Harvey Lewis is an elite ultra runner and Guinness World Record holder for most laps completed at Big’s Backyard Ultra, a race where athletes run a 4.167-mile loop every hour until only one remains. Known for his endurance, strategy, and mental resilience, Lewis has become a defining figure in the world of ultra distance running.
Harvey Lewis is an elite ultra runner and Guinness World Record holder for most laps completed at Big’s Backyard Ultra, a race where athletes run a 4.167-mile loop every hour until only one remains. Known for his endurance, strategy, and mental resilience, Lewis has become a defining figure in the world of ultra distance running.
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Harvey Lewis:
It took me five years to break five hours in a marathon, and then I went down to 3:19 at age 22. And then in my mid-20s, I went backwards and went to like a four-hour marathon. So the common denominator is that I didn't do running only to perform to win, but I actually really enjoyed just the experience of movement, the runner's high, I still get that.
Shelby Stanger:
Harvey Lewis is a high school teacher and elite ultra runner. He's a legend in the running community. Harvey's known for winning some of the world's most brutal ultra marathons, racing for days at a time with little food and almost no sleep.
Shelby Stanger:
Over his 20-year ultra career, Harvey has never stopped pushing himself. He loves looking for new ways to improve, whether that means commuting by foot to get in his training miles or working out in a sauna to mimic the hot dry environment of Death Valley.
Shelby Stanger:
What really sets Harvey apart though is his sense of joy and his positive mindset. These qualities have helped him through plenty of tough moments on the trail.
Shelby Stanger:
I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. Harvey Lewis, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. You have a record for some of the most wild ideas around.
Harvey Lewis:
I'm happy to be here and I love wild ideas.
Shelby Stanger:
I know. So where are you right now? Because you're in a tie and a dress shirt.
Harvey Lewis:
I have a couple of different modes and one of my modes is my teaching mode. So I'm at my school here in Cincinnati downtown and I teach juniors and seniors American government and financial literacy. In addition to that, I do a lot of running adventures and other things.
Harvey Lewis:
Today, we've had a lot of snow in Cincinnati. It's been like actually the most snow we've had in probably 25 years. So people are having a hard time getting to work this morning, but I run back and forth to work every day. It's about three miles and it's one of the things I love doing.
Shelby Stanger:
There's not many teachers who run three miles in the snow to class. And you're in a dress shirt that is crisp and pressed with a tie on right now. So do you leave a change of clothes in the classroom and then do you run home? Walk me through this a little bit.
Harvey Lewis:
Yeah, so actually I have a run commute backpack and I basically put my suit or whatever I'm wearing inside a Kroger bag inside that backpack. So it's really simple and I just run to school. It's only three miles. There are some days where I might run like 10 miles in the morning or 10 miles on the way back just because I'm training at a higher level, building up to a race.
Harvey Lewis:
Two nights ago, I was running and I get this sales call and I answer it, "How are you?" "I'm good, I'm out running in the snow in the dark." And they said, well, they're calling from a certain car insurance company. And I said, "I'm good. I don't need any car insurance. I run back and forth to work every day. And the guy, he's like, "Liar. It's 2025." It was pretty funny, I had to laugh about it because it's like no-
Shelby Stanger:
I love that you engage with the salesman too, the spam caller.
Harvey Lewis:
Yeah, it's very funny. So yeah, people do run in 2025 back and forth to work. Yeah, it really does happen.
Shelby Stanger:
Sounds incredible. Did you always know you wanted to become a teacher?
Harvey Lewis:
Not at all. In fact, I went to school, first year was international relations. I really love things involving travel. And then I went to Minnesota and I studied my undergraduate degree in political science.
Harvey Lewis:
And then I was actually in sales, in car sales for like a year and a half, two years, and I really just wasn't drawn to it in terms of thinking about my next 20, 30 years. And I decided to go back to school and to pursue education.
Harvey Lewis:
So I'm so glad I did because when I was in high school and middle school and before that, I was the least likely student to ever become a teacher because I gave my poor teachers so much harassment and I was absolutely not a dedicated student until like my junior year high school. I skated by with Ds, some Cs, a couple Fs. So for me now, it does give me some advantage in terms of being able to empathize and relate to students that may be struggling academically.
Shelby Stanger:
While he was in high school, Harvey struggled with his grades, but things started to change when his sister introduced him to running. Harvey joined his school's track team and he fell in love with the sport. Even though the most he'd ever run at practice was eight miles, it wasn't long before Harvey set his sights on running something much longer.
Harvey Lewis:
I'd heard about the Cleveland Marathon and it was happening in about a week. And I told my mom, "Mom, I want to run the Cleveland Marathon." And the best thing about my mother is she would always be agreeable to try new things. I know a lot of people would say, "That is absolutely insane. You're not going to run the marathon." She's like, "Okay, we'll sign you up."
