CTS Athlete Spotlight - Michael Koppy and the Superior Hiking Trail | Koopcast Episode 56

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast i wanted to put the spotlight on one of our amazing everyday runners the runners that we have the great privilege of working with each and every day that might not make the cover of ultra running magazine yet provide incredible inspiration to me and to our coaches this episode of the podcast features michael coffee and his coach stephanie howe in june of 2020 michael set a then fkt on the 310 mile superior hiking trail in northern minnesota it's a trail that he had tried at and failed before and at the age of 69 decided to take another crack at we discussed his training in nutrition and how he worked with coach stephanie to be prepared for this attempt the hallucinations that he had while out on the trails and what went wrong during the course of the attempt as things of this nature inevitably have at least one failure point michael is somebody that i find inspiration from and i hope you do too regardless of your age or where you are in the pack all right i'm gonna get right out of the way let's get into it right now here's my conversation with the incredible and the ageless michael copy

and his coach stephanie howe first off how do you feel oh i'm i'm great uh you know uh partly i mean i'm certainly recovered from everything um and one of the nice things was as you probably heard there was some controversy with my course route that i took and so it's nice to have that behind me now did you get so let's set the stage a little bit how many weeks are you out from doing the superior hiking trail um let's see what is it now it's got to be two weeks two weeks yeah so two weeks is kind of like does that sound about right stephanie i think you're a little further out than that three you're closer three and a half yeah oh three and it's july i mean it's the second week in july now oh yes right yeah okay time goes by fast ultra running amnesia takes its case regardless whether it's a one-day race or multi-day race or whatever it is um so you're a few weeks out let's just put it let's just put it that you're a few weeks out super big effort we're gonna go over how big that effort was but i mean like how's the body holding up oh it's it's good i'm you know stephanie's got me back doing long runs again so um yeah it feels good to get back i'm just gonna comment michael has an incredibly resilient body and has recovered

faster than most humans i have ever worked with is the recovery any different than it is during a normal like big ultra or anything like that or do you think that it's relatively the same well for me the the physical recovery from just the miles was not that hard it was the uh sleep deprivation which was definitely the hardest part okay that that took you know like at least a week and a half so let's set this up a little bit because a lot of people will know want to know about the sleep monsters how long is the superior hiking trail how long did it take for you to do it okay so it's 310 miles and uh it took me five hour or five days three hours and 44 minutes oh man that's a lot of running and this wasn't something that was planned out at the beginning of the year i take it uh it actually was because i attempted it yes i i tried it last year and about the same time and uh ended up at 136 miles with a stress fracture and so i knew i wanted to go back this year and try it again and so this was in my bucket list to do and how long has it been in your bucket list maybe um you know two three years i suppose okay so you've had it on your radar for a while what

initially like put it on your radar well just living here i mean i live right next to it and i train on it all the time and um actually probably maybe seven eight years ago i i had a goal of running the whole thing but over two year period so i would go out and try a section and usually i ended up having to do it twice because i would park my vehicle run out and then have to run back you know some of them i got picked up and dropped off but i did end up doing the whole thing over a two-year period so and then after doing that then the wheels started turning well what if i could do the whole thing and at that time it wasn't finished it only got completely finished it was you know before at that time it was like 250 or 60 miles it wasn't completed down at the southern end and then i started as they were completing that southern end that started interest me i because i went there and ran it you know like in its first stages when they were just sort of grubbing out the trail and it wasn't even hardly marked and there was no precise finish point um you know i only knew approximately where the end was and then as i saw that develop then that you know and i felt like okay now the trail is really done um then it interests me more to go ahead and try this and when you were scouting it out regardless of

what stage like the trail was like roughed in did they plan on extending it even more or they said listen this is the continuous length of trail it's going to be here to here it's always going to be here to here and once we're done we're done yeah i'm i mean they they had the boundaries which was the you know canadian border and the wisconsin borders so that was the end of it the only thing that with this trail it's never really done because they have various things that happen like the one thing that was um sort of whether i was doing the right course or not was because there was a bridge out and now the board has decided not to rebuild that bridge and so they have a new route going around this over the stream and of course they've i know a year ago they had a a problem with a a lot of this goes over private property as well and they had a dispute with a private landowner and had to reroute the course and so i don't think this course is ever done i mean it's always going to be moving you know a little bit here and a little bit there but basically the northern and southern borders now are set and so the in between is gonna always be moved some way so you have this trail that you're familiar with you've been out on it for years at various stages of its whole development did you ever have

