WICHITA, Kansas – If you were overwhelmed by the record-breaking heat Wednesday, imagine adding 20 degrees on top of it and running in it for hours on end. One Wichita man already knows what it’s like.
From the outside it looks ominous – like some sort of plywood prison cell.
“I put four 250-watt heat lamps in the ceiling and two 150-watt space heaters in the wall,” said Tony Clark.
It’s an 8X8 heat chamber most wouldn’t wish on their worst enemy where a thermometer once recorded 170 degrees.
Tony Clark spent hours within its walls, running on a treadmill by choice.
Everybody starts looking at you like, ‘Really? Are you a little bit off up there?’” he said.
But he’s not crazy. He was training in his garage in Wichita for one of the most intense tests of endurance known to man: the Badwater Ultamarathon held the second week of July in Death Valley, California.
“First, you got to Furnace Creek, next is Stovepipe Wells,” Tony said of the run.
Aptly named landmarks along a 135-mile route where the temperatures climbed to 127 degrees on race day. And even for a man who’d already finished seven 100-mile races and an unthinkable 224-mile trek across Kansas, the conditions proved treacherous.
“About 43 to 44 miles in, I started vomiting really bad,” he said.
Dehydration, coupled with a bad reaction to race day supplements, made the next four hours a nightmare.
“Your body's going to tell you to quit,” he said.
But his heart said otherwise. Physical pain yielded to mental toughness he developed in the Middle East during his six years in the Marines. A capable crew, including his wife, Angel, nursed him back to health. And, 34 hours and 17 minutes after he started, Tony became only the second Kansan to finish Badwater. He was the 21st finisher out of 100 runners in the field.
“I felt great when I finished,” he said. “It is the ultimate runner's high.”
Some would say it’s just not normal, which is something Tony has never strived to be.
“I just think it's wanting to push yourself beyond the limits of what normal people think are possible,” he said.
Tony has used his races as a platform to raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project and Operation Freedom Memorial to honor soldiers killed in the War on Terror.
He hasn’t ruled out returning to Death Valley next summer.