Shelby Stanger:
So you'd only run eight miles?
Harvey Lewis:
Only run eight miles, I was like 15 at the time. And my mother had to work that weekend anyways, she was a nurse. So I took the train down from Berea where I live, which was a suburb, down to Cleveland, which seemed like this New York sized city for me at the time because I didn't have a lot of experience in the city.
Harvey Lewis:
And the marathon was such a treasure because I was nearly the last person to finish. It's all about a matter of how much you're willing to apply. If you're willing to give an incredible amount of work ethic, there's very few things that you can't achieve in this world.
Shelby Stanger:
So that was your first marathon, but what was your first ultra?
Harvey Lewis:
So fast-forward it to my sophomore year of college and I had a lot of things on my plate. I was a poor college student with no opportunity to fly to Kenya to climb a mountain or even go up to Eagle Mountain, the tallest mountain in Minnesota. So I was looking for something to push myself sort of spiritually, physically, mentally, and I thought, "Oh, I should sign up for that 24-hour race. Why not? Let's just do it."
Harvey Lewis:
So that's what I did, I signed up for it. And again, it was at that moment in time, my goal was to just survive and keep moving the whole time. I didn't know how many miles that would take me. And then what happened in that event, like the last hour, I felt this incredible surge of energy and I was inspired by the other people I was watching there. And I felt in the last like 40, 30 minutes more energy than I felt the whole race. And I started running really fast and I made it to the finish in 81.3 miles. And that was like three and a half times further than I ever ran before, so I was like, "Wow, I didn't even know that was humanly possible to do that."
Shelby Stanger:
You didn't run for the college team, did you?
Harvey Lewis:
No. No, I did not. And that's kind of a wild thing because you have such incredible runners who are running in college and also come out of their collegiate careers. And yeah, I was not a competitive runner in high school. I never scored for the team. And then I ran when I was in college just with training for this 24-hour race, and I've just somehow miraculously been able to get stronger and stronger each year and each decade.
Shelby Stanger:
Today, Harvey is one of the most impressive ultra runners in the world. But for the first 15 years of his career, he considered himself pretty mediocre. Many of us give up on things we're not naturally good at, especially if we work at it for a while and we see no improvement.
Shelby Stanger:
Nevertheless, there's power in sticking with what we love. Harvey's passion for running wasn't about performing well or even winning. He found joy in moving his body, taking in nature, and the challenge of it all. He competed in ultras whenever possible and gradually improved his form and his pace. Then one day, Harvey started winning.
Harvey Lewis:
Honestly, I ran ultras from 1996 until 2010 before I won my first ultra. And that was in Canada, I ran a 100-mile race, and I started really having jumps forward. So they talk about sticking with your goals, sticking with something you dream about, what's important to you. You don't have to win the race. I could have fun if I was the last person to finish the race too.
Harvey Lewis:
But it was wild because sometimes something you're working towards, it may take years or decades to materialize, and I never dreamed, even in 2010 when I won my first ultra, I would never imagine that... It actually took me 25 years before I made the top 10 list of ultra runners of the year of North America. It was incredible that I was able to do that in my 40s.
Shelby Stanger:
We're making it sound like you had this trajectory from like age 15 to 48 where you just keep going and going and going and improving and improving and improving. But I know 20 years ago, you had a really big setback. Can you talk about that?
Harvey Lewis:
Yeah. Yeah, so I broke my neck in 2004. And honestly, it was a near death experience. So the car spun off the road and my car rolled over three or four times. I tried to kick out the glass in my vehicle and I kicked so hard and I couldn't break the glass from the inside. So now I actually carry a little tool that can break the glass on my vehicle or someone else's vehicle and I could cut the seat belts if I need to. But I ended up upside down, finally got the seatbelt off, fell to the top of the vehicle, which was at the bottom at the time, and crawled out the rear glass.
Harvey Lewis:
So I ended up, I didn't feel anything severe at that time. I heard my neck crack when I was rolling over and I felt like a whiplash or something. But when the paramedics and the firefighters arrived, I was calm and I didn't act like I was in distress. So they actually gave me an opportunity to choose which of the two hospitals I went to, and I chose the one that doesn't typically deal with trauma.
Harvey Lewis:
And once I got there, the ER, they had me do the x-rays. And came back, I had fractured my fourth and fifth vertebrae. So I had to end up getting surgery the next day, titanium and added bones to my neck. And initially, I was just felt like a billionaire because... Or more than that because I was thankful to be alive. And then it was a question the night before the surgery thinking, "Will I survive?" They said, "You have 5% chance that something may not go right here and you could be paralyzed or something else happen."
