Italian Ultrarunner Andrea Marcato Wins the 3,100-Mile Self-Transcendence Race for the Seventh Straight Year

Andrea Marcato has spent the last six and a half weeks running around the same half-mile block in Queens, New York, and on Wednesday morning he finished first at the Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race for the seventh year in a row.

The 44-year-old Italian completed the 3,100 miles (4,989K) in 45 days, 3:11:28, an average of just under 69 miles a day since the start on Aug. 30. Runners can only be on the course between 6 a.m. and midnight, so all of that mileage was squeezed into 18-hour days, and the six hours overnight had to cover meals, getting clean, looking after his feet and whatever sleep was left. On the second-to-last day alone he covered 64.1 miles, which left him with roughly 25 laps to finish on Wednesday.

Marcato has won every edition he has entered. The first came in 2020, when the pandemic moved the event to Salzburg, Austria, and the six since have all come back in Queens. Last year he became the first man to win six in a row. Finland’s Ashprihanal Aalto still holds the men’s record for most titles with nine, but his longest streak was four, from 2007 to 2010. The only runner with a longer unbroken run is Suprabha Beckjord of the United States, who won every women’s title from 1997 to 2009.

This was not Marcato’s quickest year. His best is 42 days, 17:38:38 from 2021, and he broke 44 days in each of his first five wins before slowing to 46 days, 16:19:10 in 2025. He was more than a day and a half faster this time around. Aalto’s course record of 40 days, 9:06:21, set in 2015, has stood for more than a decade.

At the finish, Marcato thanked the spectators, his coach and nutritional adviser, Arpan, and Sri Chinmoy, the spiritual teacher who founded the race in 1997.

“I did seven consecutive editions and I managed to do them all well, and I’m really honoured and privileged,” he said. “I believe that without his grace and inner help, this achievement would not have been possible for me.”

A Half-Mile Loop and a 52-Day Clock

The race is billed as the world’s longest certified footrace, and it is run on a loop of just 0.5488 miles that circles Thomas A. Edison High School and the athletic field beside it in Jamaica, Queens. Finishers complete more than 5,600 laps, switching direction each day and sharing the sidewalk with neighborhood foot traffic and kids on their way to and from class. Entrants have 52 days to finish, which puts this year’s cutoff at Oct. 20.

The numbers sit well outside most of the ultramarathon world, even among other multiday efforts on short loops. When American Mason Wright ran 1,000 miles around a Utah high school track earlier this year, he averaged 53.7 miles a day over 18 and a half days. Marcato held a higher daily average for almost two and a half times as long. Australia’s Nedd Brockmann took on his own 1,000-mile track run in Sydney in 2024, and Megan Eckert’s six-day world record of 636.482 miles shows what a runner can do when the deadline is days rather than weeks away.

Eight other runners were still out on the loop on Wednesday. Lo Wei Ming of Taiwan had 2,860.5 miles after Tuesday’s running, with Australia’s Annabel Hepworth leading the women on 2,827.5. Vasu Duzhiy of Russia, who won the race in 2017 and 2018, had just over 350 miles left. Italy’s Nayaja Perugini had reached 2,595.6 miles, though a worsening foot problem meant the race’s own daily report gave her little chance of reaching 3,100 before the cutoff.

Closest of all is Radu Budan of Moldova, who was on 2,990.4 miles, about 110 short, and is expected to finish second on Thursday evening.