a sense of how long it would take you end to end like when how did that start to manifest like in your mind starting to do the math of okay if i did this section in this time in this section in this time it's going to take me five or six days right well i did look at the past fkt holder and he had done it in six days and eight and a half hours and so i kind of looked at that and looked at you know how i knew the trail went and kind of figured how many hours it might take me and you know and if everything went you know super i could maybe do it in this kind of time and kind of knowing my own pace and and stuff so that you know i did have a spreadsheet when i went there and you know had an idea of what i was hoping i could do if and i my spreadsheet was overly optimistic for sure um but i thought you know i might try for the best i can get and and then just have to go to plan b as it goes so it was over optimistic in what way like how fast you think you could go right because my my my spreadsheet actually showed me finishing it in like nine minutes under four days and so you know you could say four days well that that would have been really ideal and everything went fine i didn't miss any trails or do any extra i

mean i did do some extra this time and you always kind of do and and just you know everything falling together a hundred percent um that that was ideal you know but weather and all those things so i mean i did have a lot of i was fortunate and a lot of things did fall together very well but there were a few things that didn't so we're going to talk about those in a second but before we before we get to the trip itself i want to bring steph into the mix here steph when did michael approach you about getting ready for this endeavor yeah so i think the first time we talked was just after the new year so um maybe january um he contacted me and partly because we have the connection i'm also from minnesota and i grew up hiking the superior hiking trail so we had a conversation about his goals and um you know this was pre-covid and it there was a very um good choice this year to have a fkt project rather than a race goal so we started early in the year and um really just kind of outlined what it would look like working into june to prepare him for this this trail and it's it's a it was a little tricky just because minnesota is there's winter there's a lot of snow and so he wasn't able to get onto the trail until pretty like far into the spring um but we started with the training um you know back

in january and when michael put together the spreadsheet that he's alluded to is this something that you two collaboratively did or is mike just like this is what i want to do you got to get me ready for it so he shared that with me um a couple months before the start and it was really well laid out in terms of like the the aid state or i guess the the points where he could see crew um and his pace so it was i i mean i had some feedback but his his initial plan was really realistic based on his training that he had done and um pace he was able to cover and then some of his experience in running the 200 mile races and so we talked about it a bit but um you know like he said it was best case scenario and um i mean over five days you know a lot can can go wrong and a lot of variables get thrown your way so i think it was still a pretty successful close to plan what he actually was able to execute i i love the fact that close to plan in this scenario is a whole day like the plus or minus there is is i mean pretty much 24 hours worth of being out there so so michael take it take us through this you've alluded to the fact that things went awry at some point as they do with any fkt this is like the summer you know covid summer of fkt's and personal projects and things like that which is the theme of this podcast and something that has come up kind of time and time again is the best laid

plans don't always go to plan so take us through what you experienced like day by day and where were some of those times where you got lost or you had something really challenging happen things like that yeah so you know the first day went pretty well we got a little rain on and it made things a little slippery we had to slow down because of that there's a lot of uh boardwalks and and sort of bridges that you have to cross and and the wood when it gets wet gets really slippery and i the last thing i wanted to do was fall so i was really cautious in the beginning especially and so we slowed down um the pace considerably even the first day because everything was wet we weren't it was a real light drizzle so it wasn't really much rain to deal with in terms of mud but it definitely made things slippery so um so that slowing down you know i don't know how many hours it added on but it definitely added a few hours on and and we were a little behind on the first day's schedule i don't remember how much um but i know we were behind after the 24-hour period and and then the the second day i know we had probably the lookout mountain which is probably the most challenging section i think of the whole trail

