“Ultramarathon.” Have you ever encountered that word before? I never had. I hate it. I hate looking at it. I hate thinking about what it means. A plain, non-ultra marathon is already horrifying enough. The idea of running 26 miles in a single day is the stuff of nightmares, but it’s something people do voluntarily. One of those people is Death Cab For Cutie leader Ben Gibbard, a distance-running devotee who is evidently much more psychotic than I realized. An ultramarathon is any footrace longer than 26 miles, and Ben Gibbard has run a bunch of those. This past weekend, Gibbard successfully completed the Western States 100, a 100.2-mile race through the trails of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. How fucked up is that? That’s terrible.
