Three Belgian runners break world record

No sleep until it’s over. The concept seems simple enough: you get an hour to run a 6.7 kilometre loop, in your country’s backyard as it were, and with every new hour you do it all over again. It sounds simple enough, but it only ends when you can’t take it anymore. In other words, it could take days if you’re resilient enough. 

For Merijn Geerts, Frank Gielen and Ivo Steyaert, that was the case. They took up the challenge against 933 other men and women from 63 countries, and the last ones standing were four Belgians, ensuring the world title after a humble 96 hours (we did the math, that’s exactly four days). 

But does eternal glory end with the world championship title? Not for these boys. A world record was looming around the corner, you see: the previous one stood at 108 rounds... and what’s just half a day more when you’ve been running for so long? 

One of our compatriots called it a (very long) day at 100 rounds, but Merijn, Frank and Ivo kept on keeping on, beating the previous record by three loops after a collective decision to call it quits at an even 110. The three ultra-runners are friends and decided they would prefer to share the record between the three of them. 

Before you try this outlandish challenge yourself, know that it is certainly not all sunshine and rainbows. It is also, for example, squirrels on bicycles. What are we on about? After a certain amount of time, the runners started hallucinating. 

Would you give it a shot? Personally, we prefer to cheer our heroes on from the sidelines in this case!