Viktoria Brown breaks Canadian 48-hour and 72-hour records

Last week during Six Days in the Dome race in Wisconsin, Whitby, Ont.’s Viktoria Brown broke not one, but two Canadian ultrarunning records. Brown beat her own 48-hour record, running 346 kilometres within that time, then she broke Marilou Corino’s 72-hour record from 2014, running 440 kilometres. Although Brown was not able to complete the full six days of the race due to injury, she still managed to have a very successful day.

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Six Days in the Dome takes place each year at the Pettit National Ice Center in Milwaukee, Wis. The entire race takes place around the 443-metre track, and participants can sign up either to run the 24-hour, 48-hour, or 6-day race. Unlike traditional road races, where runners try to run as fast as they can for a set distance, here runners try to cover as much distance as they can within the specified timeframe.

Brown’s original plan was to put up a big number for the 6-day, but an asthma attack early in the race put that goal out of the realm of possibility. The 6-day age group record, however, was still in sight. Near the end of day two was when her ankle injury started to flare up, but she still managed to hobble her way to the 48 and 72-hour records. She finally called it quits after three days of near non-stop running, leaving the 6-day world and age group records untouched.

This is not the first time Brown has had an asthma attack. The last one occurred when she set her previous 48-hour record, but since then she has brought it much more under control, but she says she is still looking for ways to solve that issue fully. If she does that, she believes she can lower her record even further. “Because of these two issues, I know there is still some left in my 48-hour,” she says, “so I can still keep pushing that mark up in the future.”

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Overall, Brown has mixed feelings about the outcome of the race, but she’s confident she will be able to take down both the Canadian and the World 6-day records in the future.

“I’m disappointed that I couldn’t go the six days, and I’m disappointed that I couldn’t hit my goals for the 48 or the 72 hours, however, I’m very, very happy that I could still break those two records, and this way I left a challenge there for myself for the future, because I know I can push those marks,” she says.

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There won’t be too much downtime for Brown, because as long as she is able to recover quickly, she plans on competing in the Triathlon World Championships in September. She will also continue training to break her own records in the future, so this certainly won’t be the last record we see from her.