahumara suffer fewer of these injuries, but as we’ve seen, they’re not free of other modern diseases.
There are superb Tarahumara athletes, that’s plain to see, but it is doubtful that the Tarahumara as a people have genetic traits that make them more talented as runners, certainly not without training. Christensen hasn’t tested this, but he plans to. “It is much more likely,” he says, “that those who are talented—assuming a relatively normal distribution of running talent in this particular population—are also very active and thereby optimize the ultra-distance running talent.”
When I started reading about the Tarahumara I was just as swept up by the romantic myth as many others. I looked a little more closely because I’m trying to understand how the best can do what they do. Rather than having a mythical floating style of running, it seems that running is just something that the Tarahumara do. The psychological impact of growing up in that culture—social facilitation, the professionals call it—goes a long way toward explaining why ultrarunning is the norm. Or was. The sad thing is that their culture is falling away, and the ills of modernity—a sedentary life, with associated diabetes and hypertension and obesity—are replacing it.
So to summarize what we know about the genetics of running, both for individuals and for athletes in general, we have clear evidence that genetics plays a role in determining how well people perform during training exercises. That’s non-controversial. What is more shaky, however, are attempts to characterize groups of people in the same way.
Since East Africans started dominating long-distance events in the 1990s, there have been several attempts to attribute their success to genetics; to say, in other words, that East Africans as a group are genetically better equipped. The problem is, no group-wide genes have been found that could explain improved performance.
It’s more likely, then, that living as the East African runners do, at altitude—the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, are respectively 1,800 and 2,300 meters (5,900 and 7,500 feet) above sea level—increases red blood cell count, giving them a big boost when running at lower levels. The tendency to be light and lean, as many East Africans are, is also a big help for efficient endurance running. “The physiological evidence so far,” says Folland, “is that East Africans have a better running economy, so they are more efficient in terms of the way they run. Part of that is anatomical—they’re slim, which is crucial, as it reduces limb inertia.” This is basically the energy expended in waving your arms backward and forward as you run. Folland says that some of the East African athletes who perform at the very highest level may have other “structural” advantages, such as a longer Achilles tendon. Runners with long Achilles tendons have calf muscles that attach relatively closer to the knee, which reduces the inertia of the leg and so improves running economy. “A longer Achilles tendon is potentially also better for storing energy,” Folland says. Like the Tarahumara, there’s also a big element of social facilitation: “A lot of the rural kids run to school and back every day, so you have this big pool of children who are very active and trained before they even get into competitive sport.” In both the Tarahumara and East African runners, there is also a big source of social motivation. Winning races can provide prize money that goes a long way toward helping a village in a poor country. It’s like we saw in Chapter 4, with the effect of motivation on focus.
“Stamina is certainly a trait in the Tarahumara, but it comes about from mental willpower as much as physical stamina,” Christensen says. And so we’re back to the role of psychology. Just how far can it get you?
• • •
I’m waiting to talk with Petra Kasperova in a running shop in London. At first glance it’s a regular running shop, with shoes and clothing and energy drinks in neat racks, but there are also framed photos on the wall of an Indian spiritual leader, Chinmoy Kumar Ghose, posing with various legends of athletics and sport. There he is with Carl Lewis. Muhammad Ali. Paula Radcliffe. There’s also a picture of him with a lesser-known figure, Tony Smith, who founded the shop, Run and Become, in the 1980s. Sri Chinmoy (who died in 2007 and who is usually referred to with the honorific Sri) was born in East Bengal, India (now Bangladesh), and moved to New York in the 1960s, where he started a meditation center which combined meditative practice with athletic development. There was no point, he taught, in just concentrating on your inner life if you ignore the outer case that it’s in. The outer case: I like that. It makes me think of a caddis fly larva inside its stony home, a case designed by the animal’s genes, and put together using what it finds in the environment; it makes me think of Richard Dawkins’s description of us as lumbering robots controlled by our genes.
Running, Sri Chinmoy taught, is an opportunity to challenge what you think you’re capable of. It’s a means to expand the limits of human potential. He started a marathon team and a running club, and his ethos spread. There are now hundreds of Sri Chinmoy events around the country and the world. So that’s why I’ve come here, to a shop started by one of Sri Chinmoy’s disciples, to talk to people who take his message seriously.
