Endurance Runner Bloodied After Being Ambushed By Wild Coyote On Trail Of 150-Mile Race

A prominent endurance runner famous for competing in high-profile marathon races sustained wounds and was left unsettled after an aggressive coyote attacked him near San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge around 3 a.m. on Monday, Aug. 16.

Dean Karnazes, 59, shared a video to his over 100,000 Instagram followers on Friday that showed him with blood dripping from his face, supposedly following the coyote attack.

“I’ve been attacked by a shark, and now a coyote. Both incidents were terrifying,” Karnazes wrote. The awful episode reportedly took place while he was on a 150-mile run in California’s Marin Headlands.

"I was running and I heard some footsteps behind me, I thought it was a big dog on the trail and I turned to look and it was a coyote," Karnazes confided to NBC Bay Area, saying that the animal was trying to snatch the energy bar he was chomping on. "Honestly I think it didn't know what to do. He was looking at me, I was looking at him, he was going for the bar."

Believing that people leaving food for wild animals like coyotes contributed the ordeal he experienced, Karnazes advised the public that uses the trail to largely avoid feeding the wildlife.

"Let's cut that out," he told NBC Bay Area. "Let wild animals be wild animals."

Karnazes is a highly-recognized athlete in the endurance arena. He was three times Competitor magazine’s Endurance Athlete of the Year and is in the Men’s Journal’s Adventure Hall of Fame.

The California-based athlete has sprinted and won some of the most esteemed races around the globe, as well as run to the South Pole, and accomplished 50 marathons in 50 successive days in 50 different states.

Coyote attacks on humans are unusual occurrences and seldom lead to serious injuries, however, the rate of recurrence is increasing, particularly in the state of California. In the three decades leading up to March 2006, no less than 160 attacks took place in the United States, typically in the Los Angeles County area.

Data from the United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and other sources confirm that while 41 attacks occurred during the period 1988–1997, 48 attacks were confirmed from 1998 through 2003.