Dean's List

by Bryan Joiner

Dean Karnazes is not a 400-pound offensive lineman in the NFL, but he can consume close to 10,000 calories per day. That’s five times what you and I are supposed to eat, and Karnazes weighs 154 pounds.

It helps when you run 50 marathons in 50 days.

Karnazes is in the latter stages of an unprecedented athletic feat: one marathon each day in all 50 United States, which is billed as the North Face Endurance 50. Yesterday, he was running in Rhode Island; today, he’s pounding the pavement in Portland, Maine; tomorrow he’ll be in New Hampshire. Doctors have warned Karnazes—who has run a marathon to the South Pole and jogged 250 miles at a time—that he might permanently damage his knees and feet in the endeavor. He doesn’t care. He’s running for Karno Kids, his foundation created to get children physically active.

All of this takes energy. A lot of it.

On the Runner's World Web site, you can see how many calories Karnazes burned during each marathon. Usually, it's around 3,000, but so far topped out at 7,682 for the Desert Classic Marathon in Sunrise, Arizona. When Karnazes needs to eat, he doesn’t wait to refuel. In his autobiography, Ultramarathon Man, he recalls ordering a pizza with the works in the middle of the night and eating it while running.

Karnazes works with Lance Armstrong’s former personal trainer, Chris Carmichael, who is the czar of high-impact athletic training. In a 2002 New Yorker feature, Michael Specter described Armstrong's “gargantuan” feasts. His rations include “boxes full of cereal, bread, yogurt, eggs, fruit, honey chocolate spread, jam, peanut butter and other snacks”—and those aren’t even the meals. “On days when a race begins at noon or later, Armstrong will eat two heaping plates of pasta and perhaps a power bar three hours before the race, after having had a full breakfast,” Specter writes.

Of course, Carmichael has a new challenge on his hands with Karnazes. In the same New Yorker article, Specter adds, “The Tour de France has been described as the equivalent of running twenty marathons in twenty days.”

To keep physically fit during his unbelievable runs, Karnazes follows Carmichael's “slow-carb” diet that allows the runner”s body to gradually burn calories. In a 2005 Esquire article, Karnazes said his favorite “slow-carb” foods are grilled salmon, energy bars, dark rye bread, pedialyte and . . . broccoli? (Yep. “It has more vitamin C than an orange, three times the fiber of a slice of wheat bread, and is an excellent source of calcium.”)

Carmichael's two star clients will run the IMG New York City Marathon together on November 5th. It will be Karnazes' 50th race and Armstrong's first athletic event since he retired from competitive cycling. It should be quite a spectacle, but nothing compared to the meal afterwards.

(Illustration by Dustin Glick.)