and we did that during the night um which makes it even more challenging it's uh it's a you know one of the nearest highest points and very rugged and um i was so wiped after doing that and it was kind of a funny conversation with the pacer that had taken me through that and and that was uh i believe like a 10 mile section from crew to crew um and then you know i sat down with the crew there and ate a little something and and and i felt like totally wiped and uh and then he says well now we got to get up and do a 12 mile section and i just thought man how am i going to keep doing this and so um so i was a lot more wiped than i thought i would be and and i had last year i had made it that's about the point i had dropped out last year from the um uh injury that i had so it was really uh it was nice to get past that point that where i had dropped out and so um did you do any celebrating when you passed that point well just internally just you know it was kind of like a relief you know as like a you know kind of a demon that i just needed to get past you know and and and i kind of you know i felt confident that i would anyway but um but just that reality that i was now running on ground that i hadn't covered last

year was was really nice nice feeling but i was really wiped and that was a hard night to finish um and then then after that last 12 mile section i took a one hour sleep and felt much better after that i woke up and was more energized but going into that that that night was was that was a real tough night and where were you sleeping during this time let's start to paint the picture of like who your support crew was as well because i think this is also an interesting facet of it sure well i had a total of about 15 people that were going to be coming and going you know at different we had a schedule laid out and they would jump in at different points and then of course as that schedule changed their points of jumping in had to change but we had we had a uh two people that had been at the um with me the previous year so they were pretty um knowledgeable what had to happen and so they were sort of our the crew chief for the first half and the second half we had them split up and both of them happened to have a subaru outback and those were that was my sleep station such a good car yes and it was great for sleeping it was like the taj mahal so of course i was very tired when i got to it you know but and i actually took from one of your

podcasts jason where you talked about doing the race you had done in europe and i remember you had talked about you could get through the whole first day and night without any sleep and so that was my goal here too was not to sleep anything the first day and night and then to to start my sleep which was going to be my goal was then an hour in the at night and an hour in the morning each day oh so you're breaking it up you had like two one-hour naps in a 24-hour period past the first day right exactly except for the first day so how did you feel that worked out for you well it was fine for the first three and a half days but after that it wasn't enough and i didn't know that and and that really put me in the hole and i think it's a little bit a little bit like um getting dehydrated once you get in the hole it's really hard to get out of it and that really slowed me down a lot at the end and and it made it so i was taking all these 15 minute naps on the trails and they just weren't doing it you know it it would help me for you know maybe a half hour but then i would be out of it again so yeah the sleep aspect on these things on these like long distance hikes and 200 mile races and things like that or has been it's it's proven to be quite fascinating because nobody really knows a good answer and it's so individual like some people can go 50 60 hours without sleep and then other

people use a two-hour schedule pretty well and other people they need you know one hour one hour is all they can stay asleep and other people take like little short naps and like literally just kind of like curl up on their pack for 15 minutes and i it throughout all my years of trying to study that i really haven't found anything really consistent that we can kind of stick with so you're doing an hour twice a day for the first few days and then at the end it seems like it was a lot of sleepwalking and taking trail maps and things like that yes yes yes did you have a pacer the whole time i did okay so they were monitoring your your uh your sleep habits you have a lot of good pictures of you like curled up on the side of the trail that's what pacers like i do when they're all fresh and rested they take embarrassing pictures of you for blackmail right right and a lot of them said that you know if they were if this was a boxy match and they had a tall they could throw in they would have thrown it in quite a few times because they said i look so bad really but i but i just kept going i wouldn't stop and you know they would say you need to take more sleep and i would just that was my schedule so i didn't and so you had your crew kind of being soft on you that's what you were saying yeah i mean they they kind of told me that i looked bad and i needed more sleep but i didn't i didn't want to take the time you know i didn't want to take another hour of sleeping and but you know in hindsight i think it probably would have been good to to get a little more but the

