In this episode of Run Long After 60, I sit down with Dean Karnazes — on his 64th birthday.

He quit running at fifteen. He didn't start again until the night he turned thirty, when he walked out of a bar in San Francisco after too much tequila, took off his pants, and ran thirty miles into the dark in a pair of silk boxer shorts. That night changed his life. Thirty-four years later he has never taken a season off, never had a real break, and he says he's never had a running injury.

Ten Badwater 135s and one outright win. Twelve Western States, eleven of them under twenty-four hours. Fifty marathons in fifty states in fifty days...the FIRST person to do anything like that and an effort that has been replicated, enhanced and celebrated for many for years. His books are published in twenty-one languages.

There are a thousand interviews out there covering his records, and he's told those stories better than anyone could ask him to again. What I wanted to know was what thirty-four unbroken years actually feels like from the inside — at 64, on the day he turns 64.

He told me he doesn't celebrate his birthday. Then he said that now that I'd told everybody, he supposed he'd have to. He also told me he isn't 64 at all. He thinks of life as an out-and-back course. He turned around at fifty. So by his math he's thirty-six now, counting down to zero.

We talk about:

• Ikaria — his mother's island, one of the world's Blue Zones, and the 104-year-old who walked five kilometers to the bank to start a new business
• Why longevity there looks like ease and not effort, and what that does to a man who built a life on effort
• Never having a running injury in three decades, and whether that's luck or something he did on purpose
• The shorter, quicker stride he runs now, and driving his arms to spare his knees
• How he went from dismissing trekking poles to building his whole mountain climbing around them
• DNFs, and his honest answer about what you actually learn from them
• Writing in A Runner's High about whether he was still relevant to the sport — and where that worry went
• Being appointed global ambassador of Greek tourism, and what the two-year role was really like
• Racing in Greece, where he's often the only American on the start line
• The 110-miler that finishes on the ancient track at Olympia, where the first Games were held in 776 BC
• Spartathlon, Pheidippides, and the 350-mile race in November he's training for now
• What it's like when strangers tell him their father read his book and now they're runners
• And the accidental Instagram DM from a stranger in January 2025 that led to this conversation

Dean is 100% Greek, third generation, born in California and now spending most of the year in Greece. He's still racing. He's still writing.

He's still showing up.

Thank you and many happy years, Dean.

Run Long After 60 is a video-first podcast about running after 60, ultrarunning, longevity, and refusing to stop. The full conversation is on the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel.

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📍 Hosted by Mark Vega