Gagz had been running for 17 hours and 20 minutes when he made it to the southeast corner of the loop. He’d already chugged past this spot 370 times, but on his 371st lap, he started walking across the lanes. “I’m takin’ five,” he told me. “I have to. I just don’t want my lead to dwindle.” He reached the edge and laid down, propping his tattooed legs up against a waist-high chain-link fence, long gray beard falling toward the damp red track. He planned to sleep for exactly five minutes.
It was midnight for civilians, but at Dawn to Dusk to Dawn—a grueling 24-hour ultramarathon in Sharon Hills, Pennsylvania—hour 17 meant more to the runners. Gagz, 47, wasn’t the only one who’d started to creak. Harvey, the race leader who had already run more than four back-to-back marathons that day (107.87 miles), needed to change his fluorescent-yellow shoes. As he sat for the first time in the race, his two crew members facilitated the camping-chair pit stop: Anti-chafe salve was handed off, new socks were stuffed in the cupholders, fresh shoes were lined up. Micah, 40, had been leading the women and was second overall. Her team in the tent next door had been tracking that while she had run 23 of her 414 laps in more than three minutes, eight of her 17 laps this hour took longer. Jeff, 75, had been the definition of consistency all day, alternating between running and walking in pursuit of multiple American records for his age group. Five minutes before Gagz laid down, Jeff had stumbled to the field inside the track and started vomiting.
The thing about lying down is that it’s not very helpful in moving forward, which is exactly what Gagz needed to do continuously—for a full 24 hours—if he was going to reach his goal. Every minute he was down, those still running under the floodlights gained ground on him. Every minute wasted pushed him further away from the distance he needed to achieve. There were five hours till the second dawn of the race, and seven to the finish line. Other racers were dropping like flies. Would he?
Most people do not run. Most people who run do not run long distances. Most people who run long distances do not run extremely long distances. And most people who run extremely long distances do not decide to do so on a 400-meter track for 24 hours straight. But this year, at least 36 people did, enough to fill the high school track field in Sharon Hills where D3 was held in mid-May.
D3 is a very particular kind of ultramarathon, a broad category of races that includes anything longer than 26.2 miles. The most common versions are based on distance, and are run on trails or roads. But there are also time-based races, ranging mostly from six hours to six days. You run as far as you can in the allotted time, and as races stretch on, you must eat, change clothes, rest, sleep, and do everything else you need to do to keep running. Because measuring every runner’s distance is essential, these races tend to take place on short loops which runners run over and over. Gagz, aka Michael Gagliardi, calls these “the last bastion of fringe in an already fringe community.”
D3 is not the only 24-hour race—there are still dozens left this year—but it is unusual. First, in contrast to invitational events, D3’s open registration at the end of a qualification period draws a range of runners that might otherwise never compete together. There are locals on a lark, elite runners, and everyone in between. This year’s event has an age range from 16 to 82; people on their first ultramarathon and others who’ve lost count.
Second, it’s held on the aforementioned 400-meter track rather than a long trail or a loop. This allows a spectator to witness something they usually can’t: You can only see tiny snippets of an ultrarunner racing 100 miles on mountain trails, but you can watch them run a full race if they’re running in circles. Endless circular running also presents a unique psychological challenge for competitors, who make no progress, don’t change terrain, and look at the same scenery for 24 hours straight. And since the competition takes place on a high school track instead of across three countries in the Alps, the whole scene will never be more than 157.49 meters away. “The best thing about it is that you can always see the competition,” D3 co-director Bill Schultz told me. “The worst thing about it is that they can always see you.” He’d know, because he’s the one to credit, or to blame. Schultz co-founded the race as a 12-hour competition in 1984 and added a 24-hour race in 1986, making D3 one of the country’s oldest 24-hour track ultras.
I’ve been a curious outsider in this world for a while. As a recent entrant in the category of “people who run long distances but not extremely long distances,” I’ve run enough to sample the thrill and challenges of races that last longer than your body wants, as well as experience the awe that people could—and would want to—multiply that turmoil several times over. And as a human being equipped with constant internet in 2020s America and a preference for variety, I found the idea of doing anything for 24 hours straight to be just as alien. I mean, really—what’s going on here? What could possibly motivate someone, what could sustain them, and what could they really get out of running around a small track for an entire day?
