Top 10 Craziest Stunt Marathon Runners

Some might say that juggling a marathon is crazy. How can I disagree?  But there are other marathon runners that do even crazier “stunts”. Consider the following list of marathon stunt runners.

Top Ten Stunt Marathon Runners – Excluding Jogglers

10.  Dark Marathon. Running in Nevada during August isn’t fun for anyone. Of course, things are a bit cooler at night so runners do just that in the E.T. Full Moon Midnight Marathon.  This sounds like a fun challenge for a joggler.

9. Crazy Costumed Marathon.  Every marathon has it’s costumed marathon runners (even this average joggler wore a Greatest American Hero outfit in the New York Marathon) but nothing compares to the crazy costumes of the London Marathon. A girl on stilts, a guy in a rhino suit, Borat outfits, running with cars. You can see more of the crazy marathoning outfits on this flickr page.

8. Multi-Day Marathons. In the last couple of years there were a few runners who did X number of marathons in X days. Sam Thompson did 51 marathons in 51 days to raise money for Katrina victims. Dean Karnazes did it too. Then Brad Alsop ran 131 marathons in 131 days to raise money for injured Marines. And then there are the Monks of Mount Hiei who do 2 marathons a day for 100 days. Crazy

7. Traveling Marathons. Some people travel to run a marathon. These guys traveled really far in a short amount of time to do 7 marathons. Sir Ranulph Fiennes & Dr. Michael Stroud did 7 marathons in 7 days on 7 continents. That includes a marathon on Antarctica.

6. Speed Walking Marathon. Who needs to run a marathon when you could walk one. But these athletes are trying to go as fast as possible. Carlos Mercenario Cabajal walked a marathon in an amazing 3:21:54.

5. Alcohol Drinking Marathon. This isn’t the kind of marathon focusing on drinking alcohol. It’s a running marathon in which the participants drink beer or wine along the way. There’s the Beer in 5 Burroughs that is a race within the New York Marathon. Here you drink 1 beer at each of the 5 Burroughs. Then there are marathons where you drink wine along the way.  Finishing is a real challenge since you drink wine every 2K.

4. Barefoot Marathon.  People are not born with shoes and these runners don’t think you should run in them either.  They do their marathons without shoes and they are fast.  The world barefoot marathon record is 2:12:00 held by Shivnath Singh.

3. Backwards marathon. This isn’t the kind where you run the course from finish to start. It’s the kind where the runners line up backwards and run backwards. Some people call this retro-running. The current record for a marathon is 3:43:39 set by Xu Zhenjun in 2004. I know Michal talked about trying to break this record.

2. Soccer Ball Juggling Marathon. Various people have tried but the current record holder for juggling a soccer ball with your feet while running a marathon is held by Dr. Jan Skorkovsky. He did it in 7:18:55 in Prague City, 1990.

1. Slow motion marathon. Greg Billingham started the London marathon with everyone else but he tried to do it as slow as he could. He finished in just over a week averaging three miles every 10 hours.  Can you imagine running that slow?  What did this guy think about?

Know of any other crazy marathon runners?  Leave a comment and let us know about them.