Goal: A Half Marathon in Every Country in the EU

by Felix Wong | 13 Jun 2023

After finishing running a full marathon in each of the 50 U.S. states, I thought about future goals.

One will be completing the six marathon majors, of which I have already completed three. Another is to continue running at least one marathon a year, something I have done since 2001. (I ran my first 26.2-miler in 1999, but did not run one in 2000.)

In addition, to take advantage of living in Spain, I’d like to run a half-marathon in all countries in the European Union. Currently, there are 27.

Criteria

For this particular goal, I will count the following:

• Any run of at least 21.1 kilometers (13.1 miles). I’ll define run as “an activity where I ran at least 90% of the time.”
• The run must include at least 21.1 kilometers in the country I am checking off if the run crossed borders.
• The run does not need to be an organized race, but it does need to be timed and tracked using GPS and published on, say, Strava.
• Published time will be the moving time, as long as there was a good faith effort to only stop for traffic, red lights, or stop signs.

I like the above critieria because it is much more flexible and inexpensive than having to always sign up for official races. I could run the distance any time I find myself in a new country. It also would not signficantly affect plans with travel partners. I could simply wake up two hours earlier than them and bust out the distance.

The Countries