I’d have to go see it all happen if I wanted to find out.
The Academy Park High School track is not exciting, not at 6:30 on a gray Saturday morning, and probably not ever. It’s exactly what you imagine when you imagine a high school track: a red ring around a green field, flanked by empty silver bleachers. Ultrarunning is weird like that: unglamorous trappings that could be the setting for physical feats never before accomplished in the history of the world. There was no other press there, nor did it seem like there was anyone there who was not running or helping the runners run. I arrived to find people making last-minute preparations at outposts set up on the field and perimeter of the track.
Nikki Harvey, a 48-year-old Alabamian, was talking with her husband, David. David would be “crewing” her, trying to provide her with all the nutrition, clothing, and off-track support she’d need. She was wearing a gray tank top and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She looked like she’d been spending plenty of time outdoors, which made sense, because she was planning to run from Mexico to Canada the week after D3. Nikki only started running in 2016, and I got the sense that her abilities were outpacing her own self-image. “I’m just a regular runner,” she insisted.
Her first 24-hour race, in February, had been particularly eventful—both because she’d dropped out after she lost vision in one of her eyes and because her performance there led to encouragement from other runners to set a qualifying distance for invitation-only events at D3. Her top goal was to qualify for the U.S. 24-Hour National Team, which would require her to run around 145 miles in the allotted 24 hours. But it was her lowest goal—“Stay on my feet for 24 hours”—that seemed like her biggest motivator; an opportunity for revenge.
Two tents down the straightaway was Harvey Lewis, a friendly high school history teacher and also one of the best ultrarunners in the world. You can see both when you look at him—inquisitive eyes, an easy smile, and a tall, slender body that looks like it’s been vacuum-packed. He was starting the race in a teal tank, black tight shorts, and shoes that were entirely fluorescent yellow. D3 wasn’t exactly the most exotic stop on his race calendar. He’s a two-time winner of the Badwater 135—a grueling climb through Death Valley in the middle of summer—and the 2021 champion of Big’s Backyard Ultra in Tennessee, a last-one-standing lap competition where he ran over 354 miles in 71 hours and 15 minutes. He came to D3 to try to secure his spot again on the national team that will compete in the International Association of Ultrarunners’ 24-Hour World Championship. D3 is one of the last opportunities to improve on his qualifying distance (148.68 miles) and defend his spot—fifth out of six—against potential challengers. At his tent—a fastidiously organized mobile kitchen and field hospital crewed by two people—I asked him if he needed to do anything before he started running. Maybe a yoga stretch, he said, “but there’ll be plenty of time to warm up.”
On the other side of the field, I found Gagz. He’s a local fixture around Philly running circles, and was pretty unmistakable in his all-black clothes, tattoos, and wiry gray chest-length beard. His aid station consisted of a folding chair and a Yeti cooler with a “Make America Grateful Again” bumper sticker. He was aiming to qualify for the invitation-only Desert Solstice race by running 138 miles, which would require running continuous 10-minute, 26-second miles for 24 hours, an equation he’s had written on his whiteboard for months. If he couldn’t crack that, he’d really need to run over 100 miles. According to him, anything less would be a failure.
I made it down to the start line with enough time to quickly greet Jeff Hagen as runners gathered around for the pre-race brief. You could mistake him for a retiree who’s just stopping by on his morning walk. He was wearing a red long-sleeved shirt, floppy white hat, and Costco socks, and had a bottle pack strapped around his waist. Now 75, he’s a retired dentist, but he was very much not there by accident. He’d already set the 48-hour—yes, 48-hour—world record for his age group and was there to break other records: the 75–79 age-group record for 100 miles in 24 hours, and to try to become the sixth person ever, and second American, to run 100 miles in less than 24 hours after the age of 75. My goal, meanwhile, was just to stay awake.
Bill addressed the runners at the starting line. Dressed in a blue D3 rain jacket, he explained that there were only two rules they needed to know. First, don’t obstruct other runners. Second, every four hours, turn around at the start line and run in the opposite direction. That was it.
And then at 7 a.m., they were off.
