Fastest Marathon Dressed as a Fast Food Item

Humans love to dress up, except that in our society, there usually needs to be a specific reason to dress up once a person gets beyond a certain age. Halloween, of course, is the easiest and most popular excuse to slap on both a RoboCop costume and 18th-century British soldier costume to go as Redcoat RoboCop.

Over the past decade, I've taken a slight fascination with how the adult desire to dress up as something fantastic has been busting past the seems of Halloween. Of course, this often comes in a not so great cultural appropriation form of what we see on Cinco-de-Mayo and the annual controversy over what gets worn at Coachella.

I've also noticed certain other events are becoming more and more costume appropriate, but you got to suffer a little to justify it.

Polar plunges seem to be now an appropriate place to wear a costume, but, you are going to suffer once that costume gets soaked with near-freezing water and keeps it good and close to your skin.

Costumed Running

The other major player in costume suffering is any form of running event from 5ks to marathons.

I hadn't realized how deep down the rabbit hole we've come regarding running in costumes until very recently. The other weekend was the 43rd Grandma's Marathon. And as I sometimes do when it is in town, I'll go and observe it with my camera in tow.

I don't often take many photos of the runners themselves and tend to focus mostly on the spectacle that all the other observers create for the event. But I usually snap a few photographs of random runners, such as this one from this year of a woman dressed as a hot dog.

What I learned later after scanning and posting the photo on my Instagram, is that what I actually have captured is a new Guinness World Records record-setting run of Fastest marathon dressed as a fast food item (female).

Yes. There is a world record category for running a marathon dressed as a hot dog.

I've also immediately realized that there is a plethora of Guinness World Records that can be set in the running world if you decide you want to combine your marathon with Halloween. Here are a few I've found so far by going down the related records rabbit hole.

• Fastest marathon dressed as a nun
• Fastest marathon dressed as Elvis
• Fastest marathon wearing imitation chainmail
• Fastest marathon wearing chainmail
• Fastest marathon in cricket uniform
• Fastest marathon wearing riot gear
• Fastest marathon in scout uniform
• Fastest marathon dressed in a police uniform
• Fastest marathon in a Kung Fu uniform
• Fastest marathon in an animal costume
• Fastest marathon dressed as a witch
• Fastest half marathon dressed as a gingerbread man
• Fastest marathon dressed as a Mr. Potato Head
• et. al.

In conclusion

1. What a time to be alive.
2. At this point, I'm assuming that I could train enough to barely finish a marathon and get my name in the books as Fastest marathon dressed as a Redcoat RoboCop.

Or maybe I can get a category created for Most medium format film photographs taken during a marathon dressed as a fast food item?