July 25, 2024 • 10 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Karen Thomson and her son Joe Meilink are the definition of determination. Here they are along with Joe’s wife, Vicky, to share their story
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories, and up next
a listener's story Aaron Thompson and her son Joe Milink
of the definition of determination. Here they are along with
Joe's wife Vicky, to share their story.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I've always said we're kind of a strangely competitive family.
And the other thing about our family is we're very active.
Our vocation to us is backpacking. I wouldn't say we
do extreme sports, but we we do. We do like
to push it.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Yeah, it's it's kind of weird because, you know, it's
just something that we did. I really enjoy run a lot,
you know, It's something that we set out to do
a while ago. You know, we were just running marathons
and we realized that we had knocked off so many states,
and one moment where it was like, oh, we have
you know, ten or twelve states already knocked off.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
And that's when Joe said, well, why don't we try
to do all fifty states? And at the time I
said sure, let's just yeah, why not, let's do it.
And so what happened was kind of before the pandemic,
we said we probably need to pick up the pace.
No pun intended there, and then my daughter in law,
(01:37):
Vicky is the one who organizes everything. We could not
have done it without Vicki because she's our pit crew
extraordinary and she lines everything up. But we would turn
it into like many vacations like Alaska, that was a
family vacation and some of the family ran a half,
but Joe and I ran the full and that's where
(01:58):
we saw the moose. It was this little guy that
kept running ahead of us and dropping back, and he's
running ahead of us and he sees the moose and
he just kind of stops and looks around. And there
was this other guy who was big football player kind
of guy, and he says, it's okay, and he puts
out his arms and just kind of walked us all
(02:20):
through the moose passage right there. But you want to
tell about how you broke your leg in why was it? Montana? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:28):
I broke my leg around about five or six and
then shuffle walked the last twenty miles of it in
pure pain. But I was determined not to have to
go back to Montana.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
We're knocking off that state, so because if you don't finish,
she got to go back to that state. And we
were happy to be able to finish that, but he
wasn't quite a bit of pain.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Yeah, I mean it was hurting before the marathon quite
a bit, and I pretty much stopped running for about
two weeks. The pain subsided a little bit, but right
away when we started, I knew it wasn't going to last.
And then pretty much around mile four five or six,
I just felt you could just feel it pop. I
(03:13):
knew it had it was it was. It wasn't full break.
It was a stress fracture. So but you get but
you felt I felt this moment where it's like blinding
pain that I knew something was wrong, and then it
was just I was, you know, I'm like, okay, I
can get through this. So I I hobbled, so to speak.
(03:34):
They I was obviously I was dead last.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
It took him six hours and forty nine minutes, which
actually that's not bad time when you think about the
broken leg. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
I remember stopping at a rest stop and having you
leave the bathroom and being unable to get out of
the vehicle.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
So another one was Maui. That was wonderful. And when
we finished the marathon and Maui, you go, you walk
right into the ocean. It was just amazing. Yeah, so
I think our our favorites would probably be, well, Maui's mine,
(04:12):
Maui is mine. Alaska, Maine was beautiful too, and that
was our last one. Maine was our very last one.
It was beautiful. We ran into Vicky Hilton, we ran
into Canada, went by Campilo, Teddy Bosebels.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Camp Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
We went by Loveing, Maine is where we were, and
it was just beautiful. Yeah. And we had to bring
our passports because we ran into Canada. So some of
the marathons you run into other countries. So Detroit Detroit
was another one, so you so if you're going to
do that, you have to bring your passport so that
(04:53):
you can but you know, get in, get in and
out of the country. Gosh, can you think of any
other one that you really liked.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
I have a tendency not to remember them at all,
like at all, So I'm like the worst source of
information about them because I don't remember them. They all
blend together. There's certain moments I remember, like the painful ones,
but other than that, they just all seem to blend together.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah. So how many marathons would we do a year?
Speaker 3 (05:23):
About well, at at the high we do five or six.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
So it's really important and helpful to have somebody follow
you through the marathon. Picky brings, she has water, she
has vasoline because that bil because what happens is you
chafe really bad. I remember my very first marathon was
actually in Saint Louis, and somebody would offered, do you
(05:49):
want fasoline? I'm like, well, whatever far And I finished
and it looked like somebody had grabbed my arm and
just held it to It was like, look bruised, but
it was bruised. It was from the rubbing and the
chafing of you know, your arms rubbing against your body.