Like all the staff in the shop, Kasperova, twenty-seven, is dressed in running gear. She doesn’t particularly stand out; she’s ostensibly a normal young woman. But a few weeks before we meet, she completed one of the toughest challenges in world sport, a six-day ultramarathon. The Sri Chinmoy six- and ten-day races take place each year in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York. This is the home of the US Open tennis tournament and of the New York Mets baseball team: Flushing Meadows is already a hotspot for extremes of sporting glory and emotion. But in the park too is a one-mile looped running track. The track is flat and the route scenic. The race is simple, and devastating. The ten-day event starts at noon on a Monday; the six-dayer starts four days later. Both races finish the following Thursday, at noon. The winner is the person who has run the farthest. In April 2017, Kasperova took part in her first multiday race, starting with the six-dayer. She ran 64 miles on the first day, then 62, 52, 48, 45, and finally 48 miles. The last three days, she says, she was hampered by injuries and she had to walk some of the way. But the total of 319 miles placed her fourth of the women runners. To put it another way, she ran more than twelve marathons in six days.
I realize I’ve been thinking of ultrarunning as a macho thing. I’ve marveled at the records of Yannis Kouros. I’ve interviewed super-toned legend Dean Karnazes. I’ve been influenced by photos I’ve seen of sweaty, muscly, grimacing men pounding topless up mountains or through deserts or across ice fields. My idea of ultrarunning has been swamped, in short, by the testosterone-laden Ironman brand. But marathon runners aren’t bulky, they are slender.
• • •
When she was a child in Prague, Czech Republic, Kasperova says, she was always active. She loved to be outside and still does. She loves being connected with nature, being under the sky, and feeling the sensation of fresh air. But as she got a little older, her friends started slowing down. “During my teenage years I was surrounded by people who seemed to be miserable, so I covered myself a little bit,” she says. She withdrew a little, she hid her nature from herself, she was unsure of herself. Then when she was nineteen her parents went through a divorce, and she had her final university exams. “I was completely lost; I couldn’t sleep. I had such headaches, I felt I couldn’t do my finals. There were so many questions in my mind. Suddenly I thought: I need to silence my mind.”
Searching online for free meditation classes in Prague, she found a Sri Chinmoy practice. “I found this class and it changed my life; something just clicked. This resonates with my heart. I felt, I don’t have to be like all these people in my class.”
Following the Sri Chinmoy way, she took up running. This was about eight years ago, around 2010. She started gradually, with short distance running, 5Ks and 10Ks, then her first half marathon. She soon built up to a marathon, then an ultra. To my mind that’s already extraordinary, but then she ran the twenty-four-hour Self Transcendence race in Tooting, south London. The race is contested by forty-five invited runners, who circle the Tooting Bec athletics track as many times as they can, and is organized by Tony Smith’s daughter, Shankara. “Some people say the purest kind of ultra are the races on the track,” she says, referring to the long-distance races on a looping track where you just go around and around forever, or for what feels like forever. In these events, there’s nowhere to hide. “It’s only you; you’re facing your demons and what you think you’re capable of. If it’s you against some tough terrain, you can fight the mountain, but on the track it’s just you.”
After this, Kasperova entered the six-day race at Flushing Meadows. Tents spring up in the running village that appears during the race. Physio tents, food tents, and sleeping tents. There are large communal sleeping tents, but Kasperova puts up her own. She wanted somewhere she could have her own space, somewhere she could crawl into and cry at the end of eighteen hours of solid running. Whatever time she finished, midnight or one or two in the morning, the alarm was set for 5:45 a.m. and she was up and off again.
“You always want to know what you are capable of,” she says. “What human nature is capable of. We have so much inside ourselves. And you learn so much about yourself. When you see how much these things change your life, you want more. You want to know more.”
I must say, talking to Kasperova I feel almost transported myself. At her young age she has the calmness and serenity of a guru. I’m not a runner—but this makes me want to start. She says that she feels lighter after a race. She feels that after a race she’s become a different person, that her nature has changed, in a positive way, and that she has experienced a beautiful form of happiness. I know this is the sort of thing that has nonrunners rolling their eyes—I’ve done it myself—but in the face of it any cynicism I have falls away and is revealed in fact as a feeling of inferiority compared to people who do these things. (Only a mild feeling, mind. Perhaps admiration is better—you can admire someone without feeling inferior.) She also runs for those who can’t. A friend died recently of cancer. “She would have loved to do it. Even though I was in pain during the six days, I just wanted to do it for the people who can’t. It’s about keeping going and never giving up.”
Doing these extreme events, something happens, Kasperova says. “Something magical. You want to do more because you want to experience these feelings of absolute happiness and absolute peace that you don’t get in the normal world. It just fills up your heart and it’s hard to get that in the day-to-day routine.”
