Chinese Runner Completes a Daily Marathon for Over a Year, Setting A New World Record

Running a single marathon is hard enough. Li Shuangyong has now run 372 of them on 372 consecutive days, a men’s world record Guinness certified on Sunday, and he has no intention of stopping. The 41-year-old capped the streak in Jinan, in eastern China’s Shandong province, before a crowd of local runners who came to watch it made official.

The certified total beats the prior mark of 366 days, held by Hugo Farias of Brazil since August 2023.

But 372 is not the longest daily-marathon streak a person has run. Spain’s Ricardo Abad completed 607 consecutive marathons between 2010 and 2012, and Belgium’s Stefaan Engels ran 365 in a single year around the same time. Abad’s total is far longer than the current record, yet Guinness credits Farias, and now Li, because it certifies only streaks that meet its modern evidence standards: GPS tracking, independent witnesses and a verification ceremony of the sort Li completed on Sunday. What Guinness certifies is the longest streak documented to its standard, which is not the same as the longest streak ever run.

A typical day was a solo marathon on a route he set himself, covered in roughly five hours, at 5:00 to 7:00 per kilometer, with the occasional organized race, in Changsha, Hangzhou and Nanjing, worked into the schedule. He began in his hometown of Heze and rarely slept in the same city twice, making his way through all 34 of China’s province-level regions, its provinces and territories. By the time the record was certified he had passed through over 300 cities and run upward of 15,000 kilometers, about 9,300 miles.

The daily marathons left their marks. When foot corns flared up, he had them cut out at roadside pedicure shops and kept going, pushing through the exhaustion on iced tea and electrolyte drinks. A recent medical check showed elevated creatinine, a waste product the kidneys filter from the blood and a standard marker doctors watch for muscle breakdown and kidney strain. Li put his steady readings down to conservative pacing. A daily marathon sits far beyond what most training guidance treats as sustainable, closer to permanent ultra-volume than to any ordinary program.

Li came to running late and in public. He drew his first large following in 2024, after finishing a 1,000-day version of the One-Punch Man routine, the manga hero’s daily set of 100 each of push-ups, sit-ups and squats plus a 6.2-mile run, which he had begun on Aug. 24, 2021. He has said he took up the sport about five years ago, after his business failed and his marriage ended. The streak has since become a livelihood: he streams his daily marathons to an audience of 890,000 on the Chinese platform Bilibili and is sponsored by the sportswear label Erke, which has put seven pairs of shoes on his feet in the past 12 months, as the South China Morning Post reported. “I have been running for five years now, and every ordinary person has the chance to achieve something great,” Li said.

He does not plan to stop at 372. Li said he would push the streak to 520 days and finish in Lhasa, Tibet, calling the year of daily marathons the second of seven challenges he has set for himself.