A special half marathon world record
Sometimes a world record can sound a little bananas. Two Belgians’ hard running training bore fruit when they set a very special world record in the half marathon distance.
You’ll have to forgive our word play, but this story is just ripe for those kinds of puns. You see, at this year’s Gentbrugge half marathon, a…bunch (yes, another word play) of Belgians were on a mission of their own, trying to break the world record for running a half marathon dressed as a fruit to raise awareness for fairtrade fruit.
As we’ve already implied above, they achieved their goals, and now the world records for the fastest half marathon run in a fruit costume are held by a Belgian man and a Belgian woman. Gudrun Hespel ran her half marathon in a stunning 1:32:17 (smashing the previous record by over 15 minutes), and her colleague Louis Misplon ran his race in 1:09:28, both of them leaving us with a healthy dose of patriotism.
They were two of over 40 runners proudly donning fairtrade banana costumes to raise awareness for fair trade practices. Did you know that nearly 3,000 products in Belgium carry the Fairtrade label, and that the proportion of fairtrade products consumed by Belgians is ever-increasing?
They trade fairly, they beat the record fairly. What more can we ask for?