I watch some race footage of the runners taking part in the six- and ten-day races. Sure, in the film they don’t include the tears and the agony the runners go through, but what jumps out is the smiling, joyous nature of the people running around. Kasperova says she feels the energy circling her body. “You’ve had two hours’ sleep and you’re running sixty miles a day. I don’t think it’s really me; it’s something higher.”
Who would have thought that this track in Flushing Meadows, squeezed between Interstate 678 and LaGuardia Airport, humming with the sound of traffic and keening aircraft, could be the setting for such, well, transcendent joy? And who would have thought that in the runners circling the loop, psychological battles would be raging every bit as intense and impressive as those flashier ones played out on the tennis courts or the baseball pitch nearby?
Kasperova is not done with the six-day race, as she feels she has more to learn from it, and after that she wants to do the ten-day race. “And then someday the ultimate.”15
The ultimate is Sri Chinmoy’s final creation. It’s hard to describe it without coming to the conclusion that he was an evil genius. After all, by the time he was creating the really long races, his knees were shot and he could no longer run them himself—but he kept creating longer races for his followers to run. He took up weightlifting, which he exceled at, but devised ever more torturous races. Sri Chinmoy, says Shankara Smith, was all about challenging things considered impossible—about unlocking potential that we don’t think we can reach. And no one’s forcing people to attempt these ridiculous races. The ultimate is the Self-Transcendence 3,100-mile race. It also takes place around a route in Queens, but not the Flushing Meadows track—this is around a city block, 5,649 times. With running, says Shankara Smith, it’s about you against yourself. “It’s your self-doubts you have to tackle, and the longer the race, the more it’s about challenging your perceived impossibility level than the whole physical fitness aspect.”
Runners have 52 days to complete the race, which amounts to over 59 miles a day. The current record-holder is a Finn, Ashprihanal Aalto, who in July 2015 completed the 3,100 miles in 40 days, 9 hours, 6 minutes, and 21 seconds. Astonishing, but it’s not even the most punishing Buddhist-inspired event I’ve heard about. That surely is the kaihogyo route around Mount Hiei near Kyoto, Japan, the most extreme version of which involves running 1,000 marathons in 1,000 days. Few people have ever achieved this feat.
I mentioned Sri Chinmoy’s advice, about taking care of the “outer case”—our bodies. But he knew that it’s more than just taking care of the outer case. If you push the shell to extremes, something feeds back into the mind and changes it, and that’s why it’s a transcendent experience. But no one imagines that there is literally a line you cross when transcendence happens. It’s a continuous thing, which is why you always want to go further, push harder. Genshin Fujinami, one of the few monks who has completed the kaihogyo 1,000, has said that for him, the quest continues. “The 1,000-day challenge is not an end point, the challenge is to continue, enjoying life and learning new things.”13
I said earlier that Kasperova was ostensibly a normal young woman. She would say she is a normal young woman. That’s her point—that anyone could do what she does. “I think most people could do this twenty-four-hour race,” she insists. But there’s a huge caveat. “If they have the willpower.”
• • •
Dean Karnazes told me how he used to run home as a kid, and I could sense the passion of his six-year-old self. And I started this chapter by listing some of his more recent feats. But what’s odd is that for a man who now so embodies running, for whom it is such a central part of his life, during all of his twenties he didn’t run at all. He was a young man with a job and a social life that was built around alcohol. Nothing unusual there, but on his thirtieth birthday, doing tequila shots with his friends, he had an epiphany.
“I felt as though I’d followed the societal prescription for happiness—get a good education, get a good job, have a comfortable and secure future—yet something was missing,” he says. “Instead of feeling happy I felt empty, as though I’d betrayed myself. It all came to a head on the night of my thirtieth birthday when I walked out of a bar, three sheets to the wind, and decided to run thirty miles in celebration of my thirty years of existence on planet Earth.”
Karnazes hadn’t run for over ten years.
“I ran straight through the night without rest. The aftermath wasn’t pretty, but it didn’t matter. I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do; the blisters and chafing and muscle cramping didn’t matter at all. My destiny was now clear. That night forever changed the course of my life.”
It does sound like a superhero origin story, doesn’t it? And indeed Karnazes appeared on Stan Lee’s Superhumans TV show, which is why he ended up being tested at Nicole Pinto’s lab. I assume he is happy now he’s running again, or at least happier than he was in a bar downing tequila. A friend who has run thirteen marathons says running has made her more optimistic, and makes her feel more alive and more healthy; it also helps her get through other problems in life.14 “When I am actively running, in particular through somewhere beautiful, I feel intense joy, and like all other emotions are enhanced,” she says. It’s got to be worth a try.