A New Zealand Lawyer Ran an Ultramarathon Every Day for 1,000 Days

Shannon-Leigh Litt had 200 days in mind when her streak began on New Year’s Day in 2024. On Saturday in Whangārei, the Northland city where she lives, the 47-year-old criminal lawyer finished her 1,000th consecutive ultramarathon, and Guinness World Records now lists her at 1,000 days, the women’s record for running an ultra distance every day.

Guinness counts any outdoor run of at least 50K, the shortest standard distance for an ultramarathon. Litt ran 51K (about 31.7 miles) each day to leave herself some margin, she told RNZ, which takes her total for the streak past 51,000 kilometers (31,700 miles), a little more than one and a quarter laps of the equator. When Megan Cassidy of Florida set the women’s record in January 2023, it stood at 23 days. Candice Burt took it to 200 that May, running 50K a day mostly around Arizona, and Litt went past Burt’s total in July 2024 with more than two years of her own run still to come.

David Jackson, a former rugby professional from North Wales, set the men’s record at 100 days when he finished at Caernarfon Castle on Sept. 5, a tenth of Litt’s count. The marathon-a-day records, over a distance about 8K shorter, sit at only a little over a third of it: Belgium’s Hilde Dosogne ran 366 straight marathons through 2024, and China’s Li Shuangyong finished a run of 372 in August.

Litt kept racing through all of it, and the day after every race she still had to get up and run at least 51K. In April 2024, about three months in, she covered 213.6K (132.7 miles) at the IAU 24 Hour Asia and Oceania Championships and placed fourth among the women. That August she was the first woman home at the Great Naseby Water 200K in 28:26:22, according to the DUV ultramarathon statistics database, and this year she lasted 37 laps at the Kings Backyard Ultra, 248.1K (154 miles) of the last-person-standing format, finishing as the top woman and fourth overall. “Doing a 200km race, ordinarily that might take four weeks to recover and I’m doing 50km a day, so I’ve had to allow more time,” she told RNZ.

Guinness wanted evidence for every one of the 1,000 days: video from the start and the finish, photos from out on the course, the word of two witnesses, and data from two GPS watches worn at once. She was free to walk and to stop for food. To fit the distance around a full-time legal practice, Litt spent most of the streak starting at 1 a.m. and wrapping up in about five and a half hours, in time for work, and she kept up with her caseload by listening to her work documents as audio. Those 1 a.m. starts have eased in recent months, since going to bed at 5 or 6 p.m. every evening had become too much of a grind, and on the later schedule some of her runs take nearly eight hours. The physical toll, by her account, has come to a few blisters and tight thighs, and she has not been injured once.

The idea began as a marathon a day, which she settled on in April 2023 after hearing about an Australian woman who had run 150 marathons in a row. That was Erchana Murray-Bartlett, who ran the east coast of Australia from Cape York to Melbourne and finished in January 2023. It was Jayden Anker, a friend and fellow ultrarunner who works as a personal trainer, who moved her up to the longer distance while they were on a South Island road trip. “We just decided that because I’ve done a lot of ultras, that an ultra was more me and that I could do it,” she told RNZ. She came to the streak with 20 years of distance running behind her, and ultra results on record as far back as 2010.

Starting Sunday, her daily target drops to marathon distance, which she plans to run slowly and keep up through December, with a proper break from the heavy volume in 2027. “I do think that I’ll probably end up maybe doing a marathon, aiming to do a marathon a day till the end of the year,” she said.