Greg Brown
Arlington, Virginia
Born 1960 in St Paul, Minnesota
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I consider myself very fortunate to be able to integrate my running with a lifetime of international travel. My three-decade military/government career included 15 years living abroad and countless deployments. During my pursuit of 100,000 miles, I created an additional goal of running in a 100 different countries and territories which I achieved in 2019 (am now at 102). I have logged more than 1,000 miles each in England, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Israel.
I have a lifetime best 1:23 Half Marathon and 2:59 Marathon (1999 London). My super power is clearly not world-class speed so it has to be my ability to avoid running injuries. I have only missed 20 days in 44 years due to running injuries: two bouts of ITB-both of which I of course tried to run through every day until I was hard broken. There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere but I’ll be darned if I can figure out what it is.
I’ve been spoiled to live in two of the great running cities in the US. I grew up in the Twin Cities and went to college at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I now live in Arlington VA, just on the other side of the Potomac River from Washington DC.
My wife, Beth, and I have been together for almost 30 years and she’s probably run 20,000 of those miles with me. As we’re both a bit type A, we previously ran our races separately. As an experiment, in 2008 we ran the Rome Marathon together (not ruling out we might be divorced by mile 2!). By refocusing on the experience and not the stopwatch, we had so much fun that we have run all our subsequent marathons (and 1 ultra) together.
Joining this group of runners on this crazy website has long been a motivating factor for me. Thanks to everyone for your inspiration!