What do you do when you really want to indulge? If suffering is your high, do you ever just relax or spoil yourself?
Indulging to me is going for an all-night run. I don't even have a desire to pig out on bad food because I just know it makes me feel so bad. When I'm racing, I need calories. If you eat natural organic food with all the fiber and bulk, you fill up before you get enough calories. So when you're on these long runs, you need processed refined foods. The last run I did I burned 40,000 calories when I ran 350 miles.

Any guilty pleasures? Things that actually feel good?
I used to love to go windsurfing all day, to mountain-bike, to surf. And I felt guilty because my kids are at home and I should be with my family. So now I run 20 miles in the am, come home, fix breakfast, take them to school, go windsurfing, go surfing. It's my life. I pick them up from school. That's my indulgence.

ON PAIN AND PRESSURE

You seem really adaptable to stress. What are your techniques for handling pressure?
One thing I've never done and hopefully never will is take myself too seriously. [Laughs] Shoot me if I do. I think that helps reduce stress right out of the gate. The other thing that I've done is being wiling to give up control. You can't control everything, especially when you go into a 200-mile run. At the starting line, you're thinking, "Geez, this is so daunting, how am I gonna get to the finish?" My commitment is to do my best, to always try my hardest, and even when I fail, and I have certainly failed, I don't feel like I'm a failure because I've given it my all. I know I struggled and tried my best, so I think that in turn takes out a lot of stress.

ON BEING OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE

Be honest. Do you consider yourself obsessive compulsive?
[Laughs] I would say yeah, to a level. I've been passionate about the things I do, and when I do something, I really throw myself at it wholeheartedly. It's been pretty much a constant.

Has it ever become a problem for you?
I've been able to luckily channel it into primarily outdoor activities but I have friends who are cut from the same mold who have not found outlets that are quite so healthy…alcohol abuse, drug abuse.

ON CROSS-TRAINING

How does cross-training benefit you?
It's important to prevent burnout because it gives me a good alternative if I really don't feel like running but I want to get outside. Mountain-biking to me is a good alternative. I've got a couple different loops I do in the Marin headlands. One I love to do is a two-hour loop. There's a little bit of singletrack but it's primarily fairly open, graded fire road. It's pretty easy to lose yourself; it's not real technical.

You have a lot of muscle mass, which isn't necessarily typical for a runner. Is that your natural body type or is it a result of your training regimen?
It's a by-product of sports I do. Windsurfing is like doing lat pulls for three hours. There's just no way around it. It's solid upper body training. Surfing, you're paddling or diving under waves. It's not necessarily good for running, but it's good for recovery and it's good for the long, long runs of more than 100 miles. Having a strong upper body, or muscle mass, allows you to recover faster because your muscles take a lot of the load off your joints so your joints don't get so beat up.

During a normal week, when you're at home and not running a marathon every day, what's your routine with weights and cross-training?
I probably cross-train three to four days a week, on top of running. I definitely do doubles. I get up at 4:00 a.m. and like to run 20 to 25 miles before making breakfast and taking the kids to school. And I do a routine of push-ups, sit-ups and pull-ups, and I'll do that in between email and writing chapters in my book, so I'll just work that in. This might sound funny, but I don't sit at a desk. It would drive me crazy. So have this stand that my laptop sits on—it's about at waist level—and I use that when I'm on the phone, when I'm doing e-mails. I stand at my desk. I don't sit. And then if someone wants to have a meeting with me, it's a walking meeting. A lot of times we'll run or go for a jog for an hour. The meetings on the fly are much more effective. We get a lot more done, we don't get off track as much, and we come up with more creative ideas.

What else have you retrofitted to accommodate your addiction to movement?
[Laughs] I have a pull-up bar in my office and a sit-up mat, so if I've got ten minutes and I've got a little writer's block or something, I'll do a quick set of sit-ups and push-ups.

And what's a quick set?
I've got a routine of 50 push-ups. It's 20 military style, ten closed-hand (make a triangle with your fingers), ten arms and legs spread, and ten where you actually are standing up and you put your hand down by your feet and do a push-up standing. It's the navy seal routine. My buddy's a navy seal and he showed it to me.

Do you do special sit-ups?
Yeah, I do 25 quarter leg-ups (bring your legs a quarter of way up and your back a quarter way up, lift shoulder blades off the ground, like a rigid board) followed by 25 crunches and then 25 quarter sit-ups (with your legs, knees up, feet straight, only move your shoulders and upper body). This basically works your lower stomach muscles all the way to your upper abs. And my routine of pull-ups: 12 regular pull-ups, 12 pull-ups where you hold a bar behind your head, 12 chin-ups, then grab the bar in reverse. So I'll do that routine, four sets in the morning and four sets in the evening. And I'm slipping that in-between calls and emails and all that stuff.