Tim Corcoran is back on the road. His GPS is flashing madly as he makes his way west on an out-of-the-way, very slightly used road three hours outside of Fort Collins. As usual, he is laughing himself silly.
He is a man given to making lists and methodically checking each item off. That explains this desolate stretch of road — “the real boondocks,” he calls it — and why it has taken him the better part of a week to drive to Fort Collins from his home in Cincinnati. Years ago, he decided to drive or walk each of the 3,141 counties in the United States.
“I’ve got 450 counties left to go,” he says, laughing near-hysterically that his daughter, Laura Corcoran Holcroft, told of this obsession.
Tim Corcoran will check off the last item on his oldest and most-dear personal list Sunday when he runs the Colorado Marathon in Fort Collins, becoming one of about 300 people to have run one in all 50 states.
He will be exactly 64 1/2 years old when he steps to the line, completing a journey that he says began in 1993 after his fifth marathon.
There was a fifth only because he decided he couldn’t quit — even though he had vowed he would — after his fourth, the course in Big Sur, Calif., having just beaten him down.
“I was so tired after that one and in such pain. I was done,” Corcoran says. The fifth one went so well that he told himself he would just keep running as long as his body allowed.
His job as a computer programmer gives him the opportunity to drive the country, to jump into a marathon if there is time. Sunday’s will be his 75th.
“He is so determined to get this done,” his daughter says. “Two days before his last marathon in New Mexico (in March), he stepped on a needle. The ER had to dig it out. He still ran.”
The odd thing, she says, is she doesn’t remember her father doing athletic things when she was growing up.
“And then one day, he joins a running club . . .,” she says. “I don’t know if the craziness of raising four kids got to him or not. He’s just the kind of guy who sets goals, who likes to go to different places and is challenged by life.”
He has averaged about four marathons a year. His 50-state checklist was endangered only once, 10 years ago, when he set out to run one in Dallas. It was the only one he started and did not finish.
“I knew about halfway through that something wasn’t right, that I better stop,” he says. “Turns out, I had a hernia. I went back the next year and finished it.”
He is worried about Sunday. Every marathon, he says, is hard. This one, though, will be attended by Laura and two of her brothers, two of his sisters, some cousins, his girlfriend — and a few buddies from his old running club in South Bend, Ind., who will run with him.
“I don’t want to do something stupid out there,” Corcoran says. “I’m getting old and getting slow. The altitude could make things a little slower, but I’m so slow already, it won’t make much of a difference.”
So will this be his last marathon?
“I’m still having fun,” he says, “plus there are a few new ones out there I haven’t run because I didn’t want to mess up the 50-states thing. I’m not done.”
He informs, laughing wildly, that he has just crossed into his seventh county of the day.
“I just want to get to Fort Collins now,” Tim Corcoran says, not wanting to jinx himself when asked about the significance of running a race in his 50th state. “Even today, I don’t know fully that I’m going to get all 50 in. Ask me again in three days.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
