Mike Heyl’s knee started to give out around mile 23.
He had been running for nearly five hours by then, sliding across ice slicks and shuffling over chunks of snow on Antarctica’s Union Glacier, zigzagging through the roughly groomed snow that was supposed to mark the 26.2-mile course.
And now this.
As his feet disappeared into what felt like icy quicksand, pain coursed through his knee, and a biting wind made him regret ditching his jacket a few miles back. I don’t want to do this, he thought. I can’t do this. Why am I doing this anyway?
The why of it had seemed so clear when he’d begun planning the trip a few months earlier, in the fall of 2010. He was a middle-aged lawyer from Kensington, a husband and father of three who had started running to keep in shape in his 20s, and found a life’s passion. Over the past decade, he had run marathons along the Great Wall of China and through an African savanna. Now he was trying to join the elite corps of endurance athletes to have successfully completed marathons on all seven continents—a feat only 67 people have accomplished.
Heyl had felt this kind of pain before, less than two years earlier, as he ran up a steep, 2-mile-long hill with deep, unstable sand during the Big Five Marathon in South Africa.
So in Antarctica, Heyl did as he’d done in Africa: He pushed aside the pain and the doubt, took a moment to stretch his knee, then resumed his shuffle onward, silently vowing: I’m going to cross that finish line even if I have to crawl across it.
At 40, Heyl looks fit enough at 5 feet 7 inches and 165 pounds. But it’s easier to picture him in a mediation hearing, flashing that ready smile, than pounding his body on a race course.
Heyl played baseball as a kid in Crofton, but never considered himself a serious athlete. He started running to stay in shape in his 20s, losing 40 pounds before his wedding. He kept running in his 30s, when it seemed the most efficient way to work out while balancing a busy job and fatherhood—he and his wife, Andrea, have three kids, Allie, 12; Michael, 8; and Christopher, 4.
Heyl ran some local 5K and 10K races, including the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure and the Lawyers Have Heart 10K, but didn’t consider trying a marathon until a friend who had registered for the 2003 Marine Corps Marathon was unable to participate. He asked Heyl to take his place.
Heyl started training in August, and when he finished the late-October race, he did so with a time of 4:29 and a newfound passion. It wasn’t long before Heyl was planning his next marathon with Ted Wilson, a co-worker who proposed traveling to France for the 2004 Marathon de Paris. Their wives would come with them, making it half-race, half-vacation.
The flat, lovely course, which passed the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées, and the sense of accomplishment at the finish line left Heyl eager to do more.
“We finished that race and thought, ‘Hey! Let’s run these things around the world!’” Heyl says.
Shortly after getting home from Paris, he read a story about three runners who had finished a marathon on each of the seven continents in seven consecutive days. Heyl was captivated by the idea, and couldn’t stop thinking about whether he could rack up all seven continents—though over a longer period of time.
“The idea or concept isn’t as unique as it was 10 years ago,” Heyl says. “You make the experience unique with the races you pick.” So he set out to pick the most adventurous, memorable races possible.
He enlisted Wilson, an Arlington resident, in the quest, and the two registered for the 2005 Great Wall Marathon in China.
In the months leading up to the race, Heyl and Wilson trained for the thousands of steps on the Great Wall course by running up and down the stairs of the 13-floor office building that houses Hogan Lovells, the international law firm they work for in Washington, D.C. They also ran five or six miles a few times per week.
As with other marathons, the most grueling part of their training—and the hardest to fit in between work and family obligations—was the long weekly run of up to 20 miles. Heyl’s kids all play sports, and his wife coaches youth soccer, so he often skirted schedule conflicts by starting his long runs at 4 a.m., heading onto the Capital Crescent Trail with only a headlamp for light.
Even with all that training, the race was “absolutely grueling,” Heyl says.
Their wives didn’t come along for the trip, so there was no cheering section to help buoy Wilson and Heyl. The steps were uneven, and seemingly never-ending. Sections of wall crumbled beneath their feet.
“You know if you take one wrong step, you’re going to be plummeting thousands of feet down a mountain,” Heyl says.
Despite the difficult course, they relished the stark beauty of Tianjin province, with its tiny Chinese villages and picturesque rice fields, and finished feeling “hungry for more,” Heyl says.
Later that year, Heyl and Wilson signed up for the Gold Coast Airport Marathon in Australia, which Heyl again turned into a family vacation.
Andrea, who occasionally joins her husband for shorter runs, initially deemed Heyl’s seven-continent plan “nutty.” She figured he’d work toward the goal slowly, assuming he was even serious about achieving it. Australia changed her mind.
“By the time he finished there, I felt like, wow, he could really achieve this, and this could really fulfill a life dream,” she says.
After his youngest son was born, though, Heyl took a couple of years off. He ran a few local 10-milers, then racked up two more continents in 2009.
First came the Big Five Marathon on a game reserve near Johannesburg, South Africa, named for the “big five” animals—elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion and leopard—that call the course home. He ran the June race with his Kensington neighbor, John Seabreeze, a vice president at Billy Casper Golf in Tysons Corner, as Wilson was unable to go.
Heyl didn’t have any close encounters with wild game along the hot, hilly course, but he was plagued by the steep inclines and deep, unstable sand, which wreaked havoc on his right knee—the same one that would pain him in Antarctica.
Heyl fought the urge to quit. He quieted his panicked mind, stopped every few minutes to stretch, then alternately walked and shuffled his way to the finish line. His knee pain turned out to be a tight iliotibial band, a section of connective tissue that runs along the outer thigh, and the discomfort abated after a few days.
The November 2009 Maratón Internacional de Buenos Aires in Argentina offered a nice, urban course, and a trip that doubled as a vacation for Heyl and his wife. He finished in 4:37, and felt a surge of emotion when he realized that crossing the finish line meant he had only one remaining challenge in his quest—Antarctica.
