Treadmill Guinness world record broken in Toronto

Twelve women in Toronto knew how to beat the cold over the weekend and still get their running in.

A team of women, calling themselves Team Tenacious, broke the Guinness world record for twelve women running for twelve hours on a treadmill on Saturday, March 1, at the Toronto Sheppard YMCA. They called the event the Megathon and also used it as a chance to raise money for the YMCA’s Strong Kids Campaign. The group raised $3,761.

Most of the women ran two 30 minutes segments, but some opted to do an entire hour at once. In total they ran 171.7K in the 12-hour span between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., handily bettering the previous mark of 161.3K. They passed the record, set in Australia in 2003, at 6:17 p.m.

“It was a great day of running,” Melanie Boultbee, one of the runners, told us in an email. “It felt different than a normal race because we were not just running for ourselves, but for the team. We all ran our best and were inspired by each other’s performances on the treadmill. Everyone was very supportive and encouraging of each other’s runs.”

Before starting the event, the team had to calculate how fast each woman would have to run, taking into account speed-up and slow-down time for the treadmill between runners.

The full team and splits are below.