In many sports, the more time that has elapsed, the clearer “the story” becomes—a team proves far more capable than their rivals, or a set of athletes separate themselves from the rest of the pack to battle it out. It takes five minutes of watching a track ultramarathon to realize that it’s the exact opposite. Just two laps in, the runners’ relative positions become meaningless, as faster runners are often behind, and then overtake, their slower competitors. But speed isn’t totally reliable either, because runners have diverse strategies for how to set their pace.
Nikki and the other women trying for the national team—Micah and Megan—came out fast and consistent, completing laps in around 2 minutes and 14 seconds, a 9-minute-per-mile pace. Harvey was a few ticks slower. But because there was nowhere to run away to, the leaders repeatedly fell in stride with other runners who were running a few laps at a faster pace. Or in Jeff’s case, part of a lap: Over his 119 ultramarathons, he’s developed a curious run-walk strategy he employs across patterns of curves and straights.
There’s really only one reliable way to understand how races like these are progressing: data. That’s how I met Good Mike and Bad Mike. It wasn’t clear whether their names were character assessments or ratings at being a Mike, but their command center in the tarped-over timing tent suggested they had other questions to focus on. The Mikes had equipped all runners with two trackers, and every time the runner passed through the starting gate, their name, position, number of laps, distance, and last lap time appeared on a TV monitor ahead of them. If there was a story in the data, they’d know it.
Bill told me that 24-hour races can be understood the same way a 1-mile race can be: by chopping it up into four parts. The first lap, you try not to go too fast. The second lap “you try not to trip, you stay out of trouble.” Third lap: you try to position yourself, because the fourth lap? “It’s balls to the wall and time to podium,” he said. It’s the same in a 24-hour race, only each lap is six hours long.
In the first six hours, I got bored and then un-bored. I obsessed over time and then lost track of it. It rained and then it got hot and then it was hot and rained. I talked with Harvey in run-by snippets and later ran a lap with him as he finished his first marathon of the day. He told me about the sneaky effects of UV rays, the cumulative consequences of little variables like carrying a water bottle, and how we were metaphorically climbing a mountain. Harvey and the other runners changed clothes and put ice bandanas around their necks, most still looking steady in their gait.
If the second “lap” is about consistency and calm for each individual runner, its collective effect felt like a trance, occasionally surreal. No one really does anything in a regular day for longer than six hours in a row, and the race started to feel open, funny, and eerie, like when you say the same word over and over again until it sounds ridiculous.
A forlorn trumpet played as dozens of runners walked the track eating slices of pizza in the rain. At the change of directions, Good Mike strummed a distance-measuring wheel like an electric guitar. I devoured cold French toast sticks from a paper cup of syrup and felt like they were saving my life. The repetition of hours 8, 9, and 10 felt interminable while they were happening, then like no time at all.
After trailing all day, Harvey finally took the overall lead, running laps 283 through 287 at exactly 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Throughout the day, he’d said hello or asked how I was doing when we passed; now he was listening to music and looked completely dedicated to the task of forward motion.
Just past 6:30 p.m., I walked the track and stopped at the apex of the western curve. A track is ostensibly uniform, but repetition magnifies the nuances. The week before the race, I ran an hour on a track near my apartment. Just in that time, little markers started to pull me through the lap: the scent of purple flowers at the bend, the spot where the outer lane dips, the mottled shade at the curve. I understood why Gagz joked he could end up naming blades of grass.
Now at D3, the birds, crinkles of plastic bags, and closing car doors were signatures of this microterritory. Jeff, trying to get my attention as he came around the corner, had learned that he’d broken the age 75–79 50-mile track record, but also that he’d probably lose it later when a rival age-group runner competed in the 12-hour event.
The third quarter is supposed to be about positioning, and as the sun came out for sunset and gave way to floodlights, I realized that I was not in a good one. Bopping around from tent to tent, I’d barely sat all day, and my legs were starting to ache. But I couldn’t sit now, because when I sat, I started to fall asleep. I decided to run a mile against traffic to try to get some energy up and stretch my legs. After four laps of passing by Harvey, Gagz, and Jeff, I realized that I hadn’t seen Nikki.
