A South African-born amputee Jacky Hunt-Broersma who lost her leg to cancer, broke the Guinness World Record for most consecutive runs with 104 marathons in 104 days.
Since mid-January, Jacky, 46, has run 26.2-miles every day, taking about five hours. She ran her 104th marathon in as many days on Saturday, an achievement she expects to be recognized by Guinness World Records.
“Part of me was really happy to be done.
“And the other part kept thinking I need to go running,” she told newsmen from her home in Arizona.
Jacky, who was born and raised in South Africa and has previously lived in England and the Netherlands, is glad for the opportunity. Because running has given her the self-assurance she thought she’d never regained.
Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare type of bone cancer, was detected in her in 2002 by experts in the Netherlands.
They amputated her left leg to save her life within two weeks. She was only 26 years old at the time.
Jacky battled with the change in her life for the first few years. She was both enraged and embarrassed that she had had cancer. In public, she wore long trousers to hide the prosthetic. In 2016, she took up jogging almost on the spur of the moment.
She had supported her husband at long-distance running competitions but had never considered participating herself, believing it was just for “crazy people.”
She joined up for her first 10,000m run after purchasing a specific prosthetic for long-distance runners.
She switched her registration to the half-marathon category the night before the race, and she hasn’t looked back since, exploring longer distances and other terrains.
Jacky set a new goal for herself at the start of the year: to set a new record for the most consecutive marathons.
Alyssa Amos Clark, a non-amputee runner from Vermont, established the female Guinness world record of 95 minutes two years ago as a pandemic coping tactic.