Willie Benegas started climbing Mount Rainier on Wednesday wearing shorts and running shoes and carrying two sports drinks and two margarita-flavored energy gel shots.

It was hardly the right gear for a climb that takes most people two days.

Lucky for Benegas, he needed only four hours, 40 minutes and 59 seconds to reach the summit and get back to the parking lot.

The run made him the newest – and the third this summer – Rainier speed-climbing record holder.

Benegas broke Liam O’Sullivan’s record of 4:46:20 set Aug. 5. Justin Merle of Auburn also held the record this summer with a 4:49:35 climb July 6.

“I didn’t even know about the record when I went up there,” Benegas, a 40-year-old Argentina-born climbing guide who lives in Utah, said Thursday. “It seems like everybody else is more excited about it than I am.”

The record is unofficial. Like most of the record setters before him, Benegas timed his own climb.

He grew up climbing in Patagonia but Wednesday was just his third summit of Rainier and his first since 1998. He guides in South America and on Mount Everest for Seattle’s Mountain Madness. According to mountain madness.com, Benegas has summited Everest seven times.

Benegas said he’s accepted a job to guide on Rainier next summer for Rainier Mountaineering Inc.

He said he left Paradise at 5 a.m. and needed about three hours, 20 minutes to reach the summit.

“It was 3:20 or 3:22, I don’t remember exactly,” Benegas said.

He was back at Paradise about one hour and 20 minutes later.

His last endurance feat ended in disappointment, though.

On Sept. 6, Benegas entered the Wasatch 100, a 100-mile endurance race in the mountains outside Salt Lake City. He had to stop with a leg injury after running 53 miles in 101/2 hours.

However, Benegas said, except for a fall on the way up, all went well on Rainier.

He expects his record will be broken some day.

“I think somebody could reach the summit in three hours, easy,” Benegas said. “I think somebody can do it (the round-trip climb) in four hours.”

He thinks he could have gone faster, too, had he been acclimatized. He said he was slowed a bit by the altitude the closer he got to the 14,411-foot summit. He said it was his first time above 10,000 feet since he was on the 29,035-foot Mount Everest in June.

He also thinks he could climb faster if he were more familiar with the route, which he hadn’t seen in 10 years.

Benegas, who once held the speed record on South America’s highest peak, 22,841-foot Aconcagua, said he might make another speed attempt on Rainier next year.

“It’s one of the things I love to do,” he said. “I’ve been blessed with good lungs.”

Craig Hill: 253-597-8497

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