New Year’s Resolutions Blog

Can “Ultraman” motivate me to become “Ultrawoman”?

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

Just ran across this new Wired article about Dean Karnazes, the ultra-ultra-ultra-marathoner (I have to add a few extra ultra’s for Dean!). I’d heard of Dean several times, but didn’t know too much about him. I was surprised to learn that he wasn’t always an ultra-runner; he got on that track about 15 years ago, at age 30. If he can make such an intense lifestyle change at that age, I bet most of us have the ability to make at least minor changes, no matter where we are in life!

The article about Dean contains several tips on how to become more like this high-mileage runner (he did 50 marathons in 50 consecutive days — surely I can do one isolated marathon!). I really like some of the tips, such as his advice to eat lots of junk food. Apparently Dean actually orders pizza while he’s on runs — and eats the pizza while running! I guess if you run for 24 hours straight (Dean’s actually run three days straight, covering 350 miles!), you’re burning enough calories to eat like that. I don’t know if a diet of ding-dongs is the best thing for all of us, but I might use the Dean excuse the next time I eat a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

Anyway, I’m not so sure about Dean’s advice to skimp on sleep. I’ve done the 4-hours-a-night thing before, and I just don’t think it’s worth it. Sure, it adds more hours to your day, but — for me at least — they’re far less productive hours. It’s just not worth staying up late and waking up early if I’m going to spend my waking hours feeling like a zombie.
This is a really broad generalization, and based on anecdotal experience only, but I feel like I’ve encountered far more men than women who can function with minimal sleep. Maybe the wide-awake women are just less vocal about it, but I’m not so sure. I’ve heard over and over that Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill got by on 3 to 4 hours of zzz’s a night, and that da Vinci endorsed polyphasic sleep, I haven’t seen many women espousing perpetual wakefulness as a great idea. I don’t know if it’s a biological difference or if it’s just that no one writes the stories of women who don’t sleep. Me, I’ll take my 8 hours a night, thank you very much!

Perhaps my favorite part of the Dean Karnazes article was this quote from Dean: “Somewhere along the line, we seem to have confused comfort with happiness.” I think this is amazingly true. I find it somewhat disturbing how easy it can be to skate along in life, maintaining a minimum comfort level but not challenging yourself too much, and never becoming truly happy because we never accomplish anything extraordinary. Even accomplishments at work aren’t necessarily indications that you’ve pushed yourself outside of your comfort zone. I have a friend who recently returned to graduate school, and she told me she was surprised by the butterflies she felt in her stomach on walking in to class on her first day back. She said she hadn’t felt that kind of nervousness about tackling a new challenge in quite some time — but she was also really excited about it!

I can barely imagine the huge butterflies that will be in my stomach on my marathon day! I think these are good butterflies, though, and I agree with my friend (and Dean Karnazes) that getting outside of our comfort zones to take on a new task is something that many of us don’t do often enough. So how about you? Do you feel happy in a comfort zone, or do you think real happiness requires pushing outside of that zone?

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