Here is a number: 198.6. That’s how many miles Aleksandr Sorokin ran in 24 hours in 2022, which is the world record. A marathon is 26.2 miles, so he ran about 7.6 marathons back to back, and he didn’t get a night’s sleep between any of them. Divide 198.6 by 24 and you get about 8.3 miles an hour, held for a full day. The International Association of Ultrarunners lists the distance as 319.614 kilometres. iRunFar reported that he set it at the IAU 24-Hour European Championships in Verona, Italy, on September 17 and 18, 2022, averaging 7:15 per mile. Plenty of reasonably fit people would be happy to hold that pace for a single 5K.
The obvious question is how anyone does that, and Business Insider took it on in a video by Daniel T. Allen, Jessica Orwig and Nicole Raucheisen. Their answer is that a distance-running world record needs six things to be “perfectly dialed in”: VO₂ max, form, footwear, fuel, environment and the mind.
I like this answer because it describes a record as a supply chain. A supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Imagine, purely hypothetically, a runner who has the best lungs on the planet and a stomach that turns on him at hour 14. That runner doesn’t get partial credit for the lungs. His day ends at hour 14. The record goes to whoever has no weak link, and that’s a much harder thing to be than the person who is best at any one of the six.
Take them in order. VO₂ max is roughly how much oxygen your body can use, and it sets the size of your engine. The team behind Kristian Blummenfelt, the Olympic and Ironman champion, recorded a VO₂ max of 101.1 for him. That’s an engine. Then there’s form, meaning how efficiently the engine’s output turns into forward motion. Stanford’s biomechanics lab built a digital model of Dean Karnazes, who holds the record for the longest distance ever run nonstop. If someone has run farther without stopping than any other human, it’s reasonable to suspect his body is doing something worth putting in a computer.
Footwear is the part with an obvious business model. Supershoes are sold on the claim that their foam gives back some of the energy the runner puts into it, and Business Insider measured how much it actually returns. Most of the six factors belong to the athlete. Shoes belong to whoever makes them, which is why shoe companies care so much about who’s wearing them when records fall. You can’t buy a VO₂ max of 101.1. You can buy the shoes.
Fuel and environment are the dull, unforgiving middle of the list. Over a day, an ultrarunner has to keep eating, and the gut decides how much of that it will tolerate. Heat raises the body’s core temperature, and every degree comes out of the performance. Air quality counts as environment too: a recent study found nitrogen dioxide adds minutes to marathon times.
The block in Queens
Then there’s the mind, and for that the video goes to Queens, New York, and the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100. In this race, runners go around the same block for 52 days. According to the IAU’s event listing, this year’s edition started on August 30 in Jamaica, Queens. The course runs from 6 a.m. to midnight each day, on a loop of 0.5488 miles. Some arithmetic: 3,100 miles in 52 days means averaging 59.6 miles a day, or a bit more than two marathons, every day for seven and a half weeks. At 0.5488 miles a lap, finishing takes 5,649 laps of one block. The course record, per the race’s Wikipedia entry, is 40 days, 9 hours, 6 minutes and 21 seconds, set by Ashprihanal Pekka Aalto in 2015. The 52-day window closes around now, so the 2026 race is wrapping up as the video comes out.
Business Insider asked the race’s front-runner what keeps him going. A race like this is close to a pure test of the sixth factor. It has no scenery, no hills and no surprises. The challenge is to keep going when the scenery is the same as yesterday’s and tomorrow’s will be too. Endurance athletes do train this explicitly: some cyclists and skiers train their brains to resist mental fatigue, on the theory that the brain often quits before the legs have to.
Records as a moving target
Sorokin’s own history is a good example of how these records move. In August 2021 in Pabianice, Poland, he ran 309.399 kilometres, which broke Yiannis Kouros’s 24-hour record of 303.506 kilometres, a mark long called unbreakable. A year later in Verona he beat his own record by more than 10 kilometres. That pattern says something about the supply-chain model. Once every link is strong, the man who already holds the record is well placed to break it again, because he has already shown his chain holds and only has to strengthen it a little.
Guinness World Records still lists Sorokin’s 319.614 kilometres as the greatest distance a man has run in 24 hours. It converts that to 198.598 miles, while iRunFar has 198.599. That’s a dispute of about five feet, after 198 miles. At his pace, Sorokin would cover five feet in roughly half a second.