Jeff Borne is hardly the first person to work out with an up-and-down tour of Pilot Butte before heading off to work. But it’s a safe bet that what he did one day this past week has no precedent.

If you’re one of the droves of locals who regularly use Pilot Butte as a fitness apparatus, or were just out to stroll the hill, you might have seen Borne on Thursday. You had plenty of opportunity. The 35-year-old Bend man was up before the sun, cranking out lap after two-mile vertical lap of the 480-foot-high cinder cone on the city’s east side.

He did it all on foot, running most of the way, shifting down to a brisk hike at times as the chill of his 4 a.m. start gave way to the heat of the midday sun.

Up the dirt Nature Trail, down the paved Summit Road. Up the road, down the trail. Up and down, up and down – until he’d done it 24 times.

His goal was 25, but he’d set a 1 p.m. cutoff.

”Had to get to work,” explained Borne, a manager at The Blacksmith Restaurant in downtown Bend.

Even here in Central Oregon, where extreme sports have become so popular that they barely qualify as extreme anymore, Borne’s Butte-athon seems, well, extreme. The math works out to about 48 miles traveled, with a total elevation gain of well over 11,000 feet – comparable to the ascent from sea level to the summit of Mount Hood.

And, of course, what goes up must come down.

”The pounding, going downhill on the road, that was the worst,” Borne recounted later. ”Running up was actually the best part.”

Understand that he wasn’t doing it to raise funds, or to campaign for a cause, or to set any sort of record, or to have some shirt-and-tie newspaper guy catch him during a short water break at the bottom of the hill to ask – I’m paraphrasing here – just what the hell he was doing.

”Training,” he replied.

I certainly hoped so. But for what?

Nothing in particular, it turned out. Borne is an endurance athlete. His sport is ultrarunning. He was just out Thursday to test his conditioning.

As if anyone who even THINKS he can grind out two dozen laps of Pilot Butte before lunch isn’t obscenely fit already. But if your running schedule includes races of, oh, 50 or 100 miles – or maybe 100 kilometers (62 miles), like next month’s Where’s Waldo Ultramarathon through the Cascade Mountains surrounding Waldo Lake – well, this is the kind of training you put yourself through.

”You have to get yourself tired – mentally and physically tired – then start pushing yourself,” said Borne of his workout strategy. ”It probably took me 12 miles (six laps of the butte) to get warmed up.”

I think he was serious.

”Sometimes, you need to go out and hurt yourself,” he added. ”And this (Pilot Butte x 24) is what I came up with.”

Borne, a Southern Califorina native who moved to Bend from Aspen, Colo., about a year ago, had some company during parts of his ultra workout Thursday. Three friends joined him individually at different times for a couple of laps each. On the 19th climb, he was accompanied by his wife, Lucy, who pushed their 7-month-old son, Parker, in a stroller.

The rest of the time it was Borne and his water bottle. He stopped at the base of the butte after every lap to log his time, grab a bite of ”anything from a PayDay bar to a turkey sandwich,” using his Toyota 4Runner as his staging area. The rig also served as his ”aid station,” though he claimed afterward that he felt fine throughout the session and didn’t so much as develop a blister.

Again, I think he was serious.

Borne encountered a few curious walkers along the way.

”One said to me, ‘Oh, is this your third time (up)?’” he recalled. ”I said, ‘No, this is 16.’”

That got Borne a funny look.

An older woman, repeatedly passed by Borne as she walked her dog at dawn, seemed impressed when she asked the runner how many times he had been up the butte and he replied, ”Four.”

”Then she asked, ‘How many times are you going to do this?’” said Borne. ”I told her 25.

”But I don’t think she believed me.”