You're Tops: Dean Karnazes (Running Banshee)

Dean 'Karno' Karnazes is not a normal person.

Dean, based in San Francisco, left a successful marketing career to go for a bit of a run. It's been a few years now, and he's still running. Plenty. And I'm not talking about your 45 minute gasp around the suburbs. He's done a bunch of crazy runs including the Western States 100 Miler, the Badwater Ultramarathon and last year he ran 50 marathons in 50 days in 50 states. He published a book about some of his shenanigans called Ultramarathon Man. It serves to chronicle the fact that he is certifiable. One anecdote from the book pretty much sums him up.

There are a few team-based relay runs out there. Dean entered one, but instead of completing it with all the blokes from the Sales Department, or the golf club, or the myriad of ways running teams are formed, Dean was running by himself: Team Karno. In order to fuel the furnace that drives this running machine he had a pizza company deliver some pizzas to him at an obscure intersection late at night so he could eat them as he ran. Which he did. And if memory serves me right he washed them down with a thermos of coffee...

Most recently, Dean has been nominated as one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. You can vote for Dean to be included within the final 100 here. I'm into people who are into their thing––be that spelling, obscenely long runs or geo-politics. There's something about the obsessive and relentless pursuit of mastery and enjoyment in a field that's inspiring. Karno makes me want to have a go, to push things a bit, to turn what can be the suburban-treading-water posture to which I can so easily entropy into an adventure. And he's done it with a pair of shoes and a healthy disregard for self-applied boundaries. Go Karno, go!