Next person, come on up.

Go!

I was working as a Covid nurse, and I got really burned out.

And I didn't really have any way to.

To process things.

So I just started running, and it started with one mile every day.

Let me just get out of the house.

And now here I am in Denver, gonna get to run the Taco Bell 50k.

I think the hardest part is going to be the food and the directions.

I hope I have a strong enough stomach to survive.

That's great.

Nice.

There you go.

Punch that ceiling six fold.

Awesome.

Keep driving that elbow.

There you go.

I started running 14 years ago, and that's when I had just started losing vision.

And there was a lot of thing that I felt like I couldn't do because, you know, out close that much like, such simple things become so daunting.

But running doesn't need vision.

You can quickly find a friend that will be willing to ru with you and it's super freeing.

And so that literally was my pivot, being able to run marathons.

That took me back to understan that I could still do anything I wanted to.

Since then, I've been running half marathons and marathons but Taco Bell is my first ultra.

Go!

We had a couple guys, Dan Zolnikov and Mike Oliva.

Dan was trainin for his first 50 mile, and Mike was a seasoned ultra runner an they were out doing a long run.

Mike stopped in to a Taco Bell use the bathroom in between the two of them.

They said, that'd be kind of funny.

Maybe we should, like eat Taco Bell and our alarm runs instead of at these farmers markets.

We went and we started it.

I've developed an iron stomach, but that wasn't true in year number one.

One of my buddy's, kids was having his bar mitzvah, and I went there with my daughter, and I ended up in the restroom for two hour during the entire bar mitzvah.

I do run, like, super long distance races.

And one of the things I learned there was, you need to be able to eat real food.

So the way I first trained myself to eat real food was I would cook a pan of lasagna, try to eat like half the pan, and then go out and run until I puked.

When you're exercising, your blood flow is going to your muscles, right?

It's not going to go to your GI tract as much.

So this food is going to sit in there longer and just kind of sit there.

And that again could precipitate some issues with with GI distress.

I'm not going to walk around and say everybody should do this, but I say if someone wants to do it and have a good time, enjoy it and understand, like, you know, don't do something like this every week or every month.

Probably over the last ten years, race fees have really increased significantly.

For instance, that New York City Marathon is over $300.

We're committed to keeping the race free.

There's no profiteering and we want it to be accessible, at least fiscally, to everybody and all of our participants who want to play.

Yeah.

It's friend, the Berlin Marathon two weeks ago.

I'm right no it's feeling quite a bit harder.

I was getting some stomac cramps a couple of months ago.

First, initial bites are pretty terrible.

And then after you kind of calm down, heart rate comes down a little bit.

It does.

It's not as bad.

Of course, it's not the ideal fuel that we would want for an athlete doing this kind of race.

But it's really interesting what the body can do.

Woo!

When you run and you run long distance ultramarathons, you inevitably have highs and you have lows.

Throw in ten Taco Bell stops.

You're guaranteed a low.

When you suffer together, you bond together.

And inevitably in Taco Bell that's what ends up happening.

People end up with a roughed up stomach or something happens, and there's encouragement from other fellow runners, and there are just tremendous bonds that take place in this race.

I hope that something as silly as the Taco Bell Ultramarathon can be a statement for all of us as humanity.

Even though we may be different in a myriad of ways, we can all come together and have a really good time.