September started with an idea that felt like a dare. Two-hundred and fifty kilometers in one month. When I first said it out loud, even to myself, it sounded like nonsense, like a made-up number that belonged to someone else, someone who runs ultras and has a running coach and posts pictures of their calves on Instagram. Not me. Not the guy who maybe, on a good week, had strung together a couple of 10Ks earlier this year. Not the guy juggling family, work stress, and the kind of anxiety that can make even stepping out the door feel like climbing Everest.

But something in me wanted that number. It wasn’t random. Two-fifty felt like a line in the sand, a point of no return. Hit that, and I’d prove to myself that I could be more than just a guy chasing running streaks and nursing shin splints. I could be the guy who pushes into uncomfortable territory, who bites off something ridiculous and somehow chews it down.

So I set the goal. And that goal, it turns out, dictated everything about September.

The first runs felt fine, the way beginnings usually do. I was fresh, optimistic, and convinced that maybe this wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. Ten kilometers here, twelve there, a couple of back-to-back runs. But soon enough, the math became real. If I wanted to hit 250K, I couldn’t just run when I felt like it. I had to run almost every day. And not little jogs. Not a couple laps around the neighborhood. Ten kilometers. Minimum. Day after day.

I ended up taking four days off in the entire month. Four. Which means I strung together nineteen 10K-plus runs in thirty days. There was a stretch where I did seven or eight straight 10K runs in a row, no break, just waking up sore and deciding, well, here we go again. And honestly? That’s where the shift happened. When you run tired, when you lace up knowing it’s going to hurt, you find a new version of yourself. I found mine somewhere around run number ten, when my legs screamed, and my ankle started to feel like it was being pried off my body, but I kept going anyway.

The ankle thing—it’s been this ongoing battle. Right where the shin meets the ankle, there’s this muscle that just doesn’t want to play along. I kept telling myself it wasn’t an injury. Injury is sharp, it’s wrong, it tells you to stop. This wasn’t that. This was pain. Stubborn, nagging pain, the kind that says, “Stretch me, roll me, ice me, but don’t you dare quit.” So I didn’t. I limped some days, I cursed most days, but I didn’t stop.

And something wild happened in the mirror. For the first time in forever, I actually noticed real change. My body started to look different. The extra runs carved out lines I hadn’t seen before. The guy staring back at me was starting to hint at abs. Not the full six-pack, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but a solid four-pack brewing under there. It was enough to make me laugh, to smirk at myself. Because who would’ve thought? The anxious, shin-splint-plagued, middle-of-life guy pulling off a four-pack. That’s the power of mileage. It chisels more than your legs.

And then, the big one. The number that mattered. I didn’t just scrape across the line. I didn’t just tap out at 250 and collapse. No, I finished September at 251 kilometers. That extra one kilometer was symbolic. It wasn’t a lot, but it was everything. It said, “You didn’t just make it, you owned it.” That single kilometer was the cherry on a month of grind, the exclamation point at the end of a sentence I wasn’t sure I could finish.

So here I am, sitting with this number, this accomplishment, and realizing it’s not the end. It’s the beginning. Because in the middle of this crazy month, I also signed up for marathon number two. Fredericton, May 11, 2026. I’ve run it before, but this time feels different. I’m coming in with more base, more confidence, and a new understanding of what it takes to put in the work. When you’ve stacked up 251 kilometers in a month, 42.2 doesn’t seem as impossible. Hard, sure, but not impossible.

And then the foolish dream showed up.

One night, scrolling through videos, I stumbled onto a clip of a couple guys tackling the Fundy Footpath. Sixty-four kilometers of rugged New Brunswick coastline, a trail so gnarly most people hike it in three to four days. These maniacs? They ran it in one. And not just that—they added on another twenty kilometers by running to and from the trailhead. Eighty-four kilometers in 24 hours.

Now, any normal person would’ve watched that and thought, “Cool. Good for them. Not for me.” But my brain doesn’t work that way. My brain went, “Huh. That looks kinda fun.”

So now I’ve got this idea lodged in my head: what if I try it? Not the extra 20K—let’s not get insane (yet). But the 64 kilometers of the Fundy Footpath, start to finish, in 24 hours. Run it, suffer through it, see if I can survive it. It’s stupid. It’s reckless. It’s beautiful. And the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

The timing even lines up. The marathon in May, then a month later, the summer solstice. June 21st or 22nd. The longest day of the year. Maximum daylight. Perfect for attempting something that’s equal parts insane and inspiring. My marathon becomes the training run. My body, tuned and sharpened, gets thrown into the fire of the footpath.

Of course, I’m not naïve. I know what that trail is. Rugged, technical, relentless. Roots, rocks, elevation, bugs, mud, maybe even the ocean laughing at me along the way. It’s not a paved road with aid stations and cheering crowds. It’s solitude and grit. It’s eating food that doesn’t want to go down. It’s cramping legs and the mental gymnastics of convincing yourself to keep moving when everything screams stop.

And that’s the point. That’s what makes it matter.

Somewhere in the middle of dreaming this up, another thought hit me. What if this wasn’t just about me? What if I tied it to something bigger? A fundraiser. A challenge for a cause. Take the miles and make them mean something beyond my own stubbornness. Maybe raise money for mental health, or for local programs, or something that ties back to why I even started running in the first place—to keep my own head above water. There’s a poetry to it. Running hurts, life hurts, but turning that hurt into help? That’s worth chasing.

Of course, there’s the humor in all this too. I can already picture myself, somewhere around kilometer fifty, hallucinating about cheeseburgers, arguing with a tree, and wondering why I didn’t just pick up golf instead. I can imagine cursing at gels that taste like melted cough syrup, swatting at blackflies, and trying to find the perfect flat rock to sit on while pretending I’m just “taking in the view.” These are the stories you laugh about later, once the pain has faded. The suffering turns into legend, the kind you tell at parties, leaving out the part where you almost cried into your electrolyte drink.

The truth is, this whole month of September has been a shift. It’s been about proving that momentum matters. That discipline, repeated daily, doesn’t just build stronger legs—it builds a stronger mind. Every time I went out the door when I didn’t want to, I carved away at doubt. Every time I pushed through pain, I added a layer of toughness. Every kilometer was a brick in a wall I didn’t know I could build.

And now, standing on the other side of it, I feel like I’ve found something. Something that was missing before. Not just the numbers on the watch, not just the mileage in Strava, but the belief that I can take on stupid, foolish goals and somehow, some way, make them real.

So September ends, 251 kilometers behind me, marathon training ahead of me, and a foolish dream waiting in the summer.

Dreams start as ideas that sound ridiculous. This one is no different. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that ridiculous ideas, when chased with stubbornness, humor, and heart, have a way of turning into stories worth telling. And that’s all I’m trying to do—live stories worth telling.