problem is i should have done it way sooner after the three days i was good up to the three three and a half days and then then it was really hitting me stef did y'all talk about this in advance and try to like work out some schedule yeah and it's hard to predict because you know you have an idea of what's going to happen over two or three days but then going into that uncharted territory of like day four day five it's like how much does the sleep deprivation catch up with you and we kind of talked about okay so a goal is you know this time in this schedule but the ultimate goal for this whole project is to finish the trail so whatever it's going to take if you need more sleep finishing is better than you know to not finishing so we did talk about you know playing it by ear a little bit as you get into day four because there's not many people who have done runs that long without you know planned overnight so you know we just didn't really know what to expect um for his his sleep needs how technical is it oh it's technical people don't realize that definitely comes in like right there you've been in europe so just like you've been in europe you've seen some like super technical trails you think this is like really technical it's technical in a different way it's rooty and rocky there's not smooth you have to be aware and so that was a concern i had like later you know when he's sleep deprived picking up his feet and being aware of like what's underneath that's like you know you can't just disconnect

and like shuffle along like you can a lot of trails out west yeah and that was one one thing that you know i think maybe i underestimated too is the mental um energy it took to concentrate because every step you take there you had to know where that step was going there like you like stephanie just said there's no shuffling because if you do you're going to go down and um you know the course is so rugged with rocks root roots and mud it's always one of those three and and uh and then you've got i mean the whole trail we ended up doing about 70 000 feet of uh vertical in that 310 miles and you you kind of don't even associate that kind of elevation with midwest trails you would think that's more like out west yeah that's a lot it's more just like rolly it sneaks up on you you're never you're never running flat it's just like unrelation so it's hard to get into a rhythm so all the technical trail sleep deprivation is ripe for having a yard sale did you ever like just totally eat it michael while you're out there well i i told my there was one point i think it was like after two and a half days i was i could see that i was way behind my schedule and and i was really concerned that my i was concerned that i was keeping my crew out much longer than i told them i was going to be you know

i thought it would be a four-day thing for them and you know and now we're looking at five days and maybe five days plus or who knows you know what it was going to end up being and and so my really my concern was are you guys willing to stick this out i mean i i really can't tell you when this is going to be over and and they they reassured me that they were in in it for the end and so that helped and i kind of forgot about what time i was going to finish then and quit looking at my chart and and just kept putting one foot in front of the other and you know and that's that's how i had to get through it but i mean it sounds just from hearing you describe it that you're really pushing yourself like you're kind of on the rivet for the last two or three days of this thing in a number of different areas i mean physically sleep deprivation wise like it just it just sounds like you're really going for it oh i was i you know like um i've done three of before doing this i had done three 200 mile plus races so i kind of knew what to expect you know going in here i thought but um i had never hallucinated before in those and i heard people talking about it it always it sounded kind of neat to me you know i thought well this would be fun but when i would get tired in those races my head would just go down to my chest and then i would wake up and know okay i gotta take a nap you know but here uh the morning

of day four um i got my first taste of hallucinations and you know and if i don't get it again i'll be real happy because it was uh it was so weird and and i was just so tired that you know and i just and i tried to take a nap but the bugs the mosquitoes were so bad they were flying in my ears and buzzing and it's felt like a jet plane in my head and you know i could have probably swatted 10 at once on my face and that didn't bother me but it was it was that they were in my ears you know and and i just so i laid down on the trail with my pacer there this was like probably three in the morning the fourth morning and i i just said i can't nap here we just got to push on and that was a 12 mile section we were going through and and i was hallucinating everything around me all the natural you know trees and and brush and you know all the stuff you have in the woods everything turned to man-made objects and and you know it started and the ground was real dry and uh so it had cracks in it because it was so dry the earth and i i felt like i was running on this open grate and a metal grate and you know and i could tell myself this this isn't real i knew that but yet it made it feel unsafe and uh so you know

and i didn't know where this was gonna go you know so i told my pacer just uh stay with me and you know get me to the to my crew and then i would take a nap you know what other man-made objects were appearing out of the woods at this point well i like i would see a leaf from a fern and it would look like a wooden pallet like a little just like a normal size leaf it looked like a full-size wooden pallet yeah well these leaves are quite big these are giant ferns and you know they're probably three feet across and and they got that i could see the correlation because they got this sort of open webbing that uh and you could kind of see how you i mean you got a head or some imagination there but and then i would see rocks and they'd look like hubcaps or i mean but nothing looked like nothing was natural it was all things you know and nothing real scary but just just all man-made things and yet i was in a woods you know where there was nothing man-made and and uh and even the ground you know was this metal open grate that i was running on and but i could tell myself it wasn't real but it didn't help because everything my eyes said that's what it was and and so i've always thought that ultra running induced hallucinations are some part of like a deep subconscious that just comes to the forefront but i'm having a hard time figuring out where palettes and grates and these

