Natural Curiosities: The Governor

What’s the farthest a human has ever run without stopping? Dean Karnazes is touted for his leg­en­­dary, albeit apocryphal, impromptu three-hundred-fifty-mile run around San Francisco Bay in 2005. That same year, Pam Reed ran more than three hundred miles in a documented run-til-you-quit event. In 1987, Al Howie ran three hundred sixty miles around a track in Victoria, Australia, in a study to see what would happen to him if he tried (he got tired, duh). Nobody knows the answer, really. There are tales of runners in ad-hoc ultramarathons from decades past motoring on without sleep for five days. The Indigenous Rarámuri from Chihuahua, Mexico, are thought to be some of the longest-running people on earth; perhaps a champion among them has broken off a hallucinatory run of a week or more without pausing, leaving sandaled footprints unbroken for hundreds of miles.

Eventually, even the fittest of runners must stop. Maybe at three hundred miles, maybe four hundred—they bonk. The human body cannot