Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Human Performance Outliers podcast with Zach Bitter.

All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Human Performance Outliers podcast.

I'm your host, Zach Bitter, and today I have a guest interview for you.

Today's guest is John Kelly.

For those of you who follow the sport

of ultramarathon running or more specifically the longer side of the sport of ultra marathoning,

you're probably quite familiar with John Kelly and some of his accomplishments. Some of you

may follow specifically the Barclays Marathons, though, too, which is a very popular

kind of much different than normal type of event.

And if you follow that, you'll definitely know John because John is one of very few people

to have successfully actually completed the event, not only once, but twice.

And the reason why that is intriguing is, unlike most endurance events,

the goal of this particular event is to maintain roughly a 1% finishing average. So what that

means is there is a five-loop course that goes through some pretty harsh terrain, and the course

gets adjusted from year to year to try to maintain that level of difficulty as things like

technology, training principles, improved running, just practices and knowledge of the area

get better. So it's this, as John describes in this episode,

an arms race between the runners and the race director or Laz to kind of have that balance of

this course is achievable on any given year, meaning if someone has the right day, they will

cross that finish line with a fifth completed loop, but it's not guaranteed.

And some years it pans out where no one finishes.

Other years like this year, you have a very historic showing where three individuals actually

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