Austin’s 24-Hour Treadmill Relay Fell 26 Miles Short of the Guinness Record

A 24-hour treadmill relay in Austin, Texas, staged by adidas and Wahoo and billed as a Guinness World Records attempt, finished 26 miles short of the mark it was chasing. The current Guinness World Record for the greatest distance run in relay on a treadmill in 24 hours is 236.41 miles (380.48 km), set by a 24-person team from the German retailer SportScheck in Munich in May 2023. Wahoo said the Austin runners covered 210.2 miles.

The relay ran from noon Friday to noon Saturday at Hold Out Brewing, hosted by Fleet Feet Austin with adidas, Wahoo and the brewery. Fleet Feet billed it as an attempt at the “Most Amount of Miles Run on a Treadmill Relay in 24 Hours” and opened it to anyone who wanted a leg: runners registered through a Google Form, chose a time slot and submitted a shoe size. Each was given a pair of the new adidas Hyperboost Edge to run in and a souvenir glass. All of it was run on a single Wahoo KICKR RUN.

Reaching 210.2 miles in a day means averaging 6:51 per mile with the belt never stopping. The Munich record required 6:05 per mile on the same terms. The difference is 46 seconds per mile sustained for a full day, and it left Austin at 88.9 percent of the standing mark.

Wahoo has not said the record was broken. Its post described the day as “an attempt at” the Guinness record and as a chance to see “how far we could go, together.” Neither Wahoo nor Fleet Feet Austin has published how many runners took a leg, whether a Guinness adjudicator was present, or whether evidence was submitted for ratification after the fact. It is also unclear whether the target was the published category or a differently defined title.

The 210.2-mile figure sits under Guinness’s other treadmill relay records as well. The organization splits the discipline by team composition, and the resulting numbers do not form a hierarchy. A 12-woman team in Sydney ran 215.14 miles (346.24 km) in April 2017, 4.94 miles further than the Austin relay managed with no limit on how many runners it could use. The male and mixed team marks, both also set by 12 runners, stand at 263.85 and 271.97 miles. Those were not community fields; the Sydney men’s squad included Ben St Lawrence, a dual Olympian and Australian 10,000m record holder.

Record attempts built into brand events have become routine in running. Ashley Paulson ran the women’s 100-mile treadmill record of 12:47:10 on the floor of the Boston Marathon expo, and adidas has scheduled a midnight 100K record attempt at its global headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany, for Aug. 26, with Aleksandr Sorokin among the entrants. Débora Simas holds the women’s seven-day treadmill record, and World Athletics and Technogym will stage the first treadmill world championship, with a $100,000 prize pool, in 2027.

Guinness’s page for the relay title still lists SportScheck, at 380.48 km, as of time of writing.