Flashes of Panic

Laurel pointed me to this commentary on the article on wired.com about Dean Karnazes.

I’ve ignored Mr. Karnazes as best I can for several years now, because my gut reaction to nearly all of his very-long-distance running “feats” has been that they all smell like publicity stunts. 300 miles non-stop? Running all of a relay like Reach the Beach? 50 marathons in 50 days? Hype. All of it. Don Kardong once said that 26.2 miles (the marathon distance) was where racing ended, and ludicrous extremes began. I tend to take a more conservative view than Don, because I’m not capable of “racing” at the marathon distance. You can imagine that this puts Karnazes, in my mental map, out with the competitive eaters and David Blaine.

And yet he keeps getting the attention he craves, and magazines like Wired keep writing sensational articles.

Yes, sensational. Wired headlines their article with “The Perfect Human” (then provides no support for that claim,) and promises “12 secrets to his success.” There are at least two problems with that five-word sentence. One is that it presumes any strategy Karnazes uses is a “secret,” (because, you know, without such trade secrets, anyone could be doing 300-mile weekends, right?) and two is that it presumes Karnazes’ various circus stunts constitute “success.” (Mr. Karnazes, meet Mr. Bekele. The distance is 10,000m and “success” is defined as a world title. Go.) Even Runner’s World is in on the act, giving extensive publicity to Karnazes’ 50-marathons 50-states 50-days stunt last fall.

Let’s get something straight. Dean Karnazes has less relevance to average runners than a professional football player has to Little League baseball players. I’ll expand the pool of “average runners” to include professional, competitive runners and nearly anyone who has ever run a marathon. He pushes the edges of the bell curve so far out that nearly everyone, from Rosie Ruiz to Paul Tergat falls within one standard deviation of the mean.

And while there are some software applications for finding outliers, most of them are finding the outliers for the purposes of discarding them, which is exactly the sort of reaction we get from John Hawks. Hawks has some good points—a blister is a signal that you need to toughen up, not an engineering problem to be solved with Krazy Glue—but when Karnazes and his bizarre overcompensation stunts presented as some sort of perfect model of distance runner, it’s no surprise that Hawks’ reaction is to dismiss the entire group.

I honestly don’t understand long distance runners—I know they exist, but they seem utterly foreign and strange to me. Some think they are the model for ancient humans. As for me, well…

“Somewhere along the line, we seem to have confused comfort with happiness,” he says.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not confused!

Right, except not. I’ve heard about some studies which suggest that the biomechanical differences which allow us to run long distances are the ones which separate us from our more-simian ancestors, but I’m not going to make such dramatic claims here. I can understand runners seeming “utterly foreign and strange” to someone with no life experience in the area. But I’ve seen plenty of people (including myself) agitated and jittery in a surfeit of comfort. And I’ve seen a lot of pleasure, a lot of satisfaction and even transcendent feeling that comes with the “flow” of a long, difficult, and perfectly-paced effort.

But it’s not for everyone, as Hawks makes clear. Karnazes is probably the worst possible example to show people like Hawks. Not only is he a circus act, but his very attitude suggests that everyone else is inferior for not sharing his insanity. It’s as though he has defined his own sport, crowned himself world champion, and challenged anyone else to a pissing contest using his rules. Personally, I’m not interested, no matter how many magazine articles get written about him.

There are plenty of distance runners—heck, even a few ultramarathoners—who, aside from this single peculiar athletic quality, act like normal people. If you’re looking for someone you can identify with, or even learn from, it’s better not to start by looking at the circus.