Harvey Lewis discusses his upbringing, teaching career, and the routines and motivations that shaped his decades of ultrarunning, including sauna and cold plunge practices.
Harvey Lewis has done so in ultrarunning that the resume almost gets in the way.
He’s won Badwater twice. He’s returned to Death Valley year after year. He’s become one of the defining athletes of the Backyard Ultra format. He runs enormous distances with a consistency that can make the extraordinary feel strangely ordinary.
But when I flew to Columbus to spend a morning with Harvey, I wanted to start somewhere else.
Before we sat down, we walked his dog, ran trails and roads around his neighborhood, jumped in the sauna, and finished with a cold plunge. This was, somehow, a taper day. His 16th consecutive Badwater was only days away.
What interested me was the person capable of building this life.
In part one of our conversation, Harvey talks about growing up between two very different parents: his mother, the dreamer, and his father, the engineer. We get into the teachers who changed his trajectory, his own career as a high school civics teacher, and the increasingly blurry line between running, travel, education, and pilgrimage.
Eventually, the conversation reaches something more personal: the person Harvey still imagines beside the course when he needs a reason to keep moving.
This is Harvey Lewis before the race results.
Part two is coming soon. That conversation turns toward Harvey Lewis the ultrarunner: the races, the competition, and what decades of pushing his limits have taught him.
