But six days before, Hamas attacked Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. Hezbollah launched rockets toward the Jewish state one day later.
This year, Wininger, a reservist commander of an elite reconnaissance unit in the Israel Defense Forces who was most recently stationed in northern Israel to fight Hezbollah, will be running for the first time in the 240-mile ultramarathon on Oct. 11.
He is doing so to commemorate the 251 hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023. Wininger intends to run an extra 11 miles so that his race can be one mile for every hostage.
“A friend joked with me that when I was training for it last year, for the Oct. [13], 2023, race, and it turned out that … I had to jump out and go to the war, that I wasn’t actually training for the race, but I was training for war, and I just didn’t realize it,” he told The Epoch Times in a Sept. 25 interview.
Wininger will be raising money for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, which was founded in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, and seeks to bring the hostages home and support family members of those missing in Gaza.
In an interview with The Epoch Times on Sept. 22, Wininger said he trains for the Moab 240 by running 60–80 miles a week. This includes back-to-back or back-to-back-to-back runs between 15 to 30 miles each day. The rest of the week consists of eight- to 12-mile runs at a low-heart-rate pace and is therefore less intense.
For Wininger, the mental aspect is bigger than the physical grind.
“You can train and you can train, and all sorts of different training tactics that you can do. But no amount of training can keep you going at Mile 160,” he said.
“You either have a strong, strong, strong why and purpose and reason for doing it, whether it’s just your mental grit, whether it’s your determination to never quit, whether it’s the hostages, whether it’s all the above, maybe a parent, or whatever it would be, you need to have that ‘why’ that keeps you going.”
Wininger said that after the race, he will continue to raise money for the Hostages and Missing Families Forum and run his e-commerce and health coaching businesses. His unit is set to be called up on Oct. 28 in response to the fighting in northern Israel.
Finally, there is this connection between his running the race and the hostages:
“They ran for their lives, and I’m running for their freedom,” he said.
