Brady McDonald Ran a 50K in All 50 States in 50 Consecutive Days

Brady McDonald finished his 50th 50K in Honolulu on Sept. 12, completing a run of that distance in all 50 states on 50 consecutive days, and then spent one more day on the part that was actually the point. He posted a total of $953,000 when he stopped running. The fundraiser went past $1 million the following day.

Make-A-Wish puts the average cost of granting a wish at $10,000, and McDonald’s campaign counted at that rate the whole way, which is how the target became 100 children rather than a sum of money.

Fifty States, 13,000 Miles of Driving and No Rest Days

He started near Orlando on July 25 and covered 1,553 miles on foot from there, with no day off anywhere in the schedule. His wife Kristy, their two daughters and the family dog travelled with him in an RV for roughly 13,000 miles by the campaign’s count, and a second RV carried a film crew putting an episode on YouTube every day. Alaska and Hawaii were flights.

A state border most nights is a harder problem than 31 miles, and McDonald told Hawaii News Now in July that he had timed the runs and the drives state by state before leaving, and that his wife had the authority to end the whole thing and get him to a hospital if she judged it necessary. The morning runs were free and open to anyone, at any distance.

Dean Karnazes Set This Record in 2006 and Lost It in June

McDonald says nobody has done this at 50K before him, and no governing body ratifies a claim of that kind. The format itself is 20 years old. Dean Karnazes ran a marathon in every state across 50 consecutive days in 2006, from St. Louis on Sept. 17 to the New York City Marathon on Nov. 5, though only eight of those were staged races on their own dates; for the other 42 states he ran certified courses on days of his own choosing. Tomasz Sobania took the mark off him this summer, covering all 50 states in 49 days between the Golden Gate Bridge and Times Square and finishing on June 27, four weeks before McDonald set out. What McDonald changed is the daily distance. A 50K is 31.07 miles against a marathon’s 26.2, and over 50 days that gap comes to 243 miles, another nine marathons on top of what either man ran.

Three years ago McDonald did not run at all. He has said he stopped drinking in 2023, and his first ultra came that May at the Keys Ultras in Florida, where he ran the 50-miler in 10:41:13 for second place overall, more than three hours behind the winner Katalin Nagy. Five races after that his lifetime total in ultras stood at 759 miles, the Moab 240 in 101:48:02 and the Arizona Monster 300 in March among them. He then ran twice that lifetime figure in 50 days.

The Children Behind the 100 Wishes

Wish recipients joined him on the road in several states. FOX 35 Orlando asked him about one of them, a boy named Ryder, and McDonald said seeing that wish granted was what made the size of the thing clear. “We got to see firsthand and we really understood the massive amount of impact,” he said. A second child, Isaak, had his wish granted before the run and died while it was under way. “Let’s tell Isaak’s story from the mountaintops and from Mount Rushmore and from the deserts,” McDonald told the station.

On the mornings he did not want to get out of the RV, he said he fell back on an argument he could not get around. “Just tell myself like, listen, we’re doing this for kids that are in hospital beds that don’t get to choose their pain,” McDonald told FOX 35 Orlando. “They don’t get to choose the end date to it. They didn’t choose their suffering. I do get to choose it.”

The fundraiser is still open. The campaign is counting toward wish 101, at the same $10,000 a child.