Episode 43 - Dean Karnazes | When I'm 64 | 34 Years and He Still Hasn't Stopped

In this episode of Run Long After 60, I sit down with Dean Karnazes — on his 64th birthday.

He quit running at fifteen. He didn't start again until the night he turned thirty, when he walked out of a bar in San Francisco after too much tequila, took off his pants, and ran thirty miles into the dark in a pair of silk boxer shorts. That night changed his life. Thirty-four years later he has never taken a season off, never had a real break, and he says he's never had a running injury.

Ten Badwater 135s and one outright win. Twelve Western States, eleven of them under twenty-four hours. Fifty marathons in fifty states in fifty days...the FIRST person to do anything like that and an effort that has been replicated, enhanced and celebrated for many for years. His books are published in twenty-one languages.

There are a thousand interviews out there covering his records, and he's told those stories better than anyone could ask him to again. What I wanted to know was what thirty-four unbroken years actually feels like from the inside — at 64, on the day he turns 64.

He told me he doesn't celebrate his birthday. Then he said that now that I'd told everybody, he supposed he'd have to. He also told me he isn't 64 at all. He thinks of life as an out-and-back course. He turned around at fifty. So by his math he's thirty-six now, counting down to zero.

We talk about: