Mike Brooks says he can’t explain the satisfaction he gets from completing a distance event.
AUBURN – Mike Brooks has run marathons in all 50 states.
Next Saturday, he’ll run his 100th. The very next day he’ll run his 101st.
The retired Auburn firefighter started running eight years ago. As his hand-written tally of race places, times and distances will attest, he never stopped.
On tap this fall: marathons in Virginia, Texas, New York, Maine and a loop around Lake Tahoe.
“I’m kind of going overboard. I’m lucky I’ve got an understanding wife,” said Brooks, 57.
His foray into ultimate fitness started in 1992. Another firefighter’s wife had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Brooks, then a two-pack-a-day smoker, hopped on his bike with several other men to join a 150-mile fund-raiser trek. He quit smoking that same year.
A few years later, he ran his first race.
“After that I was just hooked on running,” said Brooks. “I found that the further the distance I ran, the better I liked it.”
With marathons in about eight states under his belt, he set his eyes on running in all 50. He met that goal this past June, saving Alaska for last.
Brooks says he can’t really explain to most people’s satisfaction why he runs so much.
“Everybody asks me that,” he said. “It’s just the camaraderie, I just enjoy it.”
His running friends all over the country remind him of his buddies at the fire house, where he retired as a platoon chief in 2001 after 33 years in the department. He’s still a frequent visitor.
“You wouldn’t recognize him from the old days,” said Auburn Platoon Chief Richard McFadden Jr. He worked with Brooks for 27 years. “We never expected he’d get as carried away with it as he has.”
Firefighters still offer pledges for Brooks’ annual bike treks or runs for charity. “He’s a peach, we’d do anything for him,” said McFadden.
Brooks has run 24-hour ultramarathons four times. He was the only entrant to show up at one such race in Bar Harbor this summer.
Over a day and a night he ran 416 laps around a quarter-mile loop. Near the end Brooks was so sore and tired that the race director, a man he’d never met, was changing his socks and shoes for him.
More difficult still, he says, are 100-mile trail races. “It’s so much harder than a road race. You’re out there in the middle of the night trying to find your way in the woods.” Glow sticks light the way through water, mud and tree roots.
The Vermont 100 trail run was Brooks’ most difficult race, the only one he hasn’t finished. He quit at mile 89.
“It’s good. It kind of humbles you a little bit,” Brooks said. “Two weeks later I said, ‘I’m going to go back and do it.'”
And he did, twice.
/////No. 100
Brooks’ will run his 100th marathon on Saturday, Sept. 20, at the Wright/Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The next day he and friends will run the Lewis and Clark marathon in St. Charles, Mo.
For his milestone race, he requested race placard 100 for his chest, but someone had already snagged it. He got No. 99 instead.
His next major challenge – aside from a 48-hour run on Dec. 30 – is getting picked to run Kiehl’s Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile race through Death Valley.
Runners have to apply for a spot, and two of Brooks’ racing friends have been picked in past years. “My turn is next year, hopefully,” Brooks said.
He has pictures of one friend, an orthopedic surgeon, running this past July. Temperatures reached 133 degrees. The runner is bent over a pair of hiking poles, looking miserable. Brooks ran 80 miles of the race with him for encouragement.
If he runs the race next summer, he’ll raise money for Camp Sunshine in Casco.
Brooks’ wife, Denise, a registered nurse, picks and chooses the marathons she watches her husband run. With osteoarthritis in his knees and toes, Brooks said he has had doctors encourage him not to run so much.
But he’s going to keep trucking. He told Denise he’d like to run a marathon in each state one more time. “She says, ‘I get to go to Hawaii again? That’s great.'”
He has 30 states to go.
kskelton@sunjournal.com
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