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Robert Garside (born 6 January 1967), calling himself The Runningman, is a British runner who is credited by Guinness World Records as the first person to run around the world. Garside began his record-setting run following two aborted attempts from Cape Town, South Africa and London, England. Garside set off from New Delhi, India on 20 October 1997, completing his run back at the same point on 13 June 2003. While his run has been challenged by some ultra distance runners and some members of the press, subsequent publications clarified a number of the points raised, such as anomalies in his online diary, and his running of the Nullarbor plain without a support crew - a feat believed impossible according to classic ultrarunning methodologies but achieved using lateral thinking and relying upon passing traffic and local people to drop off water for him instead - and highlighted the clashes of personality, running approach, and actions, that had engendered the concerns. In assessing his feat, ''Trailrunner'' senior editor Monique Cole stated he had clearly run more of the world than anyone else,〔 while former media critic Dan Koeppel, who became one of the few journalists outside Guinness to discuss and examine his full records at length, became convinced by 2005〔 that Garside had indeed run around the world and expressed great remorse and "haunting" guilt at his past part in fuelling a media frenzy that, as he felt, "screwed one of the greatest runners ever" and "erased... one of the most incredible things a runner had ever done".〔 Guinness World Records, who spent several years evaluating evidence, declared it authentic and the record was officially bestowed on Garside on 27 March 2007 at a ceremony in Piccadilly Circus, London, England. ==Background== Born in Stockport,〔 Cheshire, England, Robert Garside attended Hillcrest Grammar School,〔(Globetrotter hits final leg of record race ) - ''Manchester Evening News'', 2005-04-09 (date uncertain as it appears to have been written in 2003 from the description of Garside in Cairo, Egypt.)〕 where he was an all-round sportsman and captain of the soccer team,〔 and after school, switched between several academic courses and jobs (including the Merchant Navy and police). Garside had become obsessed with running in the late 1980s, and while studying psychology at London's Royal Holloway University he described how he came across a copy of Guinness World Records in January 1995,〔(Sports Illustrated (CNN) - ''Road Warrior: Robert Garside hopes to be the first man to run around the world'' ), 2000-08-14: ''"I have come up with the idea of running around the world, and quite by accident. The other day I was in () library. The odd book out on the shelf was a colourful " Guinness Book of Records." That's what lured me, so I picked it up." - diary entry of Robert (Runningman) Garside, January 1995, London''〕 and noticed that there was a record listed for walking the world, but not for running it. He decided to attempt to set a record as the first person to run around the world,〔 an extreme ultramarathon feat. He credited as part of his motive, his mother's happiness at leaving his father to return to her native country, Slovakia, following their divorce, when he was a teenager, and also finding that the state of mind he reached when running as an adult brought back some of his "best times" from childhood, where he ran and played in the "huge forests" near his house.〔 : "() says he developed a need to travel almost as a way to follow his own mother who - in exiting a difficult relationship () - had finally found a sense of contentment. 'I remember the day she left... she was so happy leaving all that stuff behind'. The joy and freedom of that escape, Garside says, is what gave birth to his own wanderlust. '(wanted to see ) the world, because it's a way of understanding things..." 〔 Garside stated that his aim was to run for his own satisfaction as well as the record, therefore he set about running each continent the longest way possible, rather than the easiest way to gain the record. His run covered around 40,000 miles across 6 continents and 29 countries.〔 Koeppel notes that attempting to run Africa was entirely voluntary, and that the renowned first walk around the world, by David Kunst 30 years earlier covered barely a third of that distance (14,452 miles) and skipped South America and Africa.〔 In a 1998 video interview Garside added that he was motivated because it was "so challenging", clarifying that he meant it was challenging to himself.〔(Associated Press: archive: Japan 14 August 1998 video interview )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Robert Garside」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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