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With her 23rd straight 31.1 mile run on Jan. 8, Kissimmee’s Megan Cassidy set a female Guinness World Record for consecutive daily runs of at least 31.1 miles — an "ultra-marathon". SUBMITTED PHOTO -
Megan Cassidy with her Guinness World Record certificate. SUBMITTED PHOTO
A Kissimmee resident now holds a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.
To earn it, Megan Cassidy had to truly go the distance.
Cassidy, 41, made it into Guinness for eclipsing the consecutive number of days running an ultra-marathon for a female. That’s 50 kilometers, or 31.1 miles. For perspective, that’s the distance you’d travel on U.S. Highway 192 from its western end at U.S. 27 in Four Corners, all the way to just past Nova Road east of St. Cloud.
We don’t want to drive that far — but from Dec. 17 to Jan. 8, Cassidy ran it.
Every. Day. For over three weeks.
The old record was 11 days, and she only stopped at 23 because she needed to go back to work at a firm that designs retail items to be sold in theme parks like Disney World.
“Running every day like that, it’s not so bad because you keep up with it,” said Cassidy, who lives in the Boggy Creek area but ran in the Lake Nona area to take advantage of better trails — and the company she’d meet running each morning. “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.
“It was hard to eat enough calories in the first few days. Your brain tries to stop you from doing this so it tells you that you’re not hungry. I had to tell my boyfriend to make sure that I ate at least a quarter of a pan of lasagna every day.”
The runs would take anywhere from just under six hours to over seven, depending on weather conditions. She chose to run in December and January because the weather would be bearable — although, sometimes, barely.
“Christmas Day was so cold,” she said. “I don’t have clothes for running low heart rate runs in subfreezing temperatures and no one was out running because it was Christmas. It was my longest one.”
This saga is about two things — a love of running and a quest for a record. Cassidy said she started running in 2010, when her sister asked to run the Disney marathon with her.
“Neither one of us were runners, but if she was going to tackle a marathon, I was going to run it and finish before her — which I did, by 45 minutes — and I couldn’t walk for 3 days. Crossing the finish line ignited a spark, though, and I started running more frequently.”
She’s since run more than 100 marathons, including major ones in Boston, Chicago, Berlin and London. Once she runs the Tokyo marathon in 2024 (she deferred her entry due to COVID restrictions) and New York, she’ll receive a coveted runner’s 6-Star Medal.
As for running every day … “During 2020 a friend said, ‘I bet if I asked you to run a marathon tomorrow, you’d be ready.’ That throwaway comment made me decide to start running a marathon distance every weekend — so I did.”
After doing it weekly from December to April 2021, when it got too hot, she looked up marathon records, and passing on doing the fastest, she thought about doing the most. She noted the most daily runs for a female at that distance was 60, but by the time she was ready to start a daily streak, it was up to 95.
“But I was committed. I had never run more than two in a row but I decided that I was going to try, do my best, and see where it went. Every day past day three was a huge wave of adrenaline, and a new personal streak,” Cassidy said.
On Day 36, a tendon injury sidelined her that ending that streak after 42 days, but not her will for a record. While doing strength training to rehab the injury, Megan discovered that Katie Spotz, also a native of her home state of Ohio, had the female record for ultra-marathons at 11, and she honed in on that. Thinking the number would grow as she trained, Cassidy pooled her holiday vacation time to make three weeks worth of runs. She documented them on her YouTube channel (The Feisty Runner).
“Day 23 was bittersweet. I knew that it would be my last run and that on Monday, I would have to go back to my desk at work,” she said. “It ended up being my third fastest of the 23; my heart had gained so much efficiency in three weeks.”
During her runs, the Newton running shoe brand offered to make her an ambassador. On Feb. 8, exactly one month after her last ultra-marathon of the streak, she received confirmation that all of her data had been confirmed, and she was the new record holder.
Thus far this year, she’s run marathons in Celebration and Melbourne; St. Louis, Boston, Billings, Mont. and St. Paul, Minn. are next up for the Guinness World Record holder.
“I’m absolutely hooked on running,” Cassidy said. “The adrenaline rush at the end, and the connections with the running community I’ve made, made it all worth it.”
