Maria Chevalier started running because she kept getting benched in every other sport. No hand-eye coordination, no real athletic identity, just a kid who got sent to run laps as a punishment and discovered she actually liked it. Her dad ran cross country. She figured she'd give it a shot.

That was the beginning of something she's still in the middle of.

Forty-eight states later, seventeen Boston Marathons later, one very memorable 3 a.m. start in downtown Boston later, Maria is the kind of runner who makes you reconsider whatever excuse you've been sitting on. Not because she's preachy about it. Because she's genuinely having the time of her life.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or other podcast platforms.

Maria is two states away from running a marathon in all fifty. Alaska and Hawaii are saved intentionally — both are going to be proper trips, the kind you plan around the experience rather than just the race. But the 48 that came before have given her something harder to quantify than a list of finisher medals.

She's seen what running does to people when the miles stretch out and the small talk runs dry. She calls it the dashboard effect — something about being side by side instead of face to face, looking ahead together, that makes people open up in ways they wouldn't anywhere else. She's spent hours next to strangers who told her things they'd probably never said out loud before. She doesn't know most of their last names.

The 50 States wasn't just a project for Maria. It was a way to actually see the country, eat the local food, drink the local beer, find something worth appreciating in places she never would have chosen otherwise. Kansas gave her a mud-soaked 50K she still talks about. Iowa gave her Willie Nelson. Marine Corps gave her one of the most emotional mornings she's ever had on a course.

Every marathon has its own personality if you're paying attention.

A few weeks before this conversation, Maria ran the Boston Marathon twice in the same day. The first time starting at 3 a.m., in reverse, from the finish line in Boston out to Hopkinton. A few hours of rest, some ramen, a pair of compression boots, and then back to the start line with everyone else for the actual race.

52.4 miles total. Her legs felt fine the next morning.

She describes the 3 a.m. start with the same energy most people use to describe something they can't believe they got to do. The Midnight Riders sending them off down Boylston Street. The porta potties fresh and untouched. The quiet that eventually gives way to a kind of focus that feels a lot like the start of an ultra. She kept turning to her friend Carolyn and saying, aren't we the luckiest?

The second marathon she ran grinning the whole way. Didn't want it to end.

Maria has navigated a lot that had nothing to do with running. Four wrist reconstructions during college that redirected a path she thought was set. Medical circumstances that took away choices she'd assumed were hers. A DNF at Vermont 100 at mile 65 that felt, for a minute, like proof that she couldn't do it.

She went back nine more times before she finished.

What she's landed on isn't a mantra or a framework. It's more like a posture. She doesn't wake up looking for what's hard. She wakes up genuinely aware of how good things are, how much she has, how many people have let her into their lives in ways she didn't expect and didn't take for granted. The hard stuff taught her that. But the hard stuff isn't what she leads with.

There's a moment in this conversation where she's describing what she said to her surgeon in the pre-op room — he asked why she runs so much, and she told him it's her way of talking back to her own body, proving to herself that she can when everything is telling her she can't. It's a striking thing to hear. Not because it's dramatic, but because it's so plainly true for her. Running isn't therapy or punishment or identity armor. It's just the clearest way she knows how to say yes to her own life.

Jon brings up a book called The Gap and the Gain during this conversation and Maria latches onto it immediately. The idea is simple: most of us spend our energy measuring the distance between where we are and where we want to be, when the more useful thing is to look back at how far we've actually come.

For someone who has run 48 marathons in 48 states, finished her first hundred on a quiet reservoir loop in Boulder that almost nobody knew about, and crossed the Boston finish line seventeen times, looking back covers a lot of ground.

She's not done though. Vermont 100 is coming up. Manchester Monadnock 55 is next weekend. Hawaii and Alaska are being planned. And somewhere in there she's going to keep doing what she's been doing since ninth grade — just running, talking to strangers, finding out what people are made of when the miles get long enough.

🎧 Listen to the full episode with Dan Green on For The Long Run wherever you get your podcasts.

Stay Connected

Subscribe to the For the Long Run newsletter and follow the show on Instagram.

Jon is a runner, cyclist, and podcast host from Boston, MA, who now lives in Boulder, CO. For The Long Run is aimed at exploring the why behind what keeps runners running long, strong, and motivated.

Follow Jon on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.