In the pre-dawn darkness this Saturday, while most D.C.-area residents were still asleep, Michael Wardian laced up his shoes and set out on his latest in a long line of record-setting runs.
The accomplished ultramarathoner ran the 45-mile Washington & Old Dominion (W&OD) trail from Purcellville to the Shirlington neighborhood of Arlington in 5 hours, 6-minutes, and 10 seconds, beating the previous trail record—known as the fastest known time (FKT) in running parlance—set in 1995 by more than 23 minutes. Oh, and he did this two weeks after running 10 marathons in 10 days.
All along his record-setting W&OD run, people came out and supported him. Wardian’s brother and friends set up aid stations for him along the route, others cheered while one man ran more than 15 miles with him after driving from Delaware to support him in the record attempt.
“It was cool I got the record,” Wardian says in an interview on Sunday. “But it was cooler to me to see how many people came out and supported.”
The W&OD, which was completed by the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority in 1988, is no stranger to him. A Northern Virginia native, Wardian remembers riding his bike from Oakton in Fairfax County to D.C. via the W&OD in middle school, calling the trail part of his “running story.”
“It was one of those things where I all of sudden thought ‘wow, it’d be super cool to do the entire thing all at once,’” he says on the decision last week to go for the trail record. Yes, he only publicly announced his plan three days before the run.
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Wardian is something of a celebrity in running circles. Racing professionally since 2003, he set a new world record for 10 marathons in 10 days earlier this month, completing the World Marathon Challenge of seven marathons on seven continents in seven days for a second time, only to come back to D.C. and run three consecutive marathons, or nearly nine loops each, around Hains Point.
“Sure, great Olympians could beat him in a regular marathon, and a few ultrarunners could beat him in a race… [but his] combination of speed and strength over time is unmatched. This is not just a local story. There’s no one else who could do this,” Pacers Running owner Chris Farley told the Washington City Paper after Wardian’s 10 marathons feat.
Wardian has finished many of world’s most challenging races from the Hurt 100 Mile Trail Race in Hawaii to the 156-mile Marathon des Sables across the Sahara Desert in Morocco. Locally, he has claimed victory at the National Marathon, now the Rock ‘n’ Roll Washington, D.C. Marathon, multiple times and placed in the Marine Corps Marathon.
Last September, he ran the fastest known time on the C&O Canal Towpath, clocking the 184.5-mile route from Cumberland, Maryland, to Georgetown in 36 hours 36 minutes and 3 seconds. On that run too, supporters turned out to cheer him—something he loves about the running community. “People were able to use it as a reason to get together and connect. It drew people into our community that might necessarily be,” he says of the C&O Canal run.
Next up is a FKT attempt on The Israel National Trail, which stretches 683 miles north-to-south along the country’s length, in March. Wardian aims to complete a supported-run in about 10 days.
“I’m always up for doing new and different things,” he says. “I like to see what I’m capable of, I like to set ridiculous goals and chase them down.”
If all goes well in Israel, which he described recently on The Morning Shakeout podcast as his “ultimate” run to date, next could be an attempt at a transcontinental run across the U.S. and maybe even similar feats on every continent.
Locally, Wardian has his sights set on a circumferential run that follows the region’s 64-mile Beltway. While knows he cannot literally run on the highway (think of the traffic!), he has mapped out a route inspired by Jeff Himmelman and Mike Iacovone’s nearly 89-mile walk following arguable the region’s most notorious highway in 2017.
When he’s not logging record-setting miles on the W&OD or C&O Canal trails, Wardian trains nearly every day, including run or bike commutes between his home in Arlington and work near Dupont Circle. But even with all his travels and running feats around the world, he is deeply appreciative of the D.C. region’s trails and sights.
His favorite road run is an 8-10 mile loop that takes him from the Iwo Jima Memorial in Arlington past Georgetown, along the Mall to the Capitol building, and back past the Lincoln Memorial across the Memorial Bridge and though Arlington National Cemetery—a grand tour of some the area’s best known attractions.
“I never take for granted where we live,” says Wardian. “There’s a lot of beauty and I like to gaze on it.”
