By Aidan Gardiner
If you happen to meet and shake hands with Chris Solarz, you’ll soon be able to tell your friends that you once met the record holder for the fastest marathons run on all seven continents.
On July 17, Solarz, 32, a financial consultant and East Villager, ran the Rio de Janeiro Marathon amid its daunting heat and beautiful scenery in 2 hours, 49 minutes and 26 seconds. Once the Guinness World Records authorities verify his feat in the coming weeks, he will have snatched the title of person with the fastest aggregate marathon run on all seven continents from Nicholas Twomey, a young Englishman.
Solarz’s aggregate time is 22:14:08, about a full hour and a half faster than Twomey’s previous record.
Solarz will now assemble a package of information, including his seven race results, to send to Guinness authorities to verify his new record.
The Rio time was his fastest in his record attempt, and a personal best. His fastest marathon prior was just shy of three hours in the Boston Marathon.
Previously, in his record attempt, Solarz ran marathons in just slightly more than three hours in Berlin, Dubai and Marrakech. His Antarctica and Australia marathons both took about three-and-a-half hours, but he said that if he needed to, he could rerun Australia for a faster time.
Last weekend’s marathon was the last in his attempt to secure the record.
Solarz already had two marathons on the books in South America that he could have used, but neither was fast enough to qualify him for the record.
This Guinness record has fairly loose constraints. Twomey can rerun one of his marathons just a little faster to regain the title.
This will be Solarz’s fourth Guinness World Record. In 2009, he visited all 468 of New York City’s subway stations in just under 23 hours. This past June he and four others ran an entire marathon while tethered together by a rope. He got the record for running the farthest vertical race by sprinting up a Philadelphia skyscraper 55 times in 12 hours, logging a total of 33,000 feet, about 4,000 feet higher than Mt. Everest.
Solarz said that after he finished the Rio Marathon, he doubled back to find his wife, Beatriu Reig, who was also running in the race, but at a more leisurely pace.
After finishing Sunday’s race, Solarz boarded a plane so that he could make it to work the next day.
“I flew back on the red-eye last night and went straight into work,” he wrote in an e-mail July 18. “I’m just getting home from work now — what a crazy weekend!”
Solarz works at Cliffwater LLC as a hedge-fund researcher. Before the Rio Marathon, Solarz said that he was also excited to visit Brazil because it is a dynamic emerging market, the perfect environment for an investment researcher.
