Dean Karnazes suffers from a condition which clears the lactate buildup in his body at a very fast rate as compared to other runners. Laurent Messonnier from the University of Savoie, where Karnazes was tested, says that a person's body, while under physical exertion, breaks down glucose for energy, resulting in lactate as a byproduct. This lactate can also be converted back to energy, but the rate of that conversion is slow. After a person reaches a certain threshold of the lactate clearance capacity, their muscles start to tense up.
Karnazes's cells seem to have larger mitochondria, whose enzymes help in breaking down the lactate build up. Karnazes never gets tired or gets muscle fatigue, like other runners do. In his own words, "To be honest, what eventually happens is that I get sleepy. I've run through three nights without sleep and the third night of sleepless running was a bit psychotic. I actually experienced bouts of 'sleep running', where I was falling asleep while in motion, and I just willed myself to keep going."
Dean has trained for 50 marathons in 50 days in 2006. He has also completed a marathon on the South Pole in -13 Fahrenhei temperature. He also has had less difficulty in completing the Marathon des Sables, the toughest ultramarathon on the planet, in which athletes run for 6 days over 156 miles in the Sahara Desert.
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