Number 49 was the Fargo Marathon on 20 May 2023. I finished in 4:09:19, 400th out of 966 finishers, 10th of 52 in my age group. I was on track for sub 4 hours until mile 22, but then I slowed down to smell the roses. Rachael ran the half in 3:05. There were over 2000 folks running the half and 1500 in the 10K. Wonderful to see the community support for marahon week!

This was my fastest run in 5 years. I am not dead yet. I followed a training schedule, which unfortunately only had long runs up to 20 miles, so I guess that the full marathon was bit far. On the other hand, I didn't hurt myself and the last few miles are always a pain. Actually getting to 22 miles before breaking down is pretty good. I have also been "racing" at the Himmel park run this Spring, so my speed is up a bit. Racing is in quotes because times are terrible at my age. To be depressingly honest, however, the biggest change relative to recent runs is that I brought my weight down to 173, which is still 10 pounds heavier than optimal, but also 10 pounds less than it sometimes gets up to. I did this mostly by cutting back on alcohol, otherwise my diet is good. Apparently, Benjamin Franklin was wrong.

Here is a photo of me just before entering the FargoDome at the finish, I'm in a bit of pain.

Rachael walked the half-marathon, she is a lot more chipper her finishing shot.

We took an Uber to the airport the day after the race. The driver, Michael, had lived his entire life on farms in the Fargo area. He still lived about 30 miles outside of town, but had come into the big city on a Sunday morning to make some extra cash. He asked if we were doing the 50 states, when I said that we were he asked "Which one was this?" "49" I replied. He said, "Yes, that's where North Dakota always lands."

Getting from Tucson to Fargo was a bit of a problem. Once in Fargo, my facebook feed started getting adds for the airport shuttle to Minneapolis, which would have been an option. I had some unused credits on Frontier, however. Frontier's flights (3 times a week) to Fargo originate in Denver, so we decided to make a miniadventure out of the whole trip and drive to Denver. The obvious stop over would be in Santa Fe or Taos, but having been there before we landed on a trip to Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

Pagosa Springs is named for the hot springs that bubble up in a resort downtown. Insanely, the resort charges $600 per night. For about 1/3 that price, we booked the most amazing Air B&B we have ever seen, a cabin on a hill, as shown here

Here is the view from the deck

This marathon project is a weird sort of tourism, many things have changed since the first trip 25 years ago. The emergence of Uber and Air B&B have certainly been one of the more amazing and wonderful innovations. We stayed in Air B&B in both Pagosa Springs and Fargo, the Fargo version was a dumpy little apartment 1 block from the the corner of Broadway and 1st. Both were vastly better than hotels, it's wonderful that Air B&B exists. The cabin in Pagosa was one of three on the hill top, built expressly to AirB&B, the studio in Fargo was one of 9 rooms in a downtown building that would otherwise be vacant. Here is a shot on the street outside the Fargo room.

The first day in Pagosa Springs we into town and took in the riverwalk along the San Juan. The river was running fairly high with the great snow pack of this past winter.

In the center of Pagosa, the Spring resort has 20 pools with various temperatures, but charges $65 per person to enter. That's a bit steep for something we would do for 45 minutes. There are, famously, hippy dippy pools along the river where one can warm up for free. We elected to go to the Overlook Spring across the street, for $24, where we watched the world go by from the roof pool.

The next day we drove to the Poison Springs trailhead for a hike in the San Juan's. We had been advised at the Vistor Center in town to choose a lower elevation hiking along the Piedra river trail, but we wanted a view and thought we would see how high we could get. We took the Weminuche trail out of the Poison Park trailhead, which was spectacular, as shown here

There were enormous aspens growing along the trail

The trail actually wanders down into a valley along private land from the trailhead, so we were moving away from the snowpack, but not the runoff. 3 miles in we came to an impassable stream crossing, shown below, and had to turn back.

We flew to Fargo the next day.

Friday we took a walk around town, ending at the El Zagal par 3 golf course. El Zagal is a Masonic Shrine group founded in Fargo. Apparently there are many things happening in this world that surpass common understanding. We also came acrous a paved 20 pit horseshoe facility with grandstands in Fargo. The golf course was a blast.

The Fargo marathon starts in the FargoDome, which is super nice. Here are folks in line to drop their bags

and here is Rachael in the corral for the the start of the half marathon.

The marathon course is wonderful, passing through lots of residential neighborhoods, it crosses the Red River into Moorhead to visit Concordia College and Moorhead State before coming up Broadway in downtown Fargo to loop back to the FargoDome. The weather was fantastic, with a cosy start in the FargoDome heading out to mid 40's at the start and low 70's at the finish. The finish line is on the jumbo screen in the dome and the commentary is fun, here I am with the hardware at the end.

The lower 48 is in the books. No big hurry to finish the last two, hopefully I will remain marathon capable for a another few years.