Chasing Gratitude

Ultra-runner Hunter Leininger on how he keeps smiling through blisters and sickness on his extreme adventures

- JOE KOZLOWSKI

RUNNING IS A PRETTY UNIVERSAL EXPERIENCE.From children on the playground to adults simply trying to keep fit, there’s something understandable about lacing up your shoes and seeing how far your legs can take you.

Hunter Leininger does things a bit differently. He's not going out for a jog around the block or even pushing to finish a marathon. Instead, he’s working with distances that cover states or an entire country—and setting records in the process. “I love this long-distance running right now,” he told Newsweek ahead of one of his biggest endeavors: a 760-mile run across Colorado featuring 300,000 feet of elevation change. “I ran across Florida, ran across Iceland. Best experiences I’ve had in a long time. It’s like, all right, let’s run across Colorado, my favorite state.”

Favoritism can only count for so much, however. Running in Colorado brings altitude and, in the summer, all sorts of extreme weather into the equation. Beyond that, the sheer size of the state required him to run roughly two marathons a day for two weeks. And not only did Leininger traverse the Centennial State—with the additional challenges like hunkering down under a tarp amid lightning and hail—but he did so in what he hopes will be confirmed as a FKT, or fastest known time. “We ended up beating it [the record] by over a week, so it took 18 days to run the whole thing, and it was just the craziest adventure ever—like the best I’ve ever felt and the worst I’ve ever felt in any record attempt I've ever done,” he said afterward.

Following in His Parents’ Footsteps

While there might not be a Little League-style equivalent for extreme endurance events, Leininger, 24, still managed to catch the bug early on.