One search you can do to kill the time is for the world’s strangest running records. And if you don’t have time to do it, we’ll take care of it. We went into the Guinness World Records archive for you and, donning gloves and goggles, consulted years and years of dusty records.
Not exactly: we went to the Guinness World Records website and searched “run” and here are the results, or at least the most bizarre or interesting ones!
1. Record of the most participated pride race
The Guinness World Records committee determined that the Pride run with the most participants took place in New York City on June 19, 2019. It was organized by the Front Runners New York and the New York Road Runners (the latter are the same ones who also organize the New York City Marathon) and 10,238 people participated. Colorful!
2. Speed record for a robot
Who said that only humans can run? Doing it this time was a robot, more specifically MABEL, developed by the University of Michigan, which was able to run at a speed of 6.8 miles (i.e., almost 11 km) per hour in August 2011.
If you think running is a simple thing, think again: it is for humans but not for a robot. Or rather: the computational skills it must employ are by no means negligible and require great coordination and ability to manage balance. MABEL was also able to run on uneven surfaces, which further complicated the difficulties of its undertaking.
3. Fastest Antarctic mile
It is known that Guinness records have few to do with science, or at least they do not want to prove much. More often than not, it involves the passing of milestones that are at most bizarre, but not uninteresting or at least fun!
Like that of Irishman Paul Robinson, who on November 25, 2017 set the speed record on the mile, but in Antarctica. It was -25°C and to cover the distance-detected simultaneously by as many as 4 GPS satellites to ensure accuracy of detection-Paul took 4 minutes and 17.9 seconds.
4. The world’s longest run … of marbles
Well, since we’ve talked about robots, allow us to talk about other things that run as well, even if they’re not human. Who has never played marbles at the beach? That’s it: those at the Sensirion AG company must have remembered this as they built the world’s largest marbles track at a team building event for their employees on September 1, 2017.
Length? 2,858.90 m, or almost three kilometers! The theater of every child’s dreams, however, was not a beach but a resort in the Swiss Alps, namely Flumserberg.
5. The fastest ant
Okay, since we’ve taken this slope, let’s close with a very small thing: as small as an ant. In fact: just an ant!
Have you ever felt the urge to know how fast an ant runs? Indeed: but is an ant capable of running? Yes it can or at least the species called Cataglyphis bombycina also known as the silver ant of the Sahara. On October 16, 2019, Guinness World Records scientists decided that it had come time to figure out how fast it was going. They achieved this by placing a lure at one end of a tube: the ants would enter and exit, and a camera would photograph them along the way, then calculate the distance and time taken to travel it, then inferring the speed. That was by. 85.5 cm per second.
What is extraordinary is that this distance is 108 times the length of its body. It may tell you little or nothing but, if you want a comparison, the same ratio applied to the fastest man in the world, namely Usain Bolt, returns a value of 5.35 times. So in a sense the Sahara silver ant runs stronger than Bolt, at least relative to its body length. Do you know how many times? 20 times.
See you next time!