On Sunday, for the 100th time this year, Martin Parnell will rise at dawn and devour a pile of berries, whole milk, high-fat yogurt and Mini-Wheats. Then he will run a marathon.
It's not the daily routine of your average 54-year-old, but then, what the mining engineer from Cochrane, Alta., has been putting his body through since January is hardly normal, and neither is his goal.
He plans on finishing 250 marathons in 2010.
Five days a week, when most adults are at work, Parnell runs 42.2 kilometres. Each session lasts about 51/2 hours, not counting a couple of eight-hour marathons he walked in minus-30 degrees with a leg injury this winter, a water pack frozen on his back.
He consumes 5,500 calories daily. His blood, heart and bone health are regularly tested. He's on his 10th pair of shoes.
"It's a full-time job," Parnell said recently, his long legs plunged into two buckets of ice.
Marathon 100 will put him only five short of the Guinness world record, but Parnell isn't after records. He is raising money for Right To Play, a charity that uses sport to improve the lives of children in developing countries. The organization's core values match the beliefs instilled in Parnell when he rode a bicycle through 10 African countries, stopping to kick rag-tied soccer balls with youth who owned little else.
"Sport transcends boundaries," he said. "I hadn't really realized that until I travelled through Africa."
But as he nears the halfway mark, Marathon Quest 250 is becoming more than a way for Parnell to baffle and inspire. ("Are you nuts?" one newscaster asked.)
Researchers say the father of three is jogging into the unknown. Despite growing participation rates in endurance races such as ultramarathons, little is understood about the physical effects of such superhuman feats. Health professionals and biomechanics experts are watching Parnell closely to see how his body withstands the pounding that comes from running 10,550 kilometres in a year - the equivalent of running from Cochrane to Boston, then west to Vancouver before returning home.
"There's not much precedent for this," said Reed Ferber, a researcher and director of the Running Injury Clinic at the University of Calgary. "But shoot, he's almost halfway there."
Eight years ago, Parnell ran his first five-kilometre race and it transformed his life. His adult children had left home, and he had lost his wife to cancer two years before. In running, he found an outlet that fulfilled him athletically (he grew up in England playing soccer and tennis) and spiritually (winding through new mountain and river terrain feels magical). As he quickly advanced from marathons to Ironmans to ultramarathons 160 kilometres long, figuring out how to feed and pace his body in order to survive "appealed to the engineer in me," he said.
Soon after he left the nickel mines of Sudbury and settled in Cochrane with his second wife, Susan, an English school teacher he met on the eve of 2004, he began looking for a way to use his passion to give back.
Right To Play was an important cause, he decided, and he could afford to take a year off from his consulting job in the mining industry.
"I was going to do Marathon Quest 365," he said of his initial plan to run a marathon every day. "My wife sent me to the doctor."
For the green light, he turned to Dr. Bill Hanlon, a family doctor in Cochrane who has climbed Mount Everest and skied across Antarctica. But even Hanlon says he thought Parnell's plan sounded "a little crazy and not really achievable."
Few have come even close. American Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in 50 days across 50 U.S. states. In 2008, a 64-year-old lawyer from San Antonio, Larry Macon, ran 105 marathons and set the Guinness record for running the most marathons in one calendar year. (Parnell won't beat Macon's record because due to cost and other restrictions, not all of his routes are measured by officials. Most of his runs are measured using GPS, but he has included several races, such as the Boston Marathon in April.)
As a compromise, Hanlon suggested Parnell try 250 marathons, allowing him two days rest a week. "There's a strength and resolve which I think was important not to squash," Hanlon said.
At first, Parnell alternated nine minutes of running with one minute of walking. But in February, he developed a repetitive stress injury in his leg and was forced to take 11 days off.
Without a proper training regimen or technique, runners going as few as 10 kilometres can develop injuries, including stress fractures, plantar fasciitis, knee injuries and shin splints, Ferber said.
Some studies have shown that ultramarathons leave athletes susceptible to postrace illnesses, Ferber said. But due to a lack of funding and the relatively small pool of people to study, no major studies have assessed the long-term health effects of training at extreme distances, he added.
Undaunted, Parnell began to tweak his regimen in order to keep going. He began walking and jogging at five-minute intervals, allowing different muscle groups some rest, but maintaining his time of about 5.5 hours. He also switched to a flatter route and began weekly visits to a chiropractor and physiotherapist, who donated their time.
He's still stiff all the time, Parnell says, but the physical challenge has begun to pale in comparison to the mental taxation. The people who joined him for portions of his first marathons have disappeared. To combat boredom, he photographs scenery. He often stops for ice cream.
The high points are always on Thursdays, when he gives a talk at a local school, then runs the marathon in loops around the building. Kids jog alongside him at recess. Many have emptied their piggybanks.
One hundred marathons in, regular monitoring of his weight, blood levels and bone density shows he's in remarkably good health. He maintains an average heart rate of about 110 beats a minute. He has maintained his weight despite his massive appetite.
"His heart and his lungs have responded to this brilliantly," said his physiotherapist, Serge Tessier.
Parnell's biggest fear is flu or a stumble could knock him off his schedule. The injury in February cost him 11 of the 12 off-days he allowed himself as a buffer for unexpected problems.
Right now it's the fundraising side he needs to work on, he says. He's raised about $32,000 so far. But that's well off the pace of his goal of $250,000.
Parnell, ever the optimist, believes donors will pick up the pace as he comes closer to fulfilling his role.
"Now that I've done almost 100, that'll be 40-per-cent done," he said. "So I'll be 40 per cent less nuts."