Cruise Passenger Runs 186 Miles on 7-Day Cruise, Full Marathon Every Day

For many of us regular cruisers, just taking the stairs to go up 5 decks on a cruise ship is cause for a chocolate melting cake celebration.

And for those who cruise just to relax and not do anything for a while, the gym and running track on board might seem like a waste of space.

But for one trail running enthusiast out of Scotland, a cruise offered the perfect opportunity to complete an impressive feat: to run a marathon every day on a week-long cruise.

Paul Manson took his first-ever cruise on the Princess Cruises ship Enchanted Princess. Rather than take it easy and use the cruise as an excuse to rest his body, he pushed it to the limits in some of the Mediterranean’s most popular cruise ports.

In total, Paul ran 299.5 kilometers, or about 186 miles during the cruise, with at least one full marathon taking place on the ship during a sea day that took 185 laps to complete.

For most of us, just running a marathon once is something to brag about, but for this runner, every single day of the cruise offered an opportunity to run those 26.2 miles.

Paul ran a full marathon in each port the ship stopped in, including Rome, Naples, Kotor, Corfu, Olympia, and Sicily.

He told The Independent that he tried to be one of the first to get off the ship when it arrived in port, often aiming to be off the ship by around 7:00AM if possible.

This obviously took a lot of preplanning. He said he used Google Maps and the Strave app to calculate his routes.

Even though Paul can typically complete a marathon in about three and a half hours, most of his marathon times during the cruise were around five to six hours.

Paul said his Rome marathon took the longest to complete because he was also trying to get video of the sites along the way as well.

“Rome has a lot of steps and had the most to see. It was really good to explore but took longer to run. There were, at least, lots of water fountains on my route,” Paul told The Independent.

These ports didn’t always offer the easiest routes for a marathon run though. Paul said that Kotor in Montenegro was one of the most challenging places.

“I had considered staying down in the bay of Kotor but getting a marathon distance would have been more challenging due to the space. It was more of a challenge to head up into the cliffs so I took a 1,350 metre climb to get to the highest viewpoint and then ran back down to the bay. The trail going up was great but it was hard to follow the small roads going down, especially in 40 degree heat”, Paul stated to the news outlet.

After a long day of running in port, Paul said that he enjoyed grabbing a beverage and just enjoying the infinity pool on Enchanted Princess. He would soak in the pool, enjoying the view of the port he had just been running around.

That one sea day on the ship where Paul ran a full marathon using the ship’s running track, made him a sort of celebrity on board. After all, it’s hard not to notice the same guy running by your lounger 185 times while you just enjoy the sea breeze.

Paul said that a lot of other cruise passengers came up to him afterward, even calling him the “marathon man”, according to The Independent.

When asked if he would take a cruise again, Paul said he absolutely would and that having a comfortable ship to enjoy after a long day of running was ideal for him.

One item that Paul made to pack was extra running shoes, three pairs to be exact. He said that the sweat build up after a long marathon would make them damp and using another pair to let that first pair dry out was the way to go.

The runner also found out something we at Cruise Fever have talked about before: how using a GPS watch while running laps on a moving cruise ship can really mess up the numbers.

When running with the ship it will look like you’re running at lightning speed, but on the return trip toward the aft of the ship, it might look like you’re not moving at all.

One of the biggest concerns for Paul was just making it back to the ship on time. This was especially true in Kotor where the ship had to use tenders to transport passengers back to the main vessel.

“I knew I had to make sure I was back for the last tender otherwise the ship would have left without me,” Paul stated.

Paul Manson runs an active Youtube channel called The Random Runner.