Ikke overraskende vant Pekka Alto løpet på dag 44. Han har da løpt et gjennomsnitt på ca. 115 km hver dag og fått ny personlig rekord og tredje beste resultat noensinne.


For å forsøke å gi et innblikk i hva dette løpet dreier seg om velger vi å gjengi en glimrende artikkel skrevet etter løpet i 2005:


In this footrace, the last 3,000 miles are the toughest
By Alan Bastable


When you reach the 1,000-mile marker in the world’s longest footrace--a 3,100-mile summer odyssey in New York--try to remain calm.
“If you start thinking, ‘Oh, my, God, I’ve got another 2,000 miles to go,’ you’re in trouble,” said Trishul Cherns, a 48-year-old massage therapist from Queens, the site of the annual race. “You don’t want to get caught in that mental trap.”
He hasn’t. Last August, after running for 54 days, 16 hours, 17 minutes and 28 seconds, often in suffocating heat and humidity, Cherns completed his third Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race, a grueling test that makes the New York City Marathon look like a 50-yard dash. “It sounds nuts,” Cherns said, “I know.”
Also pretty monotonous. The route for the nine-year-old race, the equivalent of running from Boston to San Francisco, is 5,649 laps around the Thomas A. Edison Vocational Technical High School in Jamaica, a mundane half-mile loop lined by apartment buildings, fire hydrants and the odd homeless man begging for coins.
Nearly all the runners--14 entered this year; all but one finished--are disciples of Chinmoy, a 73-year-old Queens-based spiritual guru whose philosophy, rooted in self-transcendence and meditation, has garnered some 7,000 followers worldwide. Many are identifiable by the Sanskrit names Chinmoy bestows upon them. For them, the 3,100-mile race is not as much a jelly-legged slog to the finish as it is a tribute to Chinmoy, a barometer of inner-strength and an exploration of self-transcendence.
But make no mistake: It still hurts. A lot.
“In every one of these, I’ve reached a point where I say, ‘I never want to do this again,’” said 44-year-old Abichal Watkins, a poet and author from Wales who finished his second 3,100 miler this year and also has completed eight 10-day races. “But once you hit that point, you seem to come back up.”
Watkins, who also edits a Web site dedicated to multiday races, contends that anyone with the motivation and proper preparation could complete the race. Others aren’t so sure.
“There aren’t many people in the world who can do this,” said Don Davis, who counts himself among the wimps. Davis, an accomplished long-distance runner, is a math professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., where he also has taught a seminar on ultramarathons (any race longer than the standard 26.2-mile marathon). “You need a certain kind of body type that is resistant to the pain,” he said. “It really is the extreme fringe of the sport.”
The racers aim to cross the finish line in 51 days. That’s an average daily pace of 60.7 miles. Some participants run slower and are granted more time. The contenders, however, run faster, much faster.
The reigning champion, 42-year-old Srdjan Stojanovich of Serbia-Montenegro, broke the tape this year in 46 days and 10 hours, impressive but downright sluggish when compared with Madhupran Wolfgang Schwerk’s performance in 2002. Schwerk, a 45-year-old instrument maker from Germany, torched the course in a record 42 days, 13 hours, 24 minutes and 3 seconds, averaging a staggering 72.9 miles a day. “He blew everybody away,” Watkins recalled. “It was huge.”
Participants may run between 6 a.m. and midnight, resting--or receiving a route-side massage or acupuncture treatment--at their discretion. Lunch, dinner and snacks, prepared and served by a crew of volunteers, include vegetarian dishes, hot soups, Chinese herb potions and various vitamin supplements.
Some racers, however, like two-time champion Ed Kelley, a 41-year-old actor from Huntington Beach, N.J., have opted for a slightly richer diet. En route to victory in 1999, Kelley inhaled six large sausage pizzas, 30 cheesecakes, 100 burritos, 300 hard-boiled eggs, 35 quarts of chicken soup and 150 liters of ginger ale.
Cherns, the massage therapist and a native of Ontario, holds 112 ultra-distance running records in Canada. He passes the miles by tapping into the energy of the other runners. The earliest stages, he said, are the toughest. “The first two weeks you are still getting used to the concrete,” he said, noting that the constant stress on the runners’ feet often leads to blisters, shin splints and torn-off toenails. “Then you get into a routine. It’s like going to work.”
Only without getting paid. The race does not award prizes and the runners must take off time from their jobs to participate. They do get food and lodging, but not sneakers, a considerable expense when you consider that they burn through anywhere from a dozen to 20 pairs during the race.
It’s a small price to pay, said Suprahbra Beckjord, a 49-year-old gift-shop owner from Washington. Beckjord is not only the only woman to have finished the race, she is the only runner to have done so in all nine years. She describes the run as a deeply moving spiritual pilgrimage. “It’s a little different from sitting in a temple and meditating,” said Beckjord, who needed 64 days to finish this summer, some 15 days off her personal best.
Despite its epic distance, the race has maintained a relatively low profile, partly because of the small number of participants, but also because to most outsiders the concept of running 3,100 miles is unfathomable. “People can’t identify with it,” said Davis, the Lehigh professor. “It’s just too extreme.”
“People fear it,” Cherns said.
Nevertheless, a determined clan of runners continues to congregate on the starting line each June to test their physical and mental stamina and experience the rush of crossing the finish line six, seven or nine weeks later.
“We all have the capacity to go someplace inside ourselves, someplace where we haven’t been before,” Watkins said. “And, for me, that’s what this race is all about.”
That, and the blisters.
E-mail: ab2397@columbia.edu

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