Recently, I went on another outing with City Running Tours, this time in Chicago. After the great run I had in New York, I was looking forward to seeing another city on foot with the guided expertise of CRT. This time things were a bit different, to be sure. We started the run at Millennium Park, running past Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion, and on towards Grant Park. As we ran with our guide, Marlin Keesler, he asked about my then-recent marathon, and how many I’d done. “Three,” I replied, trying not to sound too proud. Likewise, I asked him if he was a marathoner and how many he’d run. He sort of grinned. “Sixty,” he said. I damn near fell off BP Bridge. Here was a stocky guy who claimed to be out of shape and to hate running—a mantra I adopt, particularly when running in the morning—yet made marathoning a habit. As I would find out, it was far more than that.
As Chicago faded into the dwindling light of the winter afternoon, and the twinkling lights of the city's famous architecture emerged with the brightest of the night's stars, we kept running and chatting—to keep warm, if nothing else. The area around which we’d intended to run had been covered on a recent boat tour, so there was little I needed in the way of information about downtown Chicago anyway.
We ran towards Soldier Field and Marlin discussed how his running habit came to be, how it was about far more than merely fitness or personal accomplishment. Marlin is, first and foremost, a family man. That is evident in the way he talks about his wife, Jeanne, and his kids, Austin and Erin. Austin and Erin were both diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, a type of high-functioning autism. Their behavior at a young age troubled their parents as schooling and social interaction both proved difficult.
Marlin and his wife decided that something had to change. He was working late shifts for Continental Airlines in Chicago and was seldom around to help Jeanne with the kids. Having run the Honolulu marathon just to see if he could, Marlin slowly caught the bug. Though he professes to hate running, he became fixated on the idea of the Fifty States and DC Marathon Group. Yes, it's every bit as insane as it sounds. To become eligible, you must first run a marathon in at least 10 states—D.C. counts—on your way to running a marathon or ultramarathon in all 51 places.
At first, Marlin simply wanted his kids to experience the wonder of travel and for them to see their dad accomplish something with them at the finish line so they wouldn’t see him simply as an “absent dad”. Along the way, Marlin and Jeanne saw how well Austin and Erin reacted to traveling. As the kids learned more and more about the places they went, the Keeslers became a family unit once again, bonded through the motion and excitement and stimulation of travel around the US. What started simply as a personal goal for Marlin became a family’s quest not only to travel the country, but to help their dad whose only wish was to help them.
Not only was I inspired—and impressed—by Marlin as a fellow marathoner, but also as a fellow traveler. It takes guts and strong will to run a marathon, let alone dozens of them. However, it takes true courage to pick up a troubled family to embark on a journey whose outcome is entirely unforeseeable and trust in the love of a family and the powerful novelty of travel.
To learn more about the Keesler’s family quest, please visit Our Life on the Run.