As soon as I completed the mile, I cut across to her tent. Only her face was visible. It was only 65 degrees, but she was lying on the ground with her feet up on a folding chair, swaddled in a blanket and sleeping bag. She’d started to throw up after 12 hours and had run her last lap over 45 minutes ago. David, Nikki, and the race co-director, Josh, discussed what could have caused her to throw up and the difficulty of judging pee color in a port-a-potty. She was dehydrated but had been advised to wait to drink until blood returned to her stomach so she could digest it. “All I want to do is drink, drink, drink … whatever,” she said. She was clearly suffering, but she wasn’t convinced it was over yet. “If I could get better by midnight, I still have seven hours,” she said. Unable to keep anything down, she’d call it 45 minutes later.
The others kept going and seemed solid—running through my bedtime, through 10:30 p.m. potato soup, through dark miles taking them nowhere. “So far, so good,” Gagz said. Jeff beat lap after lap at his own constant rhythm. Through 16 hours of the race, only one of his 273 laps took him over five minutes.
Beyond midnight, some runners had left, some were taking breaks on camping chairs, others had retired to tents to sleep. The ones who intended to keep running did what they needed to do to keep running. Harvey changed shoes. Jeff stumbled off the turn, threw up, and then immediately got back on the track. Micah and Megan, the leading women, were running and chatting about a new album.
Gagz came over to the corner to lay down. He was still 8 miles short of his lowest goal. A friend woke him up after five minutes, and told him he was dreaming. He struggled to stand, awkwardly climbing the fence and accepting a hand to regain his footing. Then he was back to the track, trudging away. “Look-ing good bay-bee,” his friend chanted.
“Feel. Like. Shit,” Gagz chanted back.
In the final six-hour “lap,” Bad Mike showed me a graph projecting the results for leaders Harvey and Micah. Harvey’s blue line arced, probably, toward his goal; Micah’s red line bent down, probably too low. It was make-or-break time.
Break, it turned out. Micah dropped out first. Then I found Harvey slogging around the track, wearing multiple outer layers, and looking, well, like he’d actually run over 120 miles. “I really toasted myself here,” he said. He realized he wouldn’t be hitting his goal and went to his tent to sleep for an hour before he started running again.
Meanwhile, Gagz found his “third wind.” Around 3:15 a.m., he asked the Mikes what distance Micah finished with, then took off with a devious trot. He seemed to be the only one enjoying himself, but he wouldn’t be hitting his qualifying target, either. Megan hit 100 miles and dropped. Jeff’s American record was broken, and he held it for only 10 hours, 22 minutes, and 52 seconds, which was less time than it took to set it (perhaps a different kind of record).
It all seemed to have gone bust. No one was winning, no one would reach their goals. Wrapped in all the clothes I’d brought with me, I sat alone on the wet risers, eating wet Chex Mix and drinking black tea, and typing illegible notes to try to keep my eyes open.
Dawn came in electric red and purple, glowing gold. Everyone who made it back on track seemed reanimated, and the closer it got to the finish, the peppier they were. Harvey woke up, and after a few blanket-wrapped laps, he got going on a new goal to hit five marathons. At 5:36 a.m., Gagz pointed at me and told me that he “just took second.” He didn’t say that he wouldn’t hit his distance. Jeff was busting it to hit his final goal: become the sixth person over 75 to run 100 miles in less than 24 hours. With just over 25 minutes left, he did. With time expiring, runners received lawn flags to plant where they finished on the track. Harvey sprinted as many extra meters as he could.
So, who won? Technically, Harvey did, but it didn’t seem to matter. Most people had left by the time Bill gave out small trophies to first and second place, and buckles to the nine runners who broke 100 miles (everyone got mini pastries, too). When I checked in with the runners in the weeks after, they were thinking more about the process than the podium. Nikki was intent on understanding why one minute she was running along, and the next she was “laying in the grass, begging for divine relief.” Gagz was pumped about what he did, but seemed even more excited about what it revealed about him—both “that little glitch” with his nutrition late at night, and the confirmation that he’s “built for this.” Harvey reflected on surprising himself in his fast-paced final hours.
