I moved up on the Mega Marathon List.

There’s a running club in Japan that maintains something called the Mega Marathon List.  It’s a ranking worldwide ranking of the runners who have completed the most marathons and ultramarathons in their lifetimes.

To get onto the list, you need to finish at least 300 marathons.  I qualified for the list in 2015, when I ran my 300th marathon at the Harpeth Hills Flying Monkey Marathon in Tennessee.

Getting on the list was one of my lifetime goals.  Since then, I haven’t paid that much attention to my ranking.  I usually rank somewhere around 500, but that varies from one year to the next.  In addition to the worldwide list, there’s also a North American list.  My ranking on this list is usually close to 100.

From 2013 through 2015, I was running more than 50 marathons a year.  Since then, I’ve cut back.  In some years, I wasn’t running as many marathons as the other runners on this list, so I had no expectation of climbing in the rankings.

The lists are usually updated twice a year, but there wasn’t any midyear update last year.  At the time, nearly all marathons were cancelled, so there didn’t seem to be much point in updating the lists.  Since then, small races have started to come back, but it varies widely, depending on where you live.

I just received a copy of the North American list, which was updated at the end of 2020.  I haven’t seen the worldwide list yet, but I was surprised to learn that I’ve climbed all the way to 68 on the North American list.  That’s up 21 spots from a year ago.  Here’s a link to it, if you’re interested:

http://megamarathonlist.com/

It seems that most of the runners on this list did few, if any, races last year.  I actually ran more races than I planned, mostly because of two multi-day series of races.  Because of that, I expected to move up a few spots, but I was still shocked to move up as much as I did.

I expect 2020 to be an aberration.  I probably won’t move up at all this year.  I only have one race scheduled.  After that, I plan to take a break, so I can heal from a lingering knee injury.  I may yet have a normal race schedule in the second half of the year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t run any other races before the summer.

One thing about this list still amuses me.  Although I moved up quite a bit in the North American rankings, I haven’t moved up at all within my home state.  I still rank 7th in Minnesota.