by Simon Gardner

SANTIAGO, April 18 (Reuters) - Fresh from winning a 155 mile (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 self-styled ‘Ultramarathon Man’ estimates he has run around 100,000 miles, the equivalent of four times around the earth, to be precise — running 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.

In 2006, Karnazes ran 50 marathons in 50 consecutive days in 50 U.S. states. Once he had completed the last one, he then ran 1,300 miles home over the period of a month. He also ran a marathon at the South Pole in 2002.

He sleeps on average 4 hours a night to fit in fatherhood with his running and business interests, and wears out 30-40 pairs of running shoes each year.

Karnazes won the 135-mile Badwater ultramarathon through Death Valley on the border of California and Nevada in 2004, billed as the toughest race on earth. The first year he ran it he became over-dehydrated, hallucinated vividly and then collapsed on the tarmac.

THRIVING ON THE EXTREME

He says the run across the moon-like Atacama, the world’s driest desert and center of the global copper-mining industry, was probably the most difficult endeavor he has undertaken.

“It’s one of the most foreboding places on earth … It’s a combination of the elements, the altitude, the fact that you had to carry all of your supplies with you.”

Karnazes’ backpack weighed 13 kilos at the outset.

“It throws your electrolytes out of balance because you become very dehydrated,” he added, saying he needed to replace between 5-7 liters of liquids a day. His feet were so badly blistered he eventually gave up trying to tend them with tape.

Karnazes even found time to write a blog at the end of each leg of the race, posted on his Web site www.ultramarathonman.com.

He is also set to run this year in the Gobi Desert in China, Death Valley, the Sahara and Antarctica.

“My ancestors literally did come from the same village that Pheidippides came from,” Karnazes said of the legendary Ancient Greek runner tradition says ran 150 miles in two days to seek help from Sparta to fight the Persian Army and then died from exhaustion after another 26 mile run in 490 BC.

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