Jamil Coury runs helipad marathon ahead of state-wide lockdown

A couple of days ago, the founder Aravaipa Running, Jamil Coury (AKA Jam Jam), tweeted to ask if his followers thought he should run a marathon the next day (yesterday), March 31. It wasn’t going to be a normal marathon, though, and instead of hitting the road, he said he would run on the helipad on the roof of his office building. He got a lot of positive responses, and so yesterday he took to the helipad and ran 42.2K in 5:55:19, streaming the run live on Periscope.

My official helipad marathon time (chip timed) 5:55:19 and a total of 1563 laps of 27 meters each. Thanks for tuning in! https://t.co/4Std7H73sC

— Jamil (@JamilCoury) April 1, 2020

Coury is an ultrarunner, and he’s raced the Barkley Marathons five times (he was planning a sixth attempt in 2020 before the event was cancelled). He may be used to long and arduous runs, but running a marathon around a 30×30 foot concrete roof is no walk in the park. Coury ran 1,563 laps of his 27-metre course to finish a sub-six-hour marathon.

RELATED: Barkley Bootcamp videos give Barkley Marathons fans a taste of what’s coming

Before the run, one of Coury’s followers on Twitter asked him why he was going to do the rooftop run, and Coury said residents in Arizona, where he lives, were ordered to stay at home as of Tuesday at 5 p.m., so he wouldn’t have access to his office helipad for much longer.

“Why not now?” he wrote back.

Here is my Helipad Marathon on Strava. Yeah GPS isn’t so accurate on such a short course. I did have a timing system tracking my laps. https://t.co/7vTykH75SD pic.twitter.com/JQADe6628G

— Jamil (@JamilCoury) April 1, 2020

RELATED: Barkley Marathons 2019 ends with no finishers

Although he’s already run a marathon this week, Coury said on Twitter that he will be running the Quarantine Backyard Ultra this weekend, starting April 4, with Dave Proctor and many other elite ultrarunners.