Jacob Puzey just spent nearly five consecutive hours on a treadmill. That alone is an achievement.
The fact he ran 50 miles in that time is unprecedented.
Puzey, 33, shattered the record for the fastest 50-mile run on a treadmill, clocking 4:57:45 last week in the Altra booth at The Running Event trade show in Orlando, Florida. Puzey, of Alberta, Canada, broke the record of 5:57:30, averaging 5:57 minutes per mile. His marathon split was 2:38.
“Honestly I’ve always kind of felt like I have endurance, but it often seems to get truncated by the short distance of events, or other technical aspects of racing that just kind of complicate things,” said Puzey, who is sponsored by Altra Footwear. “I just kind of always wondered how long I could sustain a pace if I remove all the other variables.”
Puzey said he’d run a comparable pace on the Pacific Crest Trail a couple times, and thought that if he could hold the pace on a trail carrying a pack, he should be able to do it on a treadmill. “I figured I might as well give it a shot,” he said.
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For the record to count, the incline on the treadmill couldn’t dip below zero. But Puzey explained how, a couple of times during the effort, he’d bump up the incline to give his hip flexors or hamstrings a break. “And sometimes, I’d shake out my legs doing form drills, like butt kicks,” he said. “I didn’t want to stop and stretch.” He’d do form drills at six-minute pace.
With the trade show swarming with runners and running industry folks, there was no shortage of people cheering for Puzey during his almost-five-hour run. “Talking to people allowed me to pass quite a bit of the time,” said Puzey. “I got to see everyone during my run; usually you have to wait until the finish line of a race.”
Chasing the record didn’t go perfectly, however. Puzey, who likes to fuel for longer efforts with potato chips and soda, said a bag of chips exploded on him and the treadmill when he was trying to crumple them up in the bag—small pieces of chips shot backwards at the crowd “like confetti.” And a can of Pepsi exploded in his face, spilling all over the treadmill and making it sticky and slippery, forcing him to switch treadmills partway through.
Puzey, who traveled to the trade show with his wife and 6-month-old baby and has three other kids 10 years old and younger, won and set a course record at the Canadian 50K National Championships earlier this year. He has a 2:25 marathon PR, which he hopes to break this April at his first Boston Marathon. Due to the weather in Alberta in the winter, he guesses he’ll be doing a lot of his training for Boston on a treadmill.