This story isn’t about me. My brother in law told me this story and it is one of those weird, quirky stories that I can’t seem to get out of my head. So his wife has a friend who decided to run a marathon in all 50 states over a period of years.
To many of you, this will be the weird part but it makes perfect sense to me. Dean Karnazes once ran 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days. Even that doesn’t seem weird to me. I think it is a pretty cool idea. It meets my criteria of being a big, scary goal. An adventure of a lifetime.
What is unclear is whether these were full marathons or not. Non runners use the term marathon pretty loosely. It is not uncommon for someone to use the term “Marathon” when they mean half marathon. There is a big difference between 13.1 and 26.2 miles. I was watching a running documentary about this guy getting women in shape for a half-marathon and the term marathon was being casually tossed around. Runners get a little touchy about this because our lives are based on distance and time. I asked him about this and he confirmed it was a marathon but I think I need to speak to the source.
Back to the story. As I said before, the idea of running 50 marathons in 50 states seems like a great idea. You get to travel and visit states you may never visit and soak in local culture and cuisine. That isn’t the weird part. The odd part of the story is that after completing all 50 marathons she stopped running. This makes no sense to me at all. I can understand taking a break from running for a while or running shorter distances but to quit altogether? Bizarre.
Whoever this person is, I have about a thousand and one questions I would like to ask her. Can someone just pick a goal out of the air just to do it? It seems almost like she was collecting spoons. Did you ever know anyone who did that?
Back in the day when people traveled across country, they would collect something from each state as a souvenir. My grandmother, along with a lot of the people from that generation would stop at shops along the highway, usually a Stuckey’s and buy commemorative spoons or plates. Oddly enough they were never forks, sporks or knives but always spoons with the state emblem. One could display their spoon collection in their house to show off all the places they had been. Where I grew up, this was a status symbol. The more spoons you had, the more leisure time and expendable income you had. The person with al 50 spoons earned a high level pf respect from the neighborhood.
Most likely that would be my first question and I know comparing finishing medals to truck stop commemorative spoons might seem offensive to her but the idea seems to be the same. Was this some kind of conversation starter? Is this a non-runner topic of conversation?
The second question would be why did you stop? it seems to me that if you can run 50 marathons, what else can you do? You have the fitness and willpower, what goal is next? That is the burning question, at least in my mind.
In a way, that is also the answer. Some people can dip into our sport, do something fantastic, then tap out without any regrets. There are countless stories of people showing up untrained and unprepared for their first race then winning it. It doesn’t seem fair but it happens all the time. It is a bucket list item that they choose, train for , do and move on with their lives.
I wonder what she has learned from it and how it has changed her. Or did it have any effect? Is it just another thing to put on her resume?
The world may never know.
