UPDATE:
On July 14, an Atlanta-based group of 70 men and 30 women set the first world record for the 100 x 1 mile mixed relay.
With most runners running under a 5:30 per mile pace and some running as low as a 4:15 mile, the group ran 100 miles in eight hours, 26 minutes and 54 seconds. They smashed the Guinness World Record’s limit of nine hours and beat the Canadian women’s time by more than twenty minutes, eliminating concerns over whether the time would be valid.
All that remains is for Guinness to certify the results, which may take several weeks. For now, the group is soaking in the moment on the Marist track.
Original Story
On July 14, 70 men and 30 women will attempt to set a new world record for the fastest time in the 100 x 1 Mixed Relay. In the Sunday event, which will be held at Marist School, 100 runners will each run one mile as fast as possible.
The relay was created by metro Atlanta native Colin Beecham, a University of Georgia alumni and current Georgia resident who developed a love for running while he was in college. Beecham has run multiple marathons and after completing the Georgia Jewel, a 100-mile run, decided to take time off of training to run and began looking for inspiration.
A friend of his was helping to organize the Mental Health Ultra Marathon, a 10k/half marathon/50k race organized with Coweta County Parks and Rec that raises money for mental health charities. Beecham didn’t run the race, but loved what he saw from organizing it and decided he wanted to try to start his own.
“When I saw a couple of my friends do these races, I was really inspired and wanted to do that here instead of focusing on training for a race,” Beecham said. “I mean, obviously I’m training for the one mile, but, but that’s a lot different than training for a marathon.”
GET MORE LOCAL SPORTS NEWS: Subscribe to Sideline, a weekly newsletter about sports. Click here.
Beecham also has previous experience in organizing events. He’s a founding member of Jam for Cam, a yearly music festival set up to raise awareness of melanoma after his fraternity brother, Cameron Fearon, lost his battle with metastatic melanoma in 2018. So when he decided to start planning his own race, he was coming from a place of some knowledge on event organization.
Beecham attended the Mid-State Mile and met Jill Dennes, a member of the Nashville Track Club, who told him that she and other club members were going to attempt to break the 100 x 1 women’s world record. While their attempt wasn’t successful, Beecham was inspired. The men’s record is extremely fast — under eight hours – which meant each runner would have to run every mile under five minutes.
“I realized I’m not even fast enough to compete in the men’s world record,” Beecham laughed.
The women’s time was slower, but Beecham wanted to participate in the race, eliminating that option. So he reached out to the Guinness Book of World Records and asked if he could organize the first mixed gender attempt. Guinness approved, and set the limit on the attempt at nine hours. When Beecham submitted the request, he initially said eight and a half hours could be the limit, but Guinness gave him half an hour more. The time sits in between the women and men’s records.
Or does it?
Guinness gave Beecham that time because it was faster than the men’s relay but slower than the women’s. But on July 7, a group of Canadian women broke the previous women’s record by more than 21 minutes, setting the new mark at eight hours, 57 minutes and 26 seconds — slower than Beecham’s number. Since Beecham has men running the race, his time probably ought to be under the women’s time, meaning that it is probable that the nine hour mark is no longer what he’ll need to set the record. But since Guinness takes several weeks to review any potential world records, he won’t know if their attempt was valid until after his own try on Sunday.
“We will definitely have to be running faster than nine hours to get this record now,” Beecham said. “I still feel good about it. We’ve got really fast runners, we’re going to be on pace to hopefully run around eight hours and 45 minutes. … That has shaken tanks up a little bit because we don’t know if Guinness is going to say, hey, they beat it at eight hours and 57 and that means you have to go eight hours and 37 [minutes]. There’s just not going to be enough time to have Guinness tell us what the new time is, because they’re not even going to be approved for their record in time. So we’re just gonna have to go as fast as possible and then apply and see where that lands us.”
If Beecham and his teammates successfully run under that mark, they will likely be approved by Guinness, setting a first-ever record for the event. Guinness did not set any percentage on the mixture of men to women in the relay, meaning technically Beecham could have had 99 fast men and one fast woman. But he set his mark at a minimum of 25 women, and about 30 women ultimately signed up to run. Many of the runners are from his local running club, Run Easy ATL, and the ages of the runners range from 18 to 40. Most of the runners are from Georgia, too.
“90 to 95 of them are truly Atlanta based, and then the other five to 10 have ties to Atlanta,” Beecham said. “Just wanted to keep it local. Do something cool for the community.”
The event is sponsored by West Stride, a local running store, as well as Adidas and several other companies in Atlanta.
For Beecham, the main draw of the event is trying to break the world record.
“I grew up reading Guinness World Record books and things like that,” Beecham said. “So I think it’s always been a dream of mine. Or not — I wouldn’t say a dream. It’s been kind of one of those goals of, like, hey, that would be really cool if you had the opportunity. And I think the opportunity presented itself, and I just wanted to take action on it, and, and so that’d be a really cool part. But I also think what would be cool is if we’re successful with the attempt, then I think that could roll into other really cool tests down the road.”
The run will begin at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning.
Edit: A previous version of the post misstated Beecham’s last name as Beecher. Beecham did not play lacrosse at UGA.
