Brendan Dowling is unstoppable. At the age of seven he began running, and four short years later, he found himself on a flight to the 2012 Junior Olympics in Baltimore, Maryland. Somewhere in between the competitive meets up and down the western United States, he’s found the time to try football and baseball and to learn Chinese. Oh, and he’s a Guinness World Record holder, at the age of 15.

“I wanted a world record, and I’ve been a runner for a long time, and I knew that I wasn’t good enough to set a running record, so one of my friends suggested that I skipped a 5k,” said Brendan.  

Brendan considered skipping the 3.1 mile race and did some research on the previously held record.

“I saw that the record was around 29 minutes, and I thought I could probably beat that. I didn’t really practice to set the record. The only thing I did was skip until my watch told me I had gone the distance of a 5k, and I beat the record, I just wanted to make it official,” Brendan said.  

To formally set the record, Brendan sought out the help from his long time coach Kent Roosevelt and his wife to be official timers. On July 22, 2015, the summer before his freshman year, Brendan set the Guinness World Record for “skipping a 5k without a rope” with the time of 26 minutes and 21 seconds.

While he didn’t prepare extensively, for his record setting feat, Brendan credits his ability to pull off a new record to his long distance running training. He began training competitively around five years ago.

“I joined a club through Coach Kent because I was home schooled and I couldn’t join a middle school’s cross country or track team, so I worked with his club called Revolution Express. We traveled to Oregon, southern California and the bay area. His training got me into USA Track and Field,” said Brendan.

Once he outgrew Kent’s Revolution Express program, Brendan had to make a tough decision: continue to be home schooled and try to find a new running program or attend and run for a local high school.

“I had been wanting to be a part of a team for a while just to be able to experience the team spirit and have teammates to train with. Training by myself got mentally hard because I didn’t have anyone to rely on but myself,” said Brendan.

Brendan’s parents gave him complete freedom in choosing which high school he wanted to attend. After looking into the teams at each school, Brendan chose Rocklin.

“I looked at the teams, and I thought Rocklin had the best chance to be really good, so I came here,” said Brendan.

Brendan spent his first season of high school cross country running 5k’s for the varsity team as a freshman. He plans to run the 400m, 800m, mile, and two mile for the jv and varsity track teams.

Brendan has an insatiable drive to succeed. He sees himself participating in the 2016 Track and Field Junior Olympics, which are to be held in Sacramento over the summer. As far as setting a Guinness Record for an actual running event goes, Brendan remains humble and hopeful, “Right now, I’m not that good. It would have to take a lot of hard work to beat a record like that. We’ll see. Or maybe I will just stick to beating my own 5k skipping record,” Brendan joked.