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Comment by chinaev | Hacker News Reader

Gives me an idea of an ultra endurance event... Think "Ironman" of walking. Let's say participants would have two weeks to complete the 587 km course or some part of it and whoever finished first is the Leatherman.

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There already are, they're called ultramarathons [0], 587 km would be on the longer end for a regularly held race but it's only slightly longer than Dean Karnazes's record for an uninterrupted run which was 560 km in 80 hours [1] so it'd be a multi day race probably.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Karnazes#Running_highligh...

Usually the extremely long distance ultra events are held as laps around a limited area because it's hard to safely run a race over hundreds of kilometers over a long period. Each racer needs a support car usually in the really long distance events that do happen to be run on roads etc. blocking traffic and making sure if they do get into medical trouble they can get help immediately.

That was a big deal in the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrianism

Crazy things like people walking 1 mile every hour for 1000 hours, grabbing bits of sleep within those hours.

Do you have to walk? I get that power walking exists as a sport. But no way to easily disqualify people from running instead of walking. Plenty of ultras exist though this would be a cool theme.

It exists. Well almost. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barkley_Marathons

Now days, people call them backyard ultras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_ultra

It's only one loop so not really a backyard ultra.

How would it differ from other long ultras?

Cool origin story

It would be on the longer side of ultras and unique if it was actually run over the route (vaguely defined) that Leatherman took. But that's mostly because they tend to not be done that way because of the difficulties of supporting runners when the course is that long. The really long ultras are often lap based instead of being a course that's actually 100+km long or take place in remote areas with support cars following the runners.

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