Scott Kline was a lawyer. By age 50, he was burnt out. He wanted to spend more time with his youngest son Andrew, so he decided that he would retire.
The thing he didn’t think about much was that his son was in school seven hours a day. How would he fill those seven hours? He had no friends who were retired. He didn’t want to take up golf.
Maybe running? It was something he could do alone, as much or as little as he wanted. He had run the Boston Marathon when he was at law school at Harvard, back in 1987. He hadn’t run a step since.
Kline, who lives in Dallas, started running. He signed up for the Dallas Marathon in 2013, never dreaming where the simple act of signing up for a 26.2-mile race would lead him.
On Saturday, Kline, 60, will complete his quest to run a marathon in 50 states, at the Eversource Hartford Marathon. He picked Connecticut as his last state because he was an undergrad at Yale and spent some happy times in the area.
In 10 years, he has run 60 marathons. His son is in college now, at SMU. His wife, Michele Schwartz, also a lawyer, also now retired, has accompanied Kline to most of his races.
“It’s been a crazy quest,” Schwartz said. “But it’s been a lot of fun. It’s fun to see the different states.”
“She’s a trooper,” Kline said. “Even our dog’s been to about 15 of them. The dog and Michele are my pit crew.”
When Kline was at Harvard, the Harvard running club got a bunch of bibs for the Boston Marathon (imagine that, but this was 1987), so he decided to run it. Then life got in the way, and he didn’t think about running again until 25 years later.
“I thought, ‘I’ll do another (marathon) and see how it goes,’ ” Kline said. “That led to this ridiculous odyssey of continually trying to improve my times. Ultimately my wife retired. We got this idea to start traveling around the country to go to races.
“I’m not that great a runner, so it became less of a running project the more we started going to races around the country — especially smaller, out-of-the-way races. We met incredibly nice, wonderful people and that’s what we got addicted to. We kept thinking, ‘The country’s so divided, everybody hates each other,’ then we’d go to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and met a bunch of people who were so happy that a guy had come from Texas to support their charity. It really kind of renewed my faith in people. That’s really why the 50-state thing happened.”
Ironically, his first marathon in Dallas was canceled due to an ice storm. He found another in Las Vegas at the Hoover Dam and ran that one. He did about 15 more states before he realized the 50 States Marathon Club was a thing.
He ran a marathon in Hawaii in January and midway through the race, his foot started to hurt a lot. He hobbled through the rest of the race and when he got home, he was informed he had a broken metatarsal. Luckily, he was able to recover in time for an April marathon.
He missed one race — due to flight issues — in Rhode Island. As the end got closer, Kline became a little more obsessed with travel plans. He flew into Hartford Thursday just in case.
Three years ago, he figured he should probably step up his game if he was going to finish in a reasonable amount of time. Of course, COVID-19 wiped out much of the race schedule in 2020 and some of 2021.
“Given my age, I was like, ‘You can’t do two a year and finish this,’ so I’ve averaged about one a month over the last few years,” Kline said. “I try to treat every third race like a race I’m running for time. The others I treat more like long runs plus six miles at the end.”
He usually finishes anywhere between 4 hours and 4:45ish.
A few weeks ago, he flew into Hartford, went to New Hampshire to run the Clarence DeMar Marathon in Keene Sept. 24, hung around in New England for a week, then headed to Maine for the Portland Marathon Oct. 1 and was happy his body held up for back-to-back marathons. Then he flew out of Hartford to Dallas.
“I’m very familiar with Bradley (Airport),” he said.
In West Virginia last November, he met a fellow runner who was struggling. It was a two-loop course and Michael Corbett of Dayton, Ohio, had completed one loop and was looking for company on the second. He and Kline started running together and 13.1 miles later, they were friends.
Corbett is coming to Hartford to run with him.
“He wanted to pay back the favor,” Kline said.
And this is why he continued on this crazy odyssey. Although now that it’s almost over, he’s feeling a little nostalgic.
“Not that I’m sad it’s almost done, but I’m getting a little sentimental,” he said. “It’s been a cool way to meet people and see the country.”