Harvey Lewis:
So it's just having that moment where almost everything you have could be taken away and then having it back again was just actually something that is a fire that I couldn't describe in terms of just gratitude and wanting to go after it.
Harvey Lewis:
So initially, I walked back and forth to work. Believe it or not, I was teaching summer school at the time, so I started walking back and forth, like two or three days later. I know the first day, I had to call my girlfriend. I was on the way back and I was like, "I don't think I'll make it." But the next day, I made it.
Harvey Lewis:
And I also refused to take the pain medicine. They sent me home with this big giant jar of like horse Oxycontin pills. And the first couple nights were really difficult, I was feeling a lot of discomfort. But what I found is motion is the lotion. So the worst thing I found that you can do if you have some sort of pain, and there could be some exceptions to this, but is to just be static on the couch or the bed because your body just gets so tight. But doing the little bit of walking really helps.
Harvey Lewis:
So I had to do the walking for two months and then I just got back into running. And after three months, I jumped into Columbus Marathon. I ran like four hours and 30 some minutes, which was like an hour and 20 minutes slower than my norm at that time. But then at that moment, I just kept on chiseling away. Every day, I was chiseling, chiseling, chiseling, just a little bit every day, every day, clawing at that wall.
Harvey Lewis:
And then after a year, I was able to get back to where I was previously, and that was super inspiring. I was like, "Wow. I made it back to where I was before." So then just kept on, well, I got into this routine of chiseling, so I wasn't going to stop chiseling then. So I just kept on clawing, chiseling away at that wall again.
Harvey Lewis:
And then just things just every year, like little bit more open up and open up. And miraculously, I didn't ever imagine that it would go to where it's gone and where it continues to go because it's not done yet. So that's a wild thing.
Shelby Stanger:
After his accident, Harvey made his health a priority. He adjusted his stride to help with knee pain. He eats a vegan diet, which helps him recover from big runs. And of course, he prioritizes sleep. This holistic approach has made a huge impact on Harvey's performance, allowing him to set some of the fastest ultra records in the world.
Shelby Stanger:
Ultra runner Harvey Lewis is a beast when it comes to running long distances. Perhaps most notably, Harvey set the Guinness World Record for running the most laps in the Big's Backyard Ultra Marathon. From the name, the Big's Backyard might sound like a casual neighborhood race, but in reality, and for those who know, it's one of the most grueling ultra-marathons in the world. Every hour, contestants run a 4.167 mile loop. Then they keep going until there's only one person standing.
Shelby Stanger:
It's kind of like the Hunger Games of running. During the day, the route follows a trail through the woods, and at night, the course changes to a nearby dirt road. The race lasts for days, with runners sleeping and eating for mere minutes after they finish each lap. Often, by the time runners drop out of the race, they're pretty destroyed, covered in blisters, incredibly sleep-deprived, and often delirious.
Shelby Stanger:
Harvey set his first record at Big's in 2021. Two years later, he set a new record when he ran for 108 hours, logging 450 miles in four days.
Shelby Stanger:
I want to talk about your wild records because you've set a couple. And most recently, you broke the record for the second time, not just the first, for Big's Backyard Ultra. For those unfamiliar, Big's Backyard Ultra, maybe we could just talk about the details of this run for those who don't know. What is it?
Harvey Lewis:
Yeah, Big's Backyard Ultra is just a wild race. It's captivated people in ways that we never expected. So I got to take you to a place in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, where you have this man who just looks like a mountain man. His name is Lazarus Lake.
Shelby Stanger:
Kind of looks like Santa in a way.
Harvey Lewis:
Kind of looks like Santa. He's got a big giant beard, he's got the glasses. He wears a hat that says, "Geezer," on it. And he always has this red, black plaid shirt and typically jeans.
Harvey Lewis:
But the biggest backyard ultra, you have to run 4.167 miles every hour on the hour. So if you run that 4.167 miles in less than 60 minutes, whatever time you have remaining you have to sit down, eat some food, take a short nap. So for example, if you finish the loop in 48 minutes, you have 12 minutes where you can just drink, eat, food, put your feet up, stretch a little bit perhaps, take a short nap. And it was wild because I couldn't even sleep the first three nights, so it took me to the fourth night and the fifth day to be able to sleep for like one minute, which is crazy. And then the whistle's going to blow and you have to go again.
Shelby Stanger:
So how do you sleep for one minute and feel refreshed?
Harvey Lewis:
Well, I've practiced in my classroom. Yeah, at lunchtime. So no one's in here, I just have a yoga mat and I'll lay down for five minutes. And my goal is to try to fall asleep in that time, just anywhere, anytime, just on a dime. Just you got to fall asleep right now, go do it.
