Mescal’s Guinness World Record out of left field
Hebron runner gets fastest marathon time in baseball uniform
The journey to breaking a world record is not linear.
Jeff Mescal knows.
The quirky, highly accomplished Hebron runner set the Guinness World Record for running a marathon in a baseball uniform at the Toronto Waterfront Marathon on Oct. 20.
Mescal, 54, didn’t just break the record.
He shattered it, proudly crossing the finish line in a full Cubs uniform in a time of 2 hours, 56 minutes. The old record was 3:47 set in 2015, Mescal said. His legacy should be in place for a long time.
“I wanted to set the bar high,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave low-hanging fruit.”
Mescal, a rock-star runner, is always searching for his next running challenge.
When he ran his first marathon at age 40, he was going to be one-and-done. Then he found out he could qualify for the Boston Marathon if his time was under 3:25. His first time was 3:31. Three months later, he qualified with a
time of 3:15. He ran Boston that year, and he’s run 98 marathons since. The Toronto marathon was No. 100 for Mescal.
He was a competitive soccer player growing up but had never run races. He said he “always felt like he needed a ball to run fast.”
That changed in 2006 after his first marathon. “I was hooked,” he said. Running has been an obsession since.
He’s won 18 marathons. In 2018, he became the first runner over 50 to run sub-three-hour marathons in every state. He did it with an end-of-the-year blitz of 10 marathons.
Mescal is ranked as the top runner in his age group by worldmarathonmajors.com .
But this baseball thing was way more complicated than Mescal, who is used to curveballs, imagined.
First, there was the training issue.
Mescal didn’t want to run around his neighborhood every week wearing a Cubs uniform with a hat, a glove and a bat.
He did it once for a few miles in the park, and it was weird.
“I got some strange looks,” he said.
Then it was the glove. Mescal used his childhood baseball mitt, one he’d had for 40 years.
That was nice, but the rules wouldn’t allow him to take it off.
Mescal had to peel his hand out of the glove after the race.
“My fingers felt like they were permanently bent backward,” he said. “I could not get my hand out of the glove.”
Holding the bat wasn’t easy, either. He switched it from one hand to another, occasionally putting it under his armpit.
“My arms were definitely tired at the end,” he said.
Mescal always wanted to have a Guinness record.
His early failures came because he didn’t understand the process.
He tried first to get in running as a zombie.
Mescal thought it would be simple. It wasn’t.
He got a picture of a zombie and then went to the store and bought a uniform.
Guinness verifies records three ways, according to Mescal.
An aspiring record holder can pay for an adjudicator to verify a record, which is expensive.
The record can be documented by someone else following a rigid set of guidelines.
Or someone can try at a place, like the Toronto Marathon, where Guinness provides an adjudicator.
Mescal tried for the zombie record in Lafayette, Indiana, but he made a rookie mistake.
His uniform didn’t conform.
His wife documented his run with pictures every 2 miles, he said. Then the information had to be sent to Guinness. It was rejected.
“My pant legs and sleeves were too short,” he said. “I didn’t know a zombie had to wear long pants.”
On his second try,
Mescal tried to record the fastest time wearing pajamas.
“I figured I couldn’t screw up pajamas, right?” he said.
Wrong. Mescal didn’t have a fuzzy ball on his nightcap. He had a ball, but it wasn’t fuzzy.
He didn’t bother to send in his evidence because he knew there was no chance. In both of those attempts, Mescal didn’t get preapproved. Had he been preapproved, he would’ve had specific uniform guidelines.
The lesson is don’t look at a picture and believe it can be duplicated for a Guinness record.
“I just said forget it,” he said. “It was a pain to send in all those pictures.”
For Mescal, chasing the Guinness record was a way to keep fresh and have fun.
It took him about a day to put the baseball record behind him before he started considering his next adventure.
“Maybe I’ll go back in a Bears uniform,” he said.