And I went, oh, and it hurts. I make a mistakes.
It's almost a bruise would feel better, but the chafing
(06:11):
is very painful. So it took us how many years
to do this? Seventeen? It took us seventeen years to
do this. So as time went on, you know, I
got slower and he got faster. Of course I really
never trained. I would run at least four miles a day.
I mean when I say at least, I mean at
(06:32):
least four miles a day. And then before marathon I'm
maybe up at thirteen, you know, not every day, but
just you know, like i'd run a week before, I'd
try to get in a thirteen miler for a while
toward the end, VICKI would run with me to help me,
help me prep, But basically we would just I would
just increase my mile age every day. That's pretty much
(06:54):
all I did to train. Did you ever train, Joe?
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah, I mean I run a lot every week. She's
done running marathons, but I have quite a few more
goals to achieve. So you know, I've run sixty seventy
miles a week for training.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
So yeah, and I'm not sure I'm quite done running marathons,
but maybe I don't know. One of the things we
like to do before a marathon is to go out
and have sushi, and then afterwards, I am very sore.
You've always heard of, you know, be kind of gross.
(07:30):
But you lose toenails, Yes, you do. There were a
couple of years where I wouldn't wear sandals because my
feet looks so horrible. But it kind of feels like
you got the flu, like you got a really bad
case of the flu, where everything's sore. Yeah, that's that's
kind of what it feels like for me, and so
this you know, this too will pass. So yeah, we
(07:54):
got to the point where we started making a point
to finish together. So we would come across the finish
and we join hands and would hold them up high
so and they would have they wouldn't. It's always always
a thrill when they announced us. Actually toward the end,
I kind of just start, you know, visualizing that and
(08:14):
hearing the announcer in my head to kind of get
me through that last part.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
It's like it's almost over.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
It's almost over, and sometimes it's kind of emotional that
you you made it through another twenty six point two miles.
So for my sixtieth birthday, I wanted to do the
m R. It's called the m R three forty and
it's a race down the Missouri River from Kansas City
to Saint Charles. And Joe drove us to Kansas City
(08:41):
and we're sitting in the safety meeting because everybody has
to go to safety meeting because it's kind of a
dangerous thing to do. And I said, oh, this is
a race, and Joseph, yeah, Mom, it's a race. So
my husband and I have an old town canoe and
we paddled it as fast as we could, which is
(09:02):
like paddling a barge, and we made it from Kansas
City to Saint Charles. And the time those four days
that it took us to do it, we slept maybe
seven hours. So you don't sleep. You just keep paddling. Yeah,
just keep going, keep going. Just like a marathon, you
just keep going.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
You just keep going.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
And this year I'm sixty five, so we're going to
do it again. So that's kind of replaced my marathons
for now. We'll see what happens as time goes on.
I still run every day. My husband and I run
every day. And Joe, you want to he's still running.
He's still going to be doing marathons. So yeah, no,
I'm still still doing marathons. You know.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I have a marathon in a couple of weeks here,
so I'm going to keep going. I have quite a
few more to You.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Had a great job on the storytelling by Greg Angler,
and a special thanks to Karen Thompson and her son
Joe Milink, along with Joe's wife Vicki their story and
the kids in the background. Well, they in their own way,
shared their story too, they'd run marathons in twelve states,
and in came that suggestion. Every family knows that person
who suggests something like this, Hey, let's do all fifty,
(10:13):
and what do you know? They do it, and they
finish them all over a seventeen year period, treating each
one like a family vacation, with family rituals including that
sushi meal, and coming to the finish line as a
family holding their hands up. A remarkable and beautiful listeners story.
Here on our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories, and up next
a listener's story Aaron Thompson and her son Joe Milink
of the definition of determination. Here they are along with
Joe's wife Vicky, to share their story.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
I've always said we're kind of a strangely competitive family.
And the other thing about our family is we're very active.
Our vocation to us is backpacking. I wouldn't say we
do extreme sports, but we we do. We do like
to push it.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
Yeah, it's it's kind of weird because, you know, it's
just something that we did. I really enjoy run a lot,
you know, It's