completely benign objects or somehow you know material in your in your in your past or upbringing do you have any theories on that well i just uh the only thing i can you know think about is that i'm a furniture builder and and i look at you know and my background is sort of engineering and so i'm kind of uh you know object kind of kind of guy so i could maybe kind of see some of those things but it was all weird yeah it was very weird is there any one that sticks out in particular no no they were just you know and i and i just remember telling my pacer you know that yeah i'm starting to hallucinate and and uh it's just getting stronger and stronger you know at first it was just a few things and then pretty soon it was everything and and and i just told her to you know don't usually when we would get about a mile from the um finish or from our crew i would say you know go ahead and run ahead and tell the crew i'm going to be coming and but i told her to stay with me because i said i didn't know where this was going to go and i didn't know if i'd just go running off in the woods or you know what would happen so um but yeah yeah you could have ended up in michigan yeah who knows stuff were you uh tracking michael while he was oh yeah yeah i it was hard to

to um put up put away it was exciting and i had not only myself but i had my parents who live in minnesota and all their friends tracking as well so yeah we were following along and um we there was good updates his crew did a great job of like posting photos and videos so i would like see how he was looking every once in a while and i remember it was maybe day three or maybe even day four where it was a video of you you were hiking and you were just chatting away you're just like walking down with your poles talking about your physical therapist and i was like yeah he's doing he looks pretty good for that far in michael you had set up a system where people could like text message either you or your crew and they would relay that to you were you getting those quite frequently while you're out on the trail well the one of the problems especially in the first day and a half was phone connections because if they would text it was texting my crew and then my crew would uh read those texts to me but of course there'd be many times they wouldn't get phone reception for eight 12 hours at a time or if they did they got it really now and then so i would you know i would get these texts but sometimes not for like eight hours at a time um but when i got them you know then she'd have a whole list of them and she'd have to quick read them off because you know i wasn't going to stay there very long and she'd be reading off like 20 at a time and you know and i

couldn't hardly hardly absorb them i know uh stephanie you texted me once at least once but i you know i couldn't even absorb what was happening i texted you like once every three hours yeah i was like i was on it yeah yeah i sent you a couple as well but i can imagine i've always wondered because i know a lot of athletes like set the set something up where the outside world can communicate with them while they're doing whatever project and sometimes it's an experience like you had where they just get a big huge information dump and then other times they kind of get it along the way and it's kind of fueling i mean what did you feel about that experience after it's all said and done well i mean those those texts were helpful because they were energizing so i was glad to get them but like like you said it was kind of a dump always i would get you know 15 or 20 at once and and and plus i'm half out of it you know and so to absorb it was was pretty tough um and and to even yeah i mean it was more of a overall feeling of just feeling support and and people uh encouraging me to keep going and and uh and you know that that was sort of the overall feeling but you know what i what people were actually saying and who was saying them was kind of a blur well i think it's awesome what

you did you know steph uh clued our coaching group into what you were doing and there was a number of us watching you along the way what did you what are some of the more remarkable things you like took away from the whole experience well i think you know probably the the biggest one that i learned was that in in fact there was a guy that was going to do this trail uh try for the fkt right after i did it and he called me and we talked about i gave him some tips and i think the biggest thing i learned is that yeah i can go three three and a half days on very little sleep but after that i gotta i gotta start you know putting in like three maybe even four hour naps in a 24 hour period it's just not enough to i can't i can't maintain that for a long period of time so i i realized that but you know i had never gone this far and time wise so i thought maybe i could keep that schedule on indefinitely you know but i guess not well it's always that was the biggest one it's always a learning lesson what else besides the sleep well um you know one interesting thing was sort of the sort of the schedule that stephanie had me doing because the the previous year i was doing back-to-back runs and and i thought you know that's about all i can do is you know and i am at that time i was 68 and now i'm 69 i'll be 70

