Megan Cassidy, 41, set the Guinness World Record for the most consecutive days running an ultramarathon for a woman with 23 days, besting the previous record by 12. Katie Spotz held the previous record at 11 days. The Osceola News-Gazette reported that the Cassidy only stopped at 23 days because she had to go back to work. #Adulting
Cassidy, from Kissimee, Florida, logged 50 kilometers—31.1 miles— every day from December 17, 2022 to January 8, 2023, according to the News-Gazette.
That’s 715 miles. To put that in Disney World terms—the theme park is a half-marathon’s distance away from where Cassidy lives—she ran just shy of 15 consecutive Dopey Challenges.
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According to the newspaper, Cassidy started running in 2010 after she ran the Disney Marathon with her sister. Since then, she’s run 100 marathons and is on her way to becoming a World Marathon Major Six Star Finisher.
“Running every day like that, it’s not so bad because you keep up with it,” Cassidy told the News-Gazette. “There are days it got kind of lonely. But I’d wear a bib telling about what I was doing, and people loved hearing about it.
This record-breaking run isn’t her first running streak. In 2020 a friend said to Cassidy, “I bet if I asked you to run a marathon tomorrow you’d be ready,” she told the paper.
“That throwaway comment made me decide to start running the marathon distance every weekend, so I did.”
She went on to log a marathon every week from December 2020 to April 2021 when it got too hot in the Florida sun.
While rehabbing an injury sustained during her running streak, she naturally decided she wanted to go after the consecutive ultramarathon record. She saved three weeks’ worth of vacation time in preparation for her record attempt.
“Day 23 was bittersweet,” she told the News-Gazette. “I knew that it would be my last run and that on Monday I would have to go back to my desk at work. It ended up being my third fastest of the 23.”
Talk about the Sunday scaries.
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Heather is the former food and nutrition editor for Runner’s World, the author of The Runner’s World Vegetarian Cookbook, and a seven-time marathoner with a best of 3:31—but she is most proud of her 1:32 half, 19:44 5K, and 5:33 mile. Her work has been published in The Boston Globe, Popular Mechanics, The Wall Street Journal Buy Side, Cooking Light, CNN, Glamour, The Associated Press, and Livestrong.com.
