In order to give breaking the current Guinness World Record (4 person marathon in a costume [previous time was 5:10]) a try, a few training runs would be required to work out the kinks of the costume. The real challenge here was keeping all 4 teammates training for running a regular marathon, and making time to try out these test costume runs. Everyone’s schedules were erratic, so we would frequently have to swap out runners for other friends that were crazy enough to run with us.
Luckily the 4 of us were already accustomed to a marathon training schedules, so it would be a matter of incorporating some mileage in with the costume on. We would run our normal weekly workouts, and on the weekends we would throw in a few miles with the costume during the long runs:
- 3 mile short run- prototype run
- 8 mile long run – 6 miles regular, 3 miles in costume
- 16 mile long run – 8 miles in costume, followed by 8 miles regular run
- 3 mile short run – dress rehearsal before the marathon
- 1 mile test run – day before the Berlin Marathon (make sure the thing didn’t fall apart!)
Total training miles while in costume: 19miles (~30k)
We definitely got some funny looks running around, especially during a training run around the Rose Bowl where one of the eyeballs fell off! We learned to not use hot glue gun in California weather races, and fixed this with the help of liquid nails. A few lessons learned we gained from the training runs:
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- Backpacks – Good for distributing the weight of the costume
- Modify the suspenders to be shorter
- Running cadence, we found a way to “sync” up our feet if we kicked each other too much
- Hot glue gun isn’t strong enough (use liquid nails) for running costumes
All in all, the hardest part was trying to coordinate everyone’s schedules and get a few good runs in.