Ultramarathoner Michael Wardian at mile marker 184. (Photo by Michael Wardian)

A local ultramarathoner has run the entire 184 miles of the C&O Canal in just 36 hours. The canal path stretches from Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland, deep in the Appalachian Mountains. Professional runner Michael Wardian of Arlington, Virginia beat a record set more than 40 years ago.

Wardian has set plenty of records: the fastest time for running seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, the fastest marathon while pushing a stroller (he has two kids). Wardian has gone on plenty of crazy adventures: running a 400 kilometer race in the Gobi Desert. But running the C&O Canal in sweaty mid-Atlantic weather?

“I think this is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, if not the hardest thing,” says Wardian.

Wardian grew up in Fairfax County, and he’s done lots of training runs on the canal path. He always wanted to run the whole thing.

“At first I thought, oh, I’ll just run it and it’ll be fun and I’ll make it,” he says.

When he started doing more research on the route, he came across a story in the Washington Post. In 1976, endurance runner Park Barner had run the entire canal, finishing in 36 hours, 48 minutes, 14 seconds. It was the fastest known time.

“I started doing the math, and I started realizing that’s really quite fast,” says Wardian.

Wardian is a busy guy. He works a regular day job as an international shipbroker and runs races just about every weekend (he was in 51 events in 2017, a total of 1,610 miles racing). He happened to be free Labor Day weekend, so he decided to give the C&O a try, despite the 90-degree-plus heat. An additional challenge: the trail was in bad shape, with lots of puddles, mud, and washed out sections from the all the recent rain. He started in Cumberland at 5 a.m. on Saturday, heading east toward Washington.

Halfway through, he starting thinking he wasn’t going to make it. “There’s no way I’m going to get the record, I’m just moving too slow, I’m just hurting too much,” he remembers.

One thing that kept him going: support of friends and random fans along the way (he was transmitting his GPS location, so people could follow his progress at home.) Many showed up with impromptu aid stations.

Locals along the route turned out with food and supplies, even during the night. (Photo by Michael Wardian)

“Moms with their kids, at like 1:30, 2 o’clock in the morning, jumping out of the bushes at random points along the trail, like, ‘Hey, keep going! We’ve been following you for like 24 hours,’” he says.

His wife and kids showed up with pizza from his favorite pizza place, and local runners came out to jog along with him for a few hours at a time.

He didn’t sleep the whole time, except, perhaps, for a short time when he closed his eyes after about 26 hours of running. “It’s kind of like when you’re watching TV and you close your eyes and you’re like, ‘I’m just going to listen for a second,’ and you wake up two or three hours later. I did that,” he says — emphasizing that it was just for a couple minutes.

Wardian beat the record by just 12 minutes — a tiny lead in a 184-mile race. He says now he’s working on a commemorative belt buckle to give to whoever can beat his time.

This story was originally published on WAMU.