The thing is that ultrarunning is, frankly, insane. Outsiders may hear the idea and chalk it up as a superfluous, thrill-seeking stunt. Understandable: Some version of “crazy” was the most common adjective I heard to describe it from runners themselves at D3. But the fact that the activity itself is such a deviant mutation of an otherwise understandable activity masks the fact that its purpose is basic: To reveal who you are. Sure, it’s an astonishing method of doing so, and an extraordinary way to gain self-definition, but my time with these ultrarunners suggested that’s exactly what it is.
The sport demands you learn the ins and outs of your body and mind, and then teach them to accomplish your goals. You must figure out how fast is too fast; how slow is too slow. You have to know how to cool or heat your body, when it needs to hydrate, and how often it needs to pee. You have to study what combination of pre-flattened Coca-Cola, watermelon, salted potatoes, gels, elixirs, Red Bull, pizza, and Frappuccinos will make it do what you want. That’s hard—just as a spectator, I struggled to feed myself right, to stay warm, to move efficiently, and to rest enough.
Then you have to learn what to do when your body won’t listen, when it all feels more like torture: How you think about pain, how you don’t think about pain, how you recover from setbacks, when you decide to rest, and whether you’ll be able to—and should—get back up. On a track, all of that is perpetually on display. So is how you treat the people you can’t run away from: your competitors, your crew, the volunteers. At a race like D3, you have to ask yourself these questions repeatedly, for 24 straight hours.
During that time, you have to find tangible ways to measure how well you know yourself. You track lap times, quarter-race splits, averages over different sections. You set multiple goals, you reach for niche records. Keep training, keep racing, and cumulatively, your shape becomes clearer: How pointy is this edge? What is the nature of this curve? Can I change this angle? How? When you don’t know yourself well enough, that’s how you lose.
Bill believes that the elite runners failed to hit their goals this year because they raced each other instead of running their own races. They lost track of what they individually needed. At D3, it became clear to me that the extent to which Harvey Lewis is one of the best ultrarunners in the world might also be expressed in the fact that he knows the most about what, exactly, he needs and how to get it—how much ice in the bandana; the intention and the capacity to run exactly the same speed lap after lap.
The effect of so much introspection could produce a subculture of monasticism or egotism. But the public, collective method seems to matter. “People tend to be really genuine,” Gagz said. “I think when you’re doing these kinds of distances and putting yourself out there like that, it humbles you. And when you’re humbled, you’re more compassionate.” This sounded a little outrageous, but I can’t say it felt inaccurate. The people I met seemed authentically and notably comfortable as themselves.
And yet: Even if ultrarunning provides a means for self-knowledge, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a prudent one. There are other options for self-improvement: meditation, therapy, journaling, life coaches. Ultrarunning is not the safest, quickest, easiest, or cheapest method—one runner at D3 even traveled from Talkeetna, Alaska. The immediate risks include dehydration, kidney damage, and many kinds of skin and muscle injury; the long-term damage could include osteoarthritis, nerve damage, lung problems, and cardiac maladaptations. Training for many hours takes many hours as it is, and the activity can also become an obsession. Good Mike, for example, ran every single day from 1995 to 2010. “It clearly can be a dysfunction,” he said.
Still, for some people, this is the method that works, and one they can stick with their whole lives. “I do feel we love to push ourselves and the boundaries we perceive or society perceives for us,” Harvey told me. When they do, he said, “the position of the mind and body in an uncomfortable place enables us to sometimes experience deeper thoughts than we may on a normal basis about love, what’s important in life, and gratitude.” For people like him, this type of running gets at those big questions of human existence—which may be something worth jogging 24 hours in a circle for, if you can stomach it.
After a brief nap and some breakfast in Philadelphia, I’d recovered enough to make the drive home. I thought about the irony that there’s not much else you can do for 24 hours straight besides keep moving. None of the runners I talked to could think of anything else they would do. Reading, sitting in mineral springs, sex, watching TV, driving—none felt viable without sleep or collapse. Many of them told me ahead of time that spectating for 24 hours would be harder than running it. That was definitely not true: I did the least impressive thing at the track that day. But the thing about these personal quests is that it really is all relative. Finding out I could just be at the track for 24 hours has made me wonder what else I could do there.
