Brother completes goal to run marathon in each state

Chip Southern at the
Maui Oceanfront Marathon

I don’t know if it was a New Year’s resolution or not, but this is one goal I doubt few people could top.
Chip Southern, my youngest brother, just completed his 50 in 50 before 50 challenge. Last Sunday he ran the Maui (Hawaii) Oceanfront Marathon. It was the last state in his goal to run a marathon in all 50 states before he turned 50. He is 47 and to date has run 54 marathons (26.2 miles), a 50-kilometer (31 miles), a 50-mile, a 12-hour endurance (51 miles) and a 100-mile race.
I looked online and as near as I can tell, only about 4,000 people have run a marathon in all 50 states. More people have climbed Mount Everest than that!
Chip, if you’re reading this, I want you to know how incredibly proud I am of you. That’s an amazing accomplishment.
If I’m working my calculator correctly, he has officially run 1,646.8 miles. That doesn’t include his first two failed attempts to run the Leadville Trail 100 (across three mountain passes) and the thousands of miles he has run to train for these events.
It’s interesting in that 30 years ago if you would have asked someone which of us (me and my two brothers) would have been most likely to accomplish this task, most would have chosen me. I was the three-sport athlete in high school and Chip was the brainy nerd who got the good grades but ended his athletic career years earlier with Little League baseball.
Today I am the fat, lazy one and Chip is the model of fitness. He was never fat or lazy, he just wasn’t athletically inclined back then. He told me he decided to take up running in 2007 when his clothes started feeling a little snug. Once he got into shape, he entered a half marathon in Denver. Another runner goaded him into doing the full marathon, and he did.
The next year he ran the marathon again. Repeating the race played with his head and he finished two minutes slower. The year after that, in 2009, he decided to run a marathon in Chicago.
“That’s when it hit,” he said.
That experience motivated him to push for a marathon in every state. Two months later he ran in Las Vegas. He did 10 marathons in 2010 and then averaged 8-10 marathons a year after that. He runs a marathon in about three and a half hours on average. He has never cracked the three-hour mark and in two states he was slower than four hours.
My hat is off to him. My running career ended 20 years ago when shin splints got the best of me. I was never a fast runner nor an endurance runner. I was a middle-distance runner in track in high school. I could out sprint the distance runners and out distance the sprinters with no problem. I could never bring myself to run so much as a 5K race, so even dreaming of a marathon was beyond reality for me.
As great as Chip’s accomplishment is, he wasn’t the only one reaching a major milestone in Maui Sunday. An acquaintance of his on the marathon circuit was also completing his 50/50 goal – for the 10th time!
I doubt Chip is ready to do that, but you never know. I don’t know what his next goal will be, but if I know my brother at all, it will be ambitious and he will accomplish it with a flourish. That’s just the kind of guy he is and I’m proud of him for it.