I say finally because this was my original plan in 2005 when I found out I was fairly decent at running marathons with little recovery time. I thought it would be novel. I thought it would be unique. Then I found out hundreds of people had already done it. So I came up with another idea: to run a certified marathon race every weekend for an entire year.
That decision has shaped the rest of my life.
Doing so in a fashion which has rarely been done before or since, set me up for a life in the running world. When I gained a bit of a following on social media, I tried my best to use my powers for good. I found out if you do that, often you get bitten in the ass.
When the orange parasite currently defiling the White House came on the political scene, I was adamant towards him. It cost me every running sponsorship I had and countless speaking engagements. It also partially changed my marathon trajectory.
The Louisiana Marathon, which I ran in 2016, was the 49th state I had run a marathon in. So much of the previous five years of my life had been about racing but more about all the other things where I was making a living: speaking at expos, book signings, etc. With some of that forcibly removed from me, I could concentrate on just running as fast as I could again. I had my eyes set on a fast race in North Carolina, which was the only state I had left to run a marathon in.
On my 40th birthday, I ran 40km around a track in Portland Oregon. Quite sore and tired that night, I slept in the next morning. I realized, too late, that I had missed the registration for that North Carolina race as it opened and filled quickly June 1st.
As time went on, North Carolina became a place where democracy did not exist. I decided that I would boycott North Carolina from my racing until things got much better. Some asked me why I didn’t boycott Texas, which was also bad (and was where I lived) or some of the other places. They obviously didn’t understand that not running a marathon in Texas, a state where I had already run my 24th fastest marathon, wouldn’t be much of a boycott. It had to affect me detrimentally in order to make a point.
Fast forward more than a few years and the situation had become much better in North Carolina. But then COVID hit. Then my mother died. Then I tore the root meniscus in my knee, had surgery to fix it which failed, and then had to have a partial knee replacement. I found myself staring down the barrel of being 50 years old and not having run a marathon in all 50 states, something which I had almost done when I was 39.
Last weekend, I was able to complete that challenge, even surprising myself with a 3:36:07 time, far better than I deserved. This was the least prepared for a marathon I had ever been, barring maybe my first marathon ever. It might have been my 153rd fastest marathon but I got it done and under four hours (another sub-goal of mine).
So now I am going to lay out some random stats because boy howdy do I like me some numbers.
• From my first marathon and state to my 49th it took me less than fifteen years: 11/11/01 to 01/17/16. It then took me another ten years to get one more state, only running 9 marathons during that time. (I did a double take when I saw that I had only run 9 marathons in the last ten years.)
• My lifetime average for marathons is a 3:18:31. This is weighed down tremendously by just a handful of marathons, including twice in Leadville, CO, Pikes Peak, a trail marathon with many knee-deep water crossings, a marathon in China where I had food poisoning and a marathon around a cruise ship where I got sun stroke. In fact, if you remove just my 8 slowest marathons, my time drops to 3:13:47. If you remove my 8 fastest marathons, my time barely increases to 3:19:46.
• I’ve run 100 marathons under 3:16. I have run 64 marathons under 3:10. I have run 18 marathons under sub-3. My last sub-3 was coincidentally on the same day, February 28th (2013), as my 50th state.
• While I have qualified to run the Boston Marathon 79 times, I was surprised to remember that I haven’t run a BQ in 19 different states. This might be my biggest project going forward. Already scoped out races in: GA, NM, OR, WI, RI, ID, ME, WY, MT, AK, SD, NJ, WV, NC, KY, DE, AL, HI, and CT.
• I have run 33 marathons that either no longer exist or have changed so much they are not even remotely the same race.
• I have run 26 marathons at least twice with Marine Corps Marathon being the race I ran the most, at 5 times.
• There have been over 400,000 runners in marathons I have run but over half of that number comes from just 12 separate marathons. I tend to run smaller ones with 97 marathons having less than 1000 finishers. That said, the 18 sub-3s I have run have averaged 2548 finishers (skewed a bit by the Marine Corps Marathon but even removing that still makes it 1483 per race.)
If I don’t stop here I will go on forever. Happy to have been able to do what I have done so far and hope to do much more!
No comments:
Post a Comment