'Ultramarathon Man': From tequila to Olympic torch

By Simon Gardner

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Fresh from winning a 250 km endurance run across Chile's arid Atacama desert, Dean Karnazes has come a long way since he hit a midlife crisis and had an epiphany at the bottom of a tequila bottle.

The equivalent of four times around the earth, to be precise -- running.

The self-styled 'Ultramarathon Man' estimates he has run around 100,000 miles since he drunkenly decided to go for a 30 mile run immediately after a binge to celebrate his 30th birthday in 1992 and drown sorrows about a dull life.

"It started with bad tequila," laughed Karnazes, billed by one health magazine as possibly the fittest man alive and by his own admission something of a cross between Forrest Gump and Lance Armstrong.

"I was really dissatisfied with my life. I was in a corporate job ... I was very unhappy and bored. It was absolutely a midlife crisis," he said.

So he drunkenly stripped down to his shorts, put on some old sneakers and hit the road -- and has never looked back.

Now 45, Karnazes has run hundreds of marathons -- technically races of 26.2 miles -- and many more unconventional distances. He once ran 350 miles non-stop. It took him just over 80 hours, with no sleep.

"My thing is: What are the limits of human endurance? And I'm just going to push it as far as I can to see," he said in a telephone interview on his return home from Chile to San Francisco, where he was one of a host of runners chosen to carry the Olympic torch this month.