A new Guinness World Record during lockdown!
We all agree that 2020 was a difficult year… Mine was no different.
I had set out to do an expedition that I could not do due to varying levels of lockdown. I was devastated at first but then realised that if I am going to allow my outside circumstances to continue influencing me, I might just go mad.
So I started Googling and “discovered” the Guinness World Record site. At that point in South Africa we could only exercise for 3 hours per day, from 6am until 9am. So I actively looked at what I can achieve in 3 hour and stumbled upon the Guinness World Record for most consecutive half marathons (21.1km / 13 miles) run by a female which was 50 at that point.
I thought, alrighty then, I will do 62, that felt achievable. I applied for this record and was accepted. Before I even started the new record attempt I was notified via email that the record was bettered and the new target was 76 consecutive half marathons. This made me decide to do 86 consecutive half marathons.
A couple of weeks into my attempt I received a phone call from a friend telling me that a runner from Durban, South Africa was running a 100 consecutive half marathons. My thoughts literally were: “What the HELL!?”
I contacted this lady and told her that I am doing 101 consecutive half marathons, but if she decides to continue, I will also keep running and we may end up running a half marathon each every day for the rest of our lives. She immediately said that she will definitely stop at 100, and luckily she kept her word.
I continued with my new Guinness World Record attempt and completed my 101st half marathon on 31 December 2020.
But then immediately decided to go and run just one more on new year’s’ day 2021 just because I could!
My record has been broken twice since then by the amazing Helen Ryvar from Wales who recently broke her own record of 111 by running an incredible 500 consecutive half marathons!