Dan LaMorte: between running and comedy lies obsession
The comedian talks as much about death and almost dying as he does about creativity and progress.
When I spoke to Dan LaMorte at the tail end of 2025, life was coming at him. His grandfather was dying, his wife had left him, and he was back living with his parents in New Jersey, but the comedian still had a smile.
“It’s the holidays,” he says wryly, “Which makes it feel like I’m in a bad Hallmark movie.”
Amazingly, this isn’t all he’s had to remain a positive guy about. Dan LaMorte is a runner, you see, and the worst thing to happen to a runner is anything that stops you running. (Ask me how I know.) Over the past couple of years, he’s violently broken his ankle and was in the ICU after a serious scare with his heart. All this after losing almost 200lbs / 90kg after a hospital visit in 2018 saw him diagnosed with a fatty liver.
That 2018 diagnosis led to Dan starting running in 2019, with his first ultra in 2021 – a fast move into the sport.
“That’s probably why I’ve gotten hurt so much along the way,” he laughs. “You really can’t fake your way into it. Especially coming from a body that was 355 lbs.”
I introduced Dan as a comedian, and that’s his day job. He started performing stand-up as a 19-year-old, back in 2014 or so, having blown out his arm. No good for a baseball pitcher college athlete. At first, he thought about the parallels between comedy and baseball, but now he considers how comedy and ultrarunning align.
“You’re alone on the mound – kind of like just you onstage. If you mess up, it’s on you. Now I’ve been an ultrarunner for longer than I was a baseball player, so I compare stand-up more to ultrarunning. It’s so interesting how the years change and you gravitate towards different things, and you learn how to latch meaning onto it in each direction.”
Dan goes on to talk about how it’s the process rather than the big show. How we all see the headline comedy show or 100-miler documentary or the before and after pictures, but there’s so much more to it all.
“What’s the in-between. My story is not really the guy who succeeded right away. It’s so much more than the picture. It’s gradual, it’s not linear, it beats you down. That’s why I love [running ultras]. People have no idea why I do it. It’s almost killed me three times.”
Dan skirts over a little case of rhabdo, where your muscles break down, turning your piss into something that looks like Coca-Cola, leading to kidney failure and death. He casually drops into conversation how he pukes his guts out during and after running mammoth races into conversation as if it’s totally normal. He talks briefly about snapping his ankle while “bombing a switchback, on a downhill,” and how that kept him out “for a few months.”
But he dwells on the Pine Creek 100-miler from September 2024. That’s the one where he had “crazy chest pain” 30 miles in, but was mainly upset because the camera crew creating a documentary had flown into Pennsylvania from California. By mile 50 the pain was excruciating, but his now-ex-wife ran a few miles with him before he decided to tap out.
It turned out he had spontaneous pneumomediastinum, “where the cavity around your heart fills with air out of nowhere.” He thinks that all that puking a few weeks earlier could’ve caused a small tear in his esophagus, but nobody could be sure. He spent three days in the ICU, but that wasn’t stopping him.
“I have a very weird ability to put things behind me,” he explains. But he went to all his appointments while training, and did all his rehab. Why stop?
This is why I love talking to runners. Those last few paragraphs are exactly what I mean by ‘running sucks.’ But we love it, right? But we do it anyway, right? The juicy pain is absolutely worth the squeeze.
Dan talks as much about resilience in terms of always returning to the trails as he does about returning to the stage. He talks about not just overcoming the heckles and the bad shows during “some of the most pensive miles” during the following morning’s run, but feeling compelled to do it again and again.
“I do think obsession with a particular thing does appear crazy to most people, and people do talk about balance a lot, but I know that to get successful at stand-up, it was a very unbalanced life, and I think to get successful in running, it looks a little unbalanced as well.
Success is relative, of course, but when I met Dan IRL at his headline show at Los Angeles’ Comedy Store (a very big deal to him) just before this conversation, there were several runners in attendance, myself included. He talks openly about his autism and incorporates both his neurodivergence and his running into his comedy shows.
There is increasing research about the links between neurodiversity and running. There is increased understanding that running can be a brilliant regulator for processing emotions and sensory issues. Consider the stimming action of the repetitive motion of running. Consider how running can reduce cognitive overload, allowing for mental space and freedom of thought. It’s a level of control that Harry Styles alluded to in his conversation in Runner’s World.
Like the running crowd, the neurodivergent population can be… a funny one. Especially in a world where ‘normal’ and the aforementioned ‘balance’ are the states of being that we are encouraged to strive for.
“Sometimes people who are fans of mine will just stand up and go to the back of the room and start stretching in a room full of people in the middle of a show because they don’t know that that’s not the acceptable thing to do. I’m the guy who stretches in public,” he says, while stretching.
In terms of writing material for his stand-up performances, Dan tells me that his days of sitting down with a pen and paper are largely behind him. He uses running to give him that space.
“I set out with intentions. I’ll make sure there are no headphones accessible. Just me and my thoughts. ‘Let’s figure out this joke.’ I’ll say it out loud if I’m deep in the trails.”
As I recall how Brendan Leonard spoke about how running gives him a ‘cabin in the woods’ effect in his brain, Dan laughs about how we don’t get any Unabombers any more because of how much cabins in the woods cost these days. I then refer to how Sanjay Rawal draws similarities between the team efforts of running an ultra and creating a documentary. Dan nods, as he is halfway through creating his own documentary. It’s a story that started around his weight loss journey, but has evolved to include his whole running journey.
“I’m finally in a place where I can see where the work is paying off,” Dan explains. He tells me that he’s not an easy person to coach due to how he uses his runs to process things mentally. He was first coached by Michelino Sunseri (the runner who got famously pardoned by Trump), but is now in the safe hands of Joe Corcione.
Dan reels off a list of ultras he’s taking on this year, ranging from backyard ultras to mountain races, including the PA Triple Crown and “maybe” the Vermont 100. A couple of weeks ago, he took an hour off his Hyner View 50k time. Last week, he ran a 1:28 half-marathon. He’s recording some shows for Netflix is a Joke in the coming days.
It’s fair to say that people are going to start understanding why he does it. The work is paying off.
Just like Harry Styles in 2026, Dan LaMorte is fitting his race schedule around his touring plans. Or maybe vice versa. At this point, they are both an obsession inextricable from the man.
Links & further reading
Dan on tour - danlamorte.com
My book: This is Running
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