YouTuber Tyler Oliveira has carved out a niche by doing big, unconventional personal fitness challenges, like that time he trained like anime superhero One Punch Man for an entire month. With his options currently limited due to the pandemic, he decided to do his next challenge while at home, and set himself the task of running on a treadmill non-stop for 24 hours.
Not one to do things by halves, Oliveira surrounded the treadmill with broken glass, thumbtacks, and a literal ring of fire to prevent himself from stepping down at any point, and to fill him with enough fear of injury that he wasn’t likely to fall asleep at any point. And all the while, his friends dished out one humiliation another, including pelting him with eggs, dousing him with syrup, and serving up all kinds of horrendous sustenance, from “the world’s spiciest milkshake” to bug cereal for his breakfast (at least they’re rich in protein?).
Things soon start to look even more like an old episode of Jackass when Oliveira gets a nosebleed due to the heat, and then his shoes (drenched in eggs, syrup, sweat and who knows what else) began to stick to the treadmill surface, making it even harder to keep running. His friends take it in turns to wake him up and rinse him off by tossing a bucket of cold water over him and spraying him with a fire extinguisher.
“I feel like there’s a detachment from my calves and my bones right now,” he says 7 hours in, having run about 19 miles.
With more than 16 hours still left on the clock, a thunderstorm hits, clogging the treadmill with water and making it impossible for the axel to spin, but Oliveira continues running, forcing the rubber to keep moving until a replacement treadmill arrives and he can get going again properly.
Around the 12-hour mark, he notes the challenge no longer became a solely physical one, but “a test of mental willpower” as well. “My stamina is finite, my legs feel like lead right now, I can’t even really feel them.”
“This is where the men are distinguished from the boys,” he says at midnight, with 6 hours left. “It’s willpower vs. skill. I really want to quit, not gonna lie, but I feel like I could power out 6 more hours.”
At long last, Oliveira makes it to the finish line, and says that “The last 4 minutes weighed heavier than the last 4 hours combined.” He experiences a sense of weightlessness once he finally gets off the treadmill, and says he can’t even feel his legs. (There’s also the case of seeing to the bathroom needs he’s been putting off for the last day and night, but there’s no need to get into that here.)
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