Richard P. Burgunder III is a professional extreme athlete who has set records, garnered multiple championship titles, and summited several of the most iconic peaks in the world. Burgunder has been widely recognized for his athletic accomplishments with appearances on Beyond the Game, CBS, ESPN Radio, Fox Sports, GROE TV, NBC, The Early Show, and XTERRA TV. He has been featured in Access Athletes, Associated Press, Climb Ski Boulder Magazine, Colorado Runner, Competitor Magazine, Naples Daily News, Pittsburgh City Paper, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Running USA, Runner’s Web, Russia Beyond, Sports Launch: The Magazine, Sports Networker, The Platform Magazine, XTERRA Planet Magazine, and other major media outlets.

Burgunder has completed 24 marathons/ultramarathons, qualified 14 times for the Boston Marathon, and qualified another 14 times for world championships in trail running, duathlons, stair climbing, and marathon team relays. A five-time Regional Champion of the XTERRA Trail Run Series, Burgunder is the only runner in XTERRA Trail Run Series history to earn titles in four different regions—New England (2009), northern Ohio (2011), Pocono (2011 and 2012), and Utah (2013). He also is one of an elite group of runners in XTERRA Trail Run history to win titles in two different states in the same year (Ohio and Pennsylvania in 2011).

In addition to being a five-time elite invitational heat competitor at the Empire State Building Run-Up (2007-2011), Burgunder is a two-time National Champion for the men’s 20 to 29 age group at the 2008 USA Trail Marathon and 50 Mile Road National Championships. Further, he is a two-time Top 10 Medalist at the USATF National Championships, finishing sixth at the 2008 USA Trail Marathon National Championships and ninth at the 2009 USA 50 Mile Road National Championships. He finished 12th at the 2008 USA 50 Mile Road National Championships.

Burgunder challenged the stair climbing record of 101 consecutive times up the 42-story University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, the second tallest educational building in the world. He climbed the building’s 36 floors of climbable stairs 71 times over 15 hours and 34 minutes on February 15, 2009. Equivalent in distance to going from sea level to the top of Mount Everest, this earned him a spot in the “Cathedral of Learning Everest Club,” a select group of athletes who have accomplished this extreme endurance feat.

Burgunder represented the inaugural Team USA in the Nairobi Marathon for part one of The Greatest Race on Earth (GROE) in 2007-2008 in Nairobi, Kenya. Team USA finished 28th overall.

A two-time member of Team USA for the ITU Long Course Duathlon World Championships (2005 Barcis, Italy, and 2006 Fredericia, Denmark), Burgunder was ranked ninth nationally in the USAT men’s 20 to 24 age group duathlon standings (2003-2004).

He was a member of the three-person, coed team that holds the mixed student tri/quad course record (6:04:46) kept by the Nittany Valley Running Club. That record was set on October 11, 2003, at the Tussey Mountainback 50 Mile Relay in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania.

Burgunder holds the fastest 50K by a 20-year-old resident of Pennsylvania (3:43:20), as recorded and kept by Lehigh University. This run was completed on March 25, 2000, at the GNC and USATF Ultra Series in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

An avid mountaineer who specializes in alpine style climbing, Burgunder has summited eight of the highest peaks in the contiguous United States, plus Japan’s Mount Fuji and Mount Shirane, Colorado’s Longs Peak and Pikes Peak, New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, and Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome.

Burgunder holds a bachelor of arts in economics from Pennsylvania State University, and he is a graduate of the 2018 International Security and Intelligence Programme and Conference at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge, which is hosted by the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSi) in partnership with the Department of War Studies, King’s College, University of London. His research project was entitled “Has Al-Shabaab Exacerbated the Resurgence of Piracy in the Horn of Africa?” Burgunder graduated in 2019 from the International Summer School in Russian Language and Culture at ITMO University in St. Petersburg, Russia. Most recently, he graduated from the 2020 International Summer School in Comparative Conflict Studies, which was run by Serbia’s Singidunum University.