Runner hopes feat is one for the Record Book

By Mike DeDoncker
GateHouse News Service


ROCKFORD, Ill. — Glenn Greenberg has proved that he’ll go just about anywhere to run.

He hopes that, in doing so, he has run himself into a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.

Greenberg, who became the 68th person to complete a marathon on all of the world’s seven continents in 2002, thinks he may be the first to have also run a half marathon on every continent. He said he has applied for recognition by the Guinness book, but he has yet to receive a response.

Greenberg finished his half-marathon quest in Cambodia when he ran the 14th Angkor Wat International Half Marathon — a charity run to raise money to provide artificial limbs for victims of land-mine explosions — on Dec. 6.

“Once I got into it,” he said, “what really motivated me was that there was no one that I could find out about who had done both a marathon and half marathon on all seven continents. As I understand it, to get in the Guinness book, you either have to outdo someone who has done something to get in there or you have to do something that hasn’t been done.

“I got a copy of the book, and I couldn’t find any entry that said anyone else has done this.”

Greenberg said longtime friend and running partner Rose Austin, who had begun running half-marathon races that accompanied the marathons he was doing, is responsible for his second around-the-world running feat.

“When I finished my seven continents in the marathon,” he said, “Rose still had two continents to go for a half-marathon on all seven.”

He ran half marathons with her in Stuttgart, Germany, and on Australia’s Gold Coast and decided “as long as I have a couple of them in, I might as well finish the seven continents.”

Races in Nashville, Tenn., on Madagascar and Easter Island, and in Antarctica — the only place where he repeated a site of his seven-continent marathon runs because there is only one running event there — gave Greenberg six continents to lead up to the run in Cambodia.

He said the course from the temple at Angkor Wat was flat but rough “with very heavy traffic as we ran through the temple grounds.”

Greenberg said the Madagascar and Easter Island runs stood out most among the seven “because Easter Island is so desolate — it took a five-hour plane ride off the coast of Chile to get there — and then there is just one little town on the island and NASA landing strip, where the space shuttle could land if it had to, and that’s it. Everything runs wild there, the horses and everything. Nothing is penned up.

“Then, Madagascar was an interesting race just because of the lifestyles they live and the course was unbelievably hard to run. We ran six miles in sand and then the rest of the race was on a road that had nothing but huge holes in it.”

Greenberg, who said he runs about 40 miles per week to stay in training, said the second seven-continent feat has left him with no immediate goals, except to run a half marathon on the Indianapolis 500 track in Speedway, Ind., in May.

“I want to run more marathons,” he said, “but I don’t have any specific plans. I’m sort of an impulse runner. If something comes up I could, next week, decide to go run a marathon.”

Mike DeDoncker can be reached at (815) 987-1382 or mdedoncker@rrstar.com.