I was reading an article in the Texas Co-op Power magazine this week. The article highlighted Jon Walk, a runner who started running for health and to lose some of his 300 pounds. Jon has a habit of making lists of his runs. One list he wanted to complete was to run at least one mile in every county in Texas. So far he has run in 375 town and cities across the nation. Texas has 254 counties and Jon is well on his way to making his list complete with 196 counties counted so far. He has run in temperatures from below freezing to 100 degree hot Texas summers. One difficult part of running in every county is that some counties are not very populated and finding a race in the county is a problem. He said, “Loving County in West Texas only has 34 people, so it’s a little unreasonable to expect them to organize any kind of race.” He said he found a caliche road and waved at cows as he ran by.
Because of running in counties all over Texas Jon has started other lists. One list is to visit and get a snack at all the 34 Buc-cee’s gas stations. He has visited 20 of them so far. He is in the process of visiting baseball stadiums all over the country. This includes minor league, high school, and college stadiums as well. He says, “I just want to keep seeing as many places and things as I can until I run out of time and money.” And he might as well get a run in while he is visiting the site.
Runners have several challenges that seem to attract them. One is to run a marathon in all 50 states in the United States. There is a special group of runners that have accomplished this feat. It seems that in some less populated states there is only a few marathons each year and only at a specific time of the year. One such area are in the North and South Dakota states where running is a summer sport and only a few marathons are held. Trying to coordinate travel to some of these distant states is a real challenge. There are times when one marathon is on Saturday and another marathon in another state is on Sunday. Running in 50 states is not necessarily an inexpensive list to complete.
