Running News Daily

Man Runs a Marathon in 24 Hours While Doing Home Repairs Along the Way

Beau Miles of Great Britain documented his challenge in the film A Mile an Hour.

For many of us, it can be hard to find time to run each day. On some days, we have a spare 30 minutes to squeeze in a few miles; other times, when we’re lucky, we have a full hour to devote to training. Most of the time, running comes second to all of our other obligations. But maybe that doesn’t have to be the case.

For Beau Miles, a British runner and filmmaker, his chores and other duties are scheduled around his running.

Last year, Miles decided to take on a challenge: in the span of 24 hours, he would run 26.2 miles and also check off various chores around the house. The distance around his property in England was about one mile, so to cover the marathon distance, he would run three laps in the first hour and one lap every hour for the next 23 hours. When he wasn’t running, he planned to finish tasks such as woodworking, gardening, and cooking.

The inspiration behind Miles’s challenge was to have the “ultimate day of running and fixing and being,” he said in A Mile an Hour, the documentary that captured his 24-hour run.

“The marathon itself is not the guts of this project, merely a skeleton,” Miles wrote on his blog. “In between each lap, in the barn, and around the farm, I’ll be keeping busy with a variety of projects.”

Miles, a skilled carpenter as well as an experienced trail runner, began his 24-hour marathon at noon. After he finished his laps, he changed and began tackling his list of chores, which included everything from a two-minute task (fixing a key ring) to a day-long project (building an outdoor table). When his alarm signaled the top of the hour, he laced up and headed out for another mile around his home.

Staying laser-focused on both running and working made Miles extremely productive. By the time he’d finished five miles, he’d also planted six trees, made a canoe paddle, picked up trash along his route, and painted a fence. To fuel his run, he ate licorice each hour. Around dinnertime, he cooked homemade bread and soup for himself and his wife, Helen, then sat down to eat dinner and drink a glass of red wine after mile 11.

Though eating a full meal—plus wine—midway through a marathon sounds like a recipe for disaster, by spacing out the miles, the runner could digest and keep moving. “My body feels fine with all of the resting and eating,” Miles said in the film.

Miles slept for a total of 30 minutes, broken up into two 15-minute increments. Instead of doing chores during the wee hours of the morning, he dozed, rising each hour to do a lap in the dark.

“Getting up is horrible,” he said in the film. “But once you’re up, you’ve started the lap, and there’s no turning back.”

In a blog post later, Miles reflected on his challenge.

“Aside from about 30 minutes of sleep, the 24-hour period was the busiest, most diverse day of my life,” he wrote. “Running, as a circuit breaker each hour, was the perfect way to re-set how I felt, what I would do next, what I was doing (and feeling), and what I’d just done.”