Feb 3, 2017 By Luke Campbell 4 min read

Steps away from the starting line at the 2013 Kilimanjaro Marathon in Tanzania, a comment from the race director changed how Peg Pardini of Mt. Lebanon approached the next several hours and the daunting 26.2 miles she was committed to conquering.

The director’s piece of advice to the field of runners was simple: Enjoy the scenery because you aren’t going to win.

While the message sunk in at that moment for Pardini, who already knew winning was out of the question but attempting to achieve a successful number on the stopwatch was feasible, time fell by the wayside.

Carefully taking on a 6-mile, slowly-graded hill, she continued to slow down with awe between the vineyards that lined each side. As she continued to trudge up the calf-burning hillside, the three volcanic cones of the dormant Mt. Kilimanjaro dominated the horizon.

“I wasn’t trying to win before, but I tried to run faster,” Pardini said about previous marathons. “I was in these great countries, yet I was too busy being focused on a marathon.”

Dancing with locals in the 42-kilometer Tanzanian trek was how Pardini crossed off another marathon on another continent.

This journey for Pardini, now 51, which started with a 2004 phone call to her brother, Michael Clinton, will be finished in March when she travels by ship to the Antarctica Peninsula and reaches King George’s Island, where she will participate in the final leg and complete the unthinkable achievement of running seven marathons on all seven continents.

Pardini, owner of a personal training studio in the basement of her Mt. Lebanon home, was first enticed at the idea of simply running a marathon from one of her clients.

“My intention was to be one and done,” she said about deciding to inquire about the idea with Clinton. “I just wanted the challenge. I was still relatively young and was already in shape from being in the fitness industry since 1998.”

While fitness has always come second nature after watching and imitating Jane Fonda’s workouts on VHS tapes throughout high school to teaching step classes at Just Ladies, Pardini was never a runner.

“When I first started on the treadmill I could run for maybe a two- or three-minute stretch then had to walk,” she said. “Eventually, after a couple of weeks, I took it outside by running from my home (on Main Entrance Drive) to Rollier’s Hardware. It was actually more of a walk-run.”

Now, eight marathons later – London, Buenos Aires, Australia’s Gold Coast, Tanzania, Mongolia, Toronto, Berlin and Dublin – in six different continents, including running two with broken bones in her feet, the stretch to Rollier’s wouldn’t even be considered a warm-up for her training.

The preparation for Pardini begins with her driving to tuck bottles filled with a combination of Gatorade and water into bushes. It continues with memorizing accessible restrooms and water fountains. It then ends with a rigorous workout of that spans upward of 20 miles through Mt. Lebanon, Scott Township, Dormont, Brookline and Beechview.

It is all done through the plethora of songs by the Black Eyed Peas on her convenient, yet old, waste-band strapped iPod Nano.

“I have my routine,” Pardini said about her training. “I don’t run the whole thing. I can’t. I’m not a runner. I really have to trudge through and am far from graceful doing it.”

Completing the Antarctica marathon as her seventh and final continent will put her in a distinguished list that includes fewer than 1,000 people, although none of the marathons she will have run took place within the United States.

“I love Pittsburgh and our country, but if I’m going to run that distance and be in pain for that duration of time, I’m going away to a very cool place,” she said. “I always say it’s my last one, even after the very first one I did. What kept me are the destinations. People always ask what my time is and my response to them is, ‘Ah, who cares?'”