What this is about

A week ago, I finished the long time goal of completing a marathon in all 50 states, at the Bataan Memorial Death March in White Sands, New Mexico. This little project or quest took me the better part of twenty years, but I was not really fully prepared for how finishing it would leave me a little sad. Although I am a member of the Marathon Maniacs and the 50 States Club, I'm not really one of those marathoners who racks up the races weekend after weekend or completes the 50 state circuit multiple times. I never planned to go around more than once.

And yet, even before last Sunday, I had been thinking about what I would do next. Some ideas I had were:

Start doing ultra-marathons. The problem is I have barely been able to make myself train for the marathons, so the prospect of trying to do even longer training runs was not appealing to me.

Focus on trail running. And while I do live next to a park where I can go for training runs, trail running takes longer than road running and I'm not particularly good at it. The roughness of the terrain and my general clumsiness increases the risk of injury.

Do some marathons in other countries. I would like to run Dublin, maybe something in Germany, something in Italy, Stockholm, and something in France.

Just continue doing all the small local races I love, with a destination marathon thrown in once in awhile.

None of these seemed like quite the right plan. And then one day a few months ago I read an article somewhere about a guy who was running a race in every county in his state. This was intriguing to me. I got out a map of Ohio and counted. Eighty-eight counties, wow, I had no idea. I'm originally from New Jersey, and I think I recall from some elementary school class that there are far fewer counties there. And that's the last time I paid attention to state county demarcation lines.

Eighty-eight is a big number. I put the idea of running them aside while I focused on finishing Bataan. But as soon as I got home, I knew I needed to have a new goal on the horizon, however far off it might be.

So I'm doing it. All 88. And I'm blogging about it. Which frankly will be the harder part for me.

Actually, the first thing I figured out when I started looking at the map is that I only have 80 counties left. I've already done eight! It's still going to take a few years. I am guessing that maybe I can knock out 10-15 a year. I'm not going to race or travel to races every weekend, after all. This is not my only hobby!

A web site I am finding helpful as I begin this project is Running in the USA. You can search on races by state and it lists what counties they are in. Almost as if they know that is what a person is trying to do, run one in every county! Actually, it comes as no surprise to me that other people have already done this quest. Here's an example. But at least it isn't something thousands of people of done already, like the 50 states. It's a little more obscure and quirky, like me.

As a side project to this, I'm going to try to run every Ohio marathon somewhere along the way. There are something like 23 or 24 of these depending on how you count them, and races come and go all the time, so that will be something of a moving target, but I'll do my best. I've already done five of them.

What will be a little tricky is, as I select races, to avoid running a shorter distance race in a county where I will have to go back some time to run a marathon. So if I am going to travel to a new county for a race that is not a marathon, I have to first make sure that there is not a marathon in that county. Right now it looks like there are 12 counties that I haven't yet raced in that have marathons scheduled.