Upon reaching 100 marathons, I knew it was only a midway point, so one week after hitting that number, I was already running my 101st. When I reached 125, I set my sights on reaching… 150 before 50, a goal I achieved well ahead of time, thanks to a push effort of running 20 marathons in 2024. That might seem a lot, but looking around, it turns out to be few, very few, within this world of crazies.
Having cleared this hurdle, I’ve reached a no-man’s-land where it’s harder to find motivation for new challenges. I’ve already run a marathon on every day of the month (from the 1st to the 31st), completed the Zurich marathon circuit, and nearly run a marathon on every continent. And it’s not just that; it’s also a question of how much time and weekends, not to mention money, one has to sacrifice to keep chasing marathons. It’s true that tourism and races often overlap, but that’s not always the case, often due to overloaded marathon calendars in April and October. And I still have so many countries to visit, books to read, and things to do. All within a limited, and quickly dwindling, amount of time. It’s a countdown…
Still, there are things left to do.
On my list I still have:
- Run the Athens Marathon.
- Run a marathon in Japan (which doesn’t necessarily have to be Tokyo—Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Fukuoka…).
- Run over 30 marathons in 3 countries, for which I need to add a few more in Portugal.
- Run a marathon in every Autonomous Community of Spain (I still need Asturias and Cantabria).
- Run 100 marathons in under 4 hours.
- Reach 100 half-marathons.
- Reach 500 races.
- A race in every province of Spain.
It ain’t over till it’s over…
We keep going.
