More than 100 runners start Thursday in Balatonfüred, Hungary, in a six-day world championship: as many miles as the body will give in 144 hours. [1] Megan Eckert, a 40-year-old middle-school math teacher from Santa Fe, is 5,000 miles from her classroom, using vacation days to miss the opening of the school year. Feature copy will sell inspiration. The labor fact is the leave form.
Last May, at the world championships in Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France, she ran 603.156 miles, the women's six-day record pending final ratification, more than 40 miles past Camille Herron's mark, and the first woman to cover 600 miles in that span. [1] That is nearly four marathons a day for six days. The mark has not fallen on Thursday. The race is the attempt.
She also wants the US men's record of 606.243 miles. [1] The course is a 0.558-mile loop of paved road. Hitting that men's mark would mean running the same loop at least 1,086 times. [1] Pay, pensions, and start-line support in this sport are still not the record. A public-school algebra teacher is chasing a men's distance on holiday time.
Eckert likes odds. "I like to choose goals where I have a 50% chance of success and a 50% chance of failure," she told Emily Halnon. [1] "It's amazing what can happen when you go after goals that scare you — and that just might not be possible." She teaches calculus when she is not using vacation days to chase world records. [1] She was voted third in Ultrarunning Magazine's Worldwide Ultrarunner of the Year rankings last year. She has podiums at Badwater 135, Cocodona 250, and Vermont 100. [1] She also holds the women's backyard-ultra world record: 88 hours and 362 miles at Big Dog's Backyard Ultra in 2024. [1]
She did not begin as a prodigy. She feared a 5K, skipped it, then ran a half marathon with her husband, Joe, in 2016 and thought, at the split, that it would be fun to keep going. [1] She finished that half in 1 hour 57 minutes. Her first 100-mile race she entered because she had read a book. She won it outright, men included. [1] She tried 100 miles in 100-degree heat, mountain mud, and her first multiday events past 200 miles. "I started dabbling in lots of different distances, different places, and different terrains and found that, regardless of where I went or how I performed, I loved it," she said. [1]
Six-day racing she first called "this stupid six-day thing." She signed up for Wisconsin email updates with no intention of competing, then entered when the price was about to rise because no one had hit 600. "Why not give it a shot?" [1] Her first six-day was on a 0.275-mile indoor track. She has a fish tattoo on her foot from a splotch on that floor. She looked at it every lap. [1] Last year she slept an hour or two every 12 hours and ate rice cakes, pasta, eggs, gummy bears, barbecue chips, and turkey-and-pickle sandwiches. She leaves the math to her crew. "It's such a long time to have to think about your pace, I trust them to tell me when I need to push." [1] This is her third six-day. "When I'm training for a big goal like the American men's record, I don't dwell on fear because I get so excited about how the goal is pushing me to train harder." [1]
Sponsors now include Mount to Coast and Janji. [1] That is not a pension. Feature MSM will still sell the 5K she skipped. Running Twitter will still treat Balatonfüred as a split watch. The culture file is labor and sex: a woman paid as a teacher is spending her leave to try a men's mark in a sport that still cannot pay her like one. Thursday is the start. Do not write the finish.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin