American · b. 1962
Dean Karnazes is an American ultramarathon runner and the author of several bestselling memoirs about endurance running. Born in Inglewood, California, in 1962, he spent his twenties in a conventional sales and marketing career before abandoning it on the night of his thirtieth birthday to run thirty miles on a whim -- the impulse that launched his second life as a professional endurance athlete. Nicknamed 'Ultramarathon Man,' he has run 350 continuous miles without sleep, completed fifty marathons in fifty U.S. states in fifty consecutive days, and finished the Badwater Ultramarathon across Death Valley more than a dozen times. His first book, Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner (2005), became a bestseller and helped popularize ultrarunning as a mainstream pursuit; he followed it with 50/50, Run!, The Road to Sparta, and A Runner's High: My Life in Motion. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.