Mike Hess has been running since he was a kid...
A 2-mile race when he was 9...
Track and cross-country in high school...
"And then I remember my coach telling us it took a month for to recover from a marathon. Then I swore I'd never run a marathon."
But he ran his first marathon in 2004...
San Diego's rock 'n roll marathon...
But when the music faded... He decided to rock a few more marathons...
One for each continent!
"I found it on the internet. I was researching to do the Stockholm Marathon and I stumbled across this website called the 7 continents club, and I was like, oh that's kinda cool, you know?"
He got around to Stockholm in 2006... Europe, check!
The Great Wall, and Buenos Aires marathons in '07...
He took care of the Gold Coast Marathon in Australia in 2008...
And followed that with a race in Rwanda in 2009, which was the hardest one so far...
"I didn't realize until I got there. I knew there was some elevation in Rwanda. I didn't realize it was about a mile high."
It took him just over 5 hours to complete that one...
But he did... And they didn't hand out medals at the finish line...
Not that he needed any more...
His average marathon time is around 3 hours, 30 minutes...
His personal best is 3 hours, 7 minutes... At a Napa Valley race in 2010.
And he's got 21 marathons under his belt...
Not bad for a guy who swore he'd never run one...
"80% mental. The rest is in your head."
But just beyond the horizon lies... Antarctica...
The cold and blistery continent of ice, where Mike Hess and about 100 others, will brave the sub-freezing temperatures for a 26.2-mile race.
Actually, you might say it's summer there now... Temperatures are expected to be a balmy 15 degrees on race day.
But Hess is ready...
And once he reaches the finish line... He, and 21 of those runners, will be able to say, they've run a marathon, on all 7 continents...
Hess says he'll get through it the same way he got through his first marathon.
"Once the desire becomes more than our excuses, we get out there and do it."
It's safe to say that once you've run a race on all seven continents, there's not much left to accomplish...
So, Mike Hess says once he's done with Antarctica, he'll focus on helping others accomplish their running goals.
TXT 24
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