Jeffrey Binney’s first stage was a big metal livestock fence. He would straddle the top rail and perform musical theatre routines for the workers on his family’s pig farm in Missouri.

“I was putting on shows for people all the time,” he tells me over a faulty video connection from his Airstream, parked on a mountain in Utah. “If you were in the mood for it, I bet I was a fucking blast. But if you were not in the mood for it, I bet I was a nightmare.”

Today, the 40-year-old ultra runner and body positivity advocate dances for a more eager audience than back on the farm. His extravagantly choreographed videos for Instagram and TikTok have earned him a large following and sponsorship deals.

In some ways, Binney hasn’t changed much since his adolescent days of moonlighting by the pigpen. He’s still a husky, red-haired funnyman with the bravura of a Hollywood starlet and a perpetual air of mischief — part Miss America, part Dennis the Menace. But becoming who he is today also required him to turn his identity inside out.

“I was perfectly fine living my preordained gay theatre-kid chubby life,” he says. “As it turns out, I’m kind of a badass.”

Do cool shit and don’t die

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Binney grew up on a typical farm in the heartland: his dad hunted, his mom cooked, they all shopped at J.C. Penney and ate out at Olive Garden. But he was anything but a conventional farm kid.

Diagnosed with ADHD, he rarely stopped moving and his leg shook constantly when he was sitting. “I remember feeling out of control in my body,” he says. “I had energy that wanted to go somewhere.”

A lot of that exuberance went into singing and choreography. Recognizing his gifts, Binney’s parents exempted him from most of the normal farm chores. Instead, his mom, Deb, took him to theatre and dance classes as often as five nights a week, which represented a huge investment of both time and money.

The roots of Binney’s transformation into an ultra running badass go back to that period of his life, though he never could have predicted it at the time. When he was 11 years old, his mother was diagnosed with “obesity-related heart disease.” She was given two or three years to live but survived another 20. She made those two decades an unceasing downpour of love for Jeffrey and his sister.

When she died in 2012 at the age of 58, he realized he was headed down the same path. Her passing inspired in Binney an urgent desire not only to live as long as possible, but to live as much as possible. “My goal was never to lose weight,” he says. “My goal was to not die before I got to do cool shit.”

“I’m going to do that.”

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Following high school, Binney completed a degree in musical theatre and fulfilled his dream of moving to New York City to become an actor. For seven years he worked in musicals and ultimately found his niche in stand-up comedy. His career was really picking up just when his mother’s health took a serious turn for the worse, and he returned to Missouri at the age of 28.

“Everything stopped,” he says. Over the six months that followed, Binney stayed close to his mom, sleeping many nights at the hospital.

One day, while sitting in the waiting room outside the intensive care unit, he spotted a copy of Trail Runner magazine with an advertisement for the Leadville 100, a famously gruelling, high-altitude, 100-mile trail run.

He’d lately started dabbling in running, and he said to himself, “I’m going to do that.” So he went out and bought running shoes and started exploring nearby trails.

Most importantly, it took his mind off everything that was happening with his mom.

Running was an instant love affair, but there were challenges. For one thing, it was difficult to dress properly. “Most running brands at the time didn’t make clothes for [someone my size], so it was really hard to find clothes,” he says. Today, Binney is an ambassador for Brooks Running, which makes clothing for plus-sized runners.

Binney soon found his niche with trail running. Then as now, he loved the adventure and freedom of running in the forest. “There’s nobody watching my fat jiggle, there’s nobody timing me,” he says. “I didn’t have to care about how I looked or how fast I was.”

Beginning in last place

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The first race he signed up for was a 20-mile trail run in Kansas City. Three weeks beforehand, his mother died. Binney was bereft. “When she passed, it felt like my safety net was gone.”

His mother’s passing brought with it an unexpected reckoning. “Of course, I understood why she was in the position she was in, because she had led a very unhealthy lifestyle in terms of nutrition and exercise,” he says. “But I didn’t really let myself put the pieces together until near the end of her life.

These thoughts were on his mind as the Kansas City race loomed right on the heels of the funeral.  He decided to do it anyway.

“It was awful. It didn’t go well,” he says, smiling ruefully at the memory. The race took place in February, and the water in his hydration tube froze. “It was a mess, but I managed to finish it somehow, and I loved it.”  He came in last place, but he was only just beginning.

Binney began building toward the Leadville 100 in Colorado. He started running marathons in 2013, and in 2014 he ran a 50-miler in San Francisco. He hired Ian Sharman, an  internationally recognized ultra running coach, to help him tackle the ultimate high-altitude ultramarathon in 2015.

“I was a bit skeptical,” Sharman admitted to me over the phone. “It’s like, ‘Okay, do you realize how big a step up this is?’”

Binney weighed 340 lbs when he attempted the Leadville 100. He made it 40 miles before he failed to meet the cut-off time and was barred from continuing the race.

Undeterred, he attempted another 100-mile ultra-marathon, the Rocky Raccoon, six months later. He fractured a rib along the way, raised blisters that would have to be lanced at urgent care the next day, and lost two toenails after the race. But he ran the whole thing in 29 hours, 52 minutes, and 16 seconds—less than eight minutes ahead of the cut-off.

The power of not stopping

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Since completing his first ultramarathon, Binney has continued to compete in long-distance races. He’s still big, and he uses his visibility on social media to encourage plus-sized runners. For many, his contribution to the culture of ultra running, and online running culture more broadly, has been very welcome.

In December of 2020, Binney made a video that combined his twin passions of running and dancing. His eight thousand followers loved it, and a year later he tried again—this time he recreated a classic Dirty Dancing scene on a small footbridge in a trail-running outfit. The video went viral. To date, it has been watched more than 10 million times.

With his background in entertainment, Binney was ready to seize the moment and start churning out content. In just eight months, his followers multiplied more than tenfold. He’s kept his day job and still doesn’t quite trust his new-found fame. “It’s so fucking silly,” he says. “It came out of nowhere, and I feel like it could go away.”

Binney is proud to create more visibility for plus-sized people in the trail-running world, but he knows that he’s viewed differently and faces fewer obstacles than women or people of colour.

Still, Binney isn’t motivated by changing his appearance. When it’s pitch-black in the forest, he’s cold, his stomach is twisted, and his legs hurt, the thing that gets him through is the suffering itself—and what comes after.

“The first epiphany I ever had is that when things hurt, every reasonable person would stop. But if you can push through it—I mean the temporary pain, a blister or a cramp—a crazy thing happens where if you refuse to quit, eventually it goes away.

“Getting out of those places is a little bit of a drug for me,” Binney says. “It’s empowering. It makes you feel so strong and tough. Because you are.”