Pam Reed: 301 Miles without Stopping

At 4 a.m. Friday, Pam Reed got out of bed in the Tucson foothills, changed into her running clothes, was driven to the middle of nowhere and started to run. She ran all day and all night Friday. She ran all day and all night Saturday. On Easter Sunday she did not attend church, did not appear in an Easter parade, did not sit down to Easter dinner. She ran for 24 hours on a 12 1/2-mile loop on a highway frontage road between Picacho Peak and Marana.

"About 2 in the morning, every day, I got very sleepy," said Reed. "But I kind of closed my eyes and it went away."

Not a word about being tired. No mention of aching bones, muscles or sore feet. On and on and on she ran.

At 5:52 a.m. Monday, in the dark, followed by two support vehicles and flanked by two friends, Reed reached the 275-mile mark. The (previous) unofficial world record for sustained running, male or female, is 262 miles.

If she chose to run to her stated goal of 300 miles, it would take another eight hours.

"She'll never quit," Stacy Wisner, part of Reed's running team, said at 6 a.m. "She slowed up a bit Sunday night, but she won't quit."

Eight more hours, 25 more miles. Reed later said that sleep deprivation became an issue as Sunday became Monday.

"It was scary for a while," said the 44-year-old mother of three. "I couldn't quite think clearly."

But as always in her inestimable distance-running career, she overcame the urge to give in.

Her father, Roy Saari, followed behind his daughter in a support car on Saturday and Sunday night.

"But at about 4 a.m., that was it," Saari said. "I couldn't keep my eyes open. It's so hard to imagine that she could keep going."

Reed kept going. At 1:55 Monday afternoon, she completed 300 miles. But rather than chance the math, she ran a final mile, No. 301, just to be sure.

At the finish line, she neither collapsed nor broke into tears. She immediately sat without assistance in a chair and talked about what it took to run 301 miles over nearly 80 hours.

"I'm amazed I did it, but I'm more amazed at how (good) my body feels," she said. "I've hurt more after a (26-mile) marathon."

And that was about it. After 80 hours and 301 miles of running, both believed to be world records in the non-Forrest Gump division, Pam Reed got in a car and said she had no plans to rest or burn her running shoes.

"I'm flying to New York (today) to be on the 'Tony Danza Show,'" she said. After that, she plans to compete in the Arizona Ironman Triathlon, fly to England to run the London Marathon, then hurry to Massachusetts to run the Boston Marathon - backward and forward - two days later.

All of that in the next 20 days.

"What Pam did here in the last four days is something that has never been done in the history of the human race," said Tucson attorney Chuck Giles, part of Reed's inner circle, an endurance cycling and running enthusiast of note. "This lady is indomitable. It's just overwhelming."

Reed does not run fast. On Monday, she averaged about four miles an hour, but she did not walk. She always maintained a slow jog.

She did not consider quitting - "not even once," she said - and she did not consider the 301-mile distance an unusually grueling workout.

"This was the coolest running experience I've ever had," she said. "If I don't show excitement, it's because I'm so overwhelmed."

Was it the most difficult run she had ever attempted, including the 125-mile midsummer run through Death Valley, the Badwater Marathon?

"Yes," she said. "This was the hardest ever."

Reed invented this 301-mile run for two reasons, the first being that she likes the feeling of owning the endurance-running record. The second is that one of her ultramarathon rivals, Dean Karnazes, ran 262 miles last fall and got his picture on the cover of Runner's World magazine. Reed's previous longest sustained run was about 240 miles.

Thus, the motivation, a story that was explained on CBS' episode of "60 Minutes" on Sunday night. Reed initially hoped to complete her run in time to watch the broadcast, but it was unrealistic to run 301 miles in 60 hours.

So she ran on, 19 more hours than she had hoped. Her only immediate medical issue seemed to be blisters on the bottoms of her feet.

"I didn't know how to pace myself for such a long race," she said. "I was frustrated it took so long, but it's also something that had never been done before. It was a goal, not a burden."

As a nutritional award at the finish line, Reed was given a stick of cotton candy (she saved it for later). She snacked on energy bars and liquids for 79 hours, sometimes eating pasta as she ran. Reed's longest pause was for a brief leg massage.

"I hope this inspires a lot of people to be active and stay fit," she said. "But I do want to take a shower."

Ultra run

* Tucsonan Pam Reed ran longer than anyone has run before

MILEPOSTS

301 Miles of sustained running by Reed

79:55 Time it took

262 Miles her rival logged last year