FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
A MARATHON IS NOT ENOUGH: DEAN KARNAZES TO RUN 100 MILES TO L.A.
AND THEN RUN THE L.A. MARATHON
LOS ANGELES, California, May 19, 2009 – Running one marathon is plenty for
most people, but not Dean Karnazes.
The 46-year-old ultra-marathoner who grew up in Southern California will
return – on foot – to run in the 2009 Los Angeles Marathon next Monday on
Memorial Day, May 25, by running approximately 100 miles from Santa Barbara
to Los Angeles on Saturday and Sunday!
"I'm an L.A. native, so I feel a certain affinity for the L.A. Marathon and
I so look forward to running it every year," he said on a video posted on
YouTube on May 9. "In fact, one of my fondest memories ever is my Dad
running the L.A. Marathon; he ran the inaugural L.A. Marathon and I was
there to watch him cross that finish line. It left an impression on me
forever.
"So the weekend of the L.A. Marathon, I'm actually going to be staying in
Santa Barbara. It's about 100 miles from Santa Barbara where I'm staying to
the L.A. Marathon, so I'll take off about 24 hours in advance to run the
100 miles. I'll run right down the Pacific Coast Highway, right along the
coast. It will be extremely beautiful, so I look forward to that. I'll run
to the Expo, actually, on Sunday and I'm going to give a talk, so if anyone
wants to come listen to me talk, I'll be at the Expo on Sunday afternoon
and then I'll probably kick about and run the Marathon with everyone on
Monday. It seems like a great weekend."
Karnazes will appear at free-to-the-public Run/Ex/09 at the Los Angeles
Convention Center on Sunday at 2:30 p.m. to share his experience of running
down the coast over the prior 24 hours.
"My earliest recollection of running was running home from kindergarten,"
he noted. "I started running at six years old." He recalled that he ran his
first marathon at age 14, but then gave it up as he matured, graduating
from San Clemente High School and then majoring in food science technology
at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
"I found myself in a bar on my 30th birthday," he remembered in the video.
"I said to my buddies at 11 o'clock at night, 'I'm going to go running
tonight. I'm going to run 30 miles to celebrate my 30th birthday. And they
said, 'You're drunk,' and I said, 'Yeah, I am, but I'm still going to do
it.' So I walked out of a bar at 11 at night and literally ran all night
long." That marked his return to running and he's been on the roads ever
since. "You really stretch the boundaries of the human spirit and human
endurance," he said, noting that he's run as much as 350 miles non-stop.
Asked how many marathons he's run, he replies that "I stopped counting at
100; I don't think I've quite run 200." But he respects the distance and
the effort required: "Completing a marathon is an incredible achievement;
it's something that 99.9% of people will never do."
Karnazes, who lives in Marin County, isn't planning on resting much after
Monday's L.A. Marathon, though. He'll be on the road to race again in San
Diego the next weekend.
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