here in a month and and i i thought you know doing back-to-back runs was pretty good but stephanie had me doing back-to-back back you know three run three hard runs in a row and i thought man i don't think i can do this you know but and then the other thing i did the year before was i would do like four weeks of hard training i would do training blocks and then i would take a week and sort of have an easy week and then go back at it well we didn't have any easy weeks stephanie had me going just constant and and i never thought i was capable of doing that but she proved me wrong that you know i and i didn't you know have any i don't think i even came close to being injured or anything i i was it surprised me that i was able to do that and in our training going up to it and i do think especially those three days in a row maybe stephanie we needed to do four days or five days in a row because uh but i do think that helped me um out there just that it's part of it's the mental part too is just you know the kind of things you have to face when you're you're running and you're tired and you're you know not a hundred percent but um and just being able to run through that but i think also the physical part i mean i felt like physically i was ready for this and stephanie prepared me really well to do this steph can you kind of give like the coaching highlights of this try to like encapsulate

what michael's describing like in terms of like how he actually got ready for this yeah so we changed things up quite a bit um he michael had really great endurance it was something that you know when you're not following a training plan you just go out and run and he was really good about just consistency getting out every single day seven days a week just doing his endurance runs and so when we first started it was winter which kind of lends to less volume so we started with some speed work because he had done some speed work but it was a little bit um it wasn't it was in the the old school style of like you do two workouts a week maybe on the track and then you're doing your long run so we really took his volume down at first focused on getting some good speed some good upper and fitness and then just started to build from there and um one thing we we also concentrated on or or tried to concentrate on was some recovery because he was so used to running every single day not taking days off or rest days and so we built in a little bit more recovery um just to to let his body come down from all that hard training and then the back to back to back days were important just because that's what this trail was going to take you know for him to be out running on tired legs and so um you know a lot of his training was on the roads in duluth and in the snow and so you know the the longer days um really came more in the spring to getting out in the trails and he would go do his run

and then come back and get his dog and take his dog out for like four extra miles so it was it was really fun to to put this plan together because it's you know it's it's such a different type of training um but we definitely you know got a lot of the upper end fitness earlier in in the the training plan and then focus on volume and michael did incredible with this this training program he he didn't really miss any days we had enough recovery built in like when we got to the week before we had a phone call and he was confident i was confident it was more like okay let's just we just have to twiddle our thumbs until you're ready to start because he was ready to go and michael what were when you were describing these back to back to back days like how long were they oh boy and you know that was something that was different too because i was the year prior when i was just training myself i was actually going longer the first day and then quite a bit shorter the other days and here i was going like what what i think it was like 25 roughly the first day and then maybe was it like 15 and 10 the next day yeah yeah and it kind of varied depending on the terrain we did a lot of it on on time but that was about the mileage so yeah instead of doing one huge day it was more more spread out over three days but ending up being more total volume and did you i take it stephanie with your nutrition background

you were also doing some nutritional planning for this oh yeah oh yeah he had everything planned um practiced everything during his long runs he already had great nutrition um habits so we just kind of went through okay so what are the things you you want to be using on the trail and then really had him practice with more of the the simple carbohydrates while he was training along with some of the other more complex but we kind of broke it out i like to call it tier one two and three just like you know you would do for any planning but he he had a good plan and practiced with all of that that is the key so what are in the tier one two three foods so it's kind of like okay so tier one simple carbohydrates that's going to be the bulk of your quick energy so things like gels blocks fruit um white rice just things that are going to get into your stomach quick and be you know used for energy immediately tier two a little bit more complex um that can be like bars maybe a peanut burn jelly sandwich some savory options maybe some soup with you know some chicken or noodles in it and then tier three is the food you're not going to have all that often but when you're out in the trail that long you need real food so it is going to resemble more real food and so that's going to be like you know like a what you think of as like a meal and he had a lot of different options out there and we talked about making sure he had those options if he needed them but also being pretty clear about what do i need from my crew so it wasn't like came into this huge smorgasbord of like uh