Harvey Lewis:
And I got to where I could fall asleep just like that. I could just immediately fall asleep, just practicing it. I really haven't mastered that though because I still struggle with the sleep element because I think it's my heart's elevated, my mind is like I have a hard time slowing my mind down. So I'm still working on it.
Shelby Stanger:
Well, you're doing pretty good. So then how do you entertain yourself for four and a half days of running?
Harvey Lewis:
Yeah, so the first day and a half to two days, I'm talking a lot to the other runners because we're running at a pace that's not so fast that we can't chat with each other, and that's a lot of fun. I try to memorize as many people's names as I can and get to know about the other people. I've met some super fascinating people doing this backyard ultra. Everyone has a story. Really interesting once you start talking to people.
Harvey Lewis:
And then beyond that, in the evenings when you're on the road, you're allowed to listen to music. When you're on the trail, you're not allowed to because you got to have people passing one another, at least for the first three or four days before there's... When you're down to the last three or four people, they don't care if you have music on. But the music is powerful because I may be feeling a lot of discomfort. And if I have the music on, I can take my mind to a place where I don't feel discomfort. I can use the music to alleviate discomfort, which is pretty amazing.
Shelby Stanger:
After running every hour for four days straight, Harvey was exhausted. Somehow he still had a little gas in the tank. While there had been hundreds of people at the starting line, on the last lap, it was down to just Harvey and one other competitor. Someone took a video of the two setting off from the starting line, and you can see Harvey put on his headphones and push forward, hobbling into a jog. On that 108th loop, his competitor dropped out of the race, but Harvey kept going, making him the winner of Big's Backyard Ultra.
Shelby Stanger:
So that last day, what is going through your head and how are you surviving? What are you doing?
Harvey Lewis:
So during that period, I'm being as focused as a neurosurgeon. I'm really, really focused on details. So I don't have much time to work with because my body is operating at maximum capacity, and at that moment in time, I was finishing the loops in like 55, 56 minutes, which is super tight because that means I only have like four and a half minutes to get whatever I need to get and then get back up into the corral and start again.
Harvey Lewis:
There were eight runners that made it to 400 miles, which is really amazing because at that time, that was already the record on the course. So it's super competitive amongst the eight. And then we got down to three of us. But then we got to the last couple loops and I had blood all over myself. I had fallen down so many times. But I was like, "I'm not going to stop."
Harvey Lewis:
So I just keep on focused on every single detail that I can manage in that four and a half minutes. So I get to my crew member, Judd Poindexter. He is so good. He knew exactly what he had to do. I'd go lay down for like one minute. He'd time me, be like, "Okay, get up." I don't know how I survived making it through that deprivation of sleep. But I'd have to lay, I put ice on my body, on my head to try and cool myself because it was like temperature was in the mid-70s and your body has a harder time regulating temperature at that point. And I was just drinking and eating as much as I humanly could in those last like minute and a half.
Harvey Lewis:
And then just hopping back up and then you want to... It's like poker. You don't want to show your cards, you want to give the image that you could go on forever.
Shelby Stanger:
What did you eat afterwards? Did you have a post-race meal that you looked forward to?
Harvey Lewis:
So honestly, the funny thing about this is actually some runners might think about going to a hotel and getting a shower or bath and [inaudible 00:23:10]. I went directly back to my tent, which was about 20 yards from the start and end place, and I just laid down and went to bed. I don't even remember what I ate, just grabbed whatever was near me. I don't think I had a giant meal then. But I know my buddy, Judd, we woke up the next morning. He made this amazing breakfast. It was like bagels and avocado and maybe some tofu scramble, and it was the best meal.
Harvey Lewis:
So doing one of those events, if you want the best food experience of your whole life, is just do an ultra, maybe a marathon, maybe a half-marathon, but it's like or do a long hike for a day or two, when you're out camping and you're just like, you're just, "Oh my God, this is the best food I've ever had in my entire life. [inaudible 00:24:03] so thankful."
Harvey Lewis:
Yeah. So that was it. So there's some really nice awards at the end, which you get to sleep and you get to eat all the food you want.
Shelby Stanger:
Running a race like Big's Backyard Ultra seems grueling. But Harvey had so much fun, he's already planning to do it again next year. He also has a handful of other races coming up soon. If you want to keep up with Harvey, you can follow along on his Instagram @harveylewisultrarunner. His name is spelled H-A-R-V-E-Y L-E-W-I-S. If you liked this episode, you should check out our episode with the renowned ultra runner and friend of Harvey Courtney Dauwalter. We'll link to it in our show notes.
Shelby Stanger:
Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Peers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producers are Jenny Barber and Hanna Boyd. Our executive producers are Paolo Motala and Joe Crosby. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it, and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.