Hajime Nishi

Hajime Nishi ( Japanese 西 一 , Nishi Hajime ; * 1949 in Kyōto ) is a Japanese amateur athlete. His vision is to run 1,000 marathons in 250 countries by the end of 2048, i.e. before his 100th birthday . By May 2010 he had completed 568 runs. He currently runs an average of 39 marathons per year. He has been in the Guinness Book of Records since 1999 with the record of running a marathon on each of the seven continents in the shortest possible time. It took him 168 days for this in 1997. Three years later, he became the first non-American to successfully complete at least one marathon in each of the 50 US states .

He achieved his best time of three hours and 45 minutes at the Morgan Hill Marathon in California in 1994 . Since he almost always uses the time limit in his runs to talk to the spectators and to take photographs of the route, the surroundings and the ambience of the event, he regularly takes last place. In 2003 he published his first book in which he presented and rated 255 marathons in 54 countries. He sees himself as an “ecomarathoner” and, by his own account, promotes peace, international understanding and a life in harmony with nature.

He started running in 1990. Four years later, he ran his first marathon in Honolulu . Before that, he worked for 14 years as the managing director of a film rights distribution company. He has been a single father of three children since his wife's cancer-related death in 1988. He finances his travel related to running the marathon entirely himself without any sponsorship. He currently lives in Tokyo .

Web links

• Ecomarathon International Website by Hajime Nishi (Japanese / English)