what am i going to choose michael what was your favorite food while while you're out there well surprising they like after the fourth day um my wife had brought out pizzas for the crew and first and if you had asked me beforehand are you going to eat pizza i would have said absolutely not i mean it's too much grease and and i chowed down um um um sausage pizza like i mean i think every time i saw him i ate like four or five pieces and i couldn't believe it before and that was for like four stops in a row so i mean i got a lot of calories but man it must have taken two weeks for that to digest with all the grease that's with the pizza you know but for some reason it it's it was what i could eat because a lot of you know that's one of the problems is your appetite goes south and uh and this was something i for some reason i wanted to eat and uh and i could get it down and it stayed down and so i'm sure there was a lot of calories in it but it wasn't something i would needed the calories yeah wasn't that your secret weapon in the tour de jant tour de jant my wife bring me pizza every 50k yeah yeah okay so you're motoring down the trail you're eating pizza sleeping in the back of your subaru four days go by you're kind of in like the home stretch what are you thinking

as you're getting close to the terminus of the trail well i knew when i hit duluth that it was pretty much a done deal because i knew the adrenaline i had a lot of friends that came out and just joined me for sections you know and and uh so i i just i mean i knew i was unless something happened i knew i was going to be done and finish it it was just a matter of how much i was going to break the record by at that point and um so for me it was just keeping going and and uh just make sure i didn't make any bad mistakes you know trip on a rock and those kind of things you know but um or the pallets that you were seeing out on the trail yeah yeah well i only hallucinated that one time i never had it again so um i guess i was taking enough 15 minute naps that i kept at a bay but when i when i hit duluth um i knew that you know i would have a lot of friends joining me and pacing me so that that was a real adrenaline rush to have all my different friends join me at different points running through duluth and um you know i did have one night after that which of course then i was back by myself the the last night and then morning going into the finish because i think i finished around 10 30 in the morning roughly and um and that was you know up until the very early morning then i had

again that was probably the last um what four maybe three or four miles then i had a bunch of people joining me again they wanted to run to the south terminus with me and that was great so we had quite a crowd there and and uh but that yeah that was good it was hard that last night and you know through the morning hours there the early morning hours we got lost twice during that time and i know it was you know i know that area so well and it was just dumb mistakes because i was sleep deprived you know just missing simple trail markers and you know they weren't bad you know probably each one a half a mile extra but it um you don't feel like doing an extra half a mile even once at that time especially at the very end how long did you how long were you awake for during that last stretch like what did your sleep look like for the last you know little bit of this yeah i well the only sleep i took the last that last night was these 15 minute naps and i think i did i don't remember now for sure two or three um because i just couldn't see you know i probably needed it maybe in hindsight i should have taken a good hour it might have you know helped more but at the time it just felt like i can't take an hour now when i'm this close and only got this much left you know you just think i'll just you know get get

through it and but man i was tired just power through it right yeah yeah and so you finished like what did you think right when you finished well it was they had set up uh you know they had balloons over the the terminus area it's you know it's out in the middle of nowhere there's really nothing there but they had set up this big sign and you know that i had checked it off and and balloons there and of course a bunch of people welcoming me so i was just kind of overwhelmed with uh the you know being done with it and i was glad it was over um so it was nice and it was nice to have friends there you know um and and just welcome me you know in knowing that it was done now and so then we had to hike out almost a mile because you can't drive to the end so you got to hike out and so we all hiked out together it was they wanted me to lead and so i hiked we just walked out then and and uh then we got to where the vehicles were and they had a chair for me and um oh they gave me a can of beer but you know a couple sips of that and man that was that was not the thing to drink well that that last mile you know there's a lot of uh routes and fkts and things like that that that include this last little bit that is in between the end of the trail and where you can get to a car

yeah and it's always trivial when you look at it on paper you know it's a mile or two miles out of two or three hundred miles yeah but when you're actually in the middle of it i've been with a lot of athletes that have that have been in the middle of it it i mean it is a kick in the butt right when you're at your worst because all the adrenaline has gone off and you know that you finished and that mile might as well be another hundred miles it seemed like a fairly long way but um but again you know with everybody there and we were talking and they were telling me all the stories that i never heard because i was running you know like with our truck getting stuck and all these different things that happened and um and so i was just entertained the whole way out you know so i i wasn't really thinking about having to walk but it it was a fair walk it seemed like you you had a tremendous amount of support not only from your coach uh stephanie but also from the community that came out to come and help you out but also from the virtual community as well because you reached out to people your crew reached out to people to like send you all these messages uh during the actual uh event did you could you feel that could you sense that that the totality of that community support while you were out there i could and i i think you know that varied at times but the other part of that too was you know i was also doing this as a fundraiser for the sht

people and i told i i had put this challenge out on facebook that i would match 750 uh or 7 500 dollars um that was donated to the sht i would match that first um 7 500 and you know we ended up raising 20 20 275 dollars and so um that was really nice to see that support and i i think a lot of that was because people got so excited about all this and you know and it took it wasn't like a one day thing it took you know these five plus days and so people got to follow it and it it really got them involved and uh you know and and and and they really got behind you know not only supporting me but supporting the sht people and and i would send messages out you know via my crew to have them put it on facebook like the one i said that uh we were in duluth and we hadn't quite made my match at that point and i i told one of the runners um he was actually videotaping me live and and streaming it right to facebook and i said that i'm not going to cross i'm going to stay 10 feet from the end of the trail until

the matches met and uh and boy the dollars just started flying in um and so you know it was that was really cool to to see that that support as well so the community support was in a lot of ways like you said a lot of it was uh i actually at the end i got a list of all the people that contributed and i would say i only knew a quarter of them by name that's unbelievable so yeah so that was really cool a lot of that is you though i mean you're a likable person you're a normal person i think people listening to this podcast are going to like identify you like you're very much an everyday runner yeah i think i am i don't yeah i'm not a professional by any means you know so probably the only unique thing is that i'm older than a lot of runners that try this that was probably the the only thing that maybe differentiated me from other people was my age you know i'm not going out your age but you're more than welcome to if you want to yeah no i'm i'm just saying no that was the one characteristic like when they a couple of tv stations came out and interviewed me and one of the big things they pointed out was the guy that had the record was 25 and here i'm beating it by 28 and a half hours and and i'm 69 almost 70 you know and um so you know it

was but you know for me i like i said it it's just a number and you know we do what we feel we can do and i felt like i could do this and so why not do it you know the the number shouldn't make the difference you know well god god bless you i i i bet that that's going to be an inspiration to a lot of runners both in your age group and in my age group and in uh age groups younger than both than than than both of us it's certainly good it's certainly inspiring to me and i know a lot of people listening will be uh inspired by it as well uh where can before we let you go where can people find more about the superior hiking trail well the just their website i'm sure and you know if they just go to the superior hiking trail that they have a website there that'll bring them right to that and they have a a lot of different links to different aspects if you want to learn about the trail or no trail conditions all those kinds of things are on their website and or if you want to donate you know there's certainly a link there as well so um and like these kind of times you know all the non-profits are hurting so this was um for me it was it was you know and they they said that this couldn't have been better timing for them because they had lost a lot of opportunities to raise money because of what was going on and so um that it was nice to be able to help them this way and have other people support me with that so well thanks for coming on the podcast and sharing your story

it's a great one i i thoroughly enjoyed watching you while you were doing it stephanie was giving us the download the entire time while you were out there and i appreciate you being so willing to kind of share your story with uh with all the listeners out there oh it's my pleasure jason nice to be on here i'm honored absolutely all right folks and there you have it much thanks to michael and stephanie for coming on the KoopCast today i'll tell you what i just find so much inspiration from athletes like michael it's one of my life goals to continue to run and continue to push myself all the way to the ripe ages of late 60s and early 70s i just cannot tell you how much inspiration i get from athletes like michael i hope you guys did too all of the links to some of the things that we mentioned on the podcast including the superior hiking trail the fkt as well as some of the fundraising that mike did those are all in the show notes i encourage everybody to go and check those out in addition to that if you think one of our coaches like stephanie or any of our other incredible cts coaches is the right coach for you you've got some big goals lined up for this summer just like michael did go ahead hit me up on social media go ahead and check out train right.com i'll be more than happy to steer you in the right direction all right that's all for today folks as always we will see you out on the trails you