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Dean Karnazes

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Dean Karnazes: A Life in (Full) Motion

9 min readMay 1, 2025

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Envision celebrating your thirtieth birthday and getting a bit tipsy by nightfall. Not hard to imagine, right?

But, how about then deciding to go for a night run, from the bar, for thirty miles?

Well, that’s what Dean Karnazes did, and it changed his life, and a lot of others’ as well. Including mine.

Allow me to acquaint you with a highlight reel of some of Dean’s accomplishments:

  • Ran 350 miles in 80 hours and 44 minutes without sleep,
  • Completed “The Relay” (eleven times) which is a 200-mile relay race with teams of twelve, but Dean ran it solo,
  • Ran marathons to the South Pole in −13° temperatures, and I think at least part of one was in the nude, which we’ll get into,
  • Ran 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 consecutive days, finishing with the New York City Marathon, which he ran in three hours flat,
  • Won the infamous Badwater Ultramarathon, which is 135 miles across Death Valley in 120° temperatures in 2004, and has five other top-10 finishes between 2000 to 2008,
  • Won the Vermont Trail 100 Mile Endurance Run,
  • Was the Overall Winner in the 4 Deserts Race Series, traversing the Antacara, Gobi, Antarctica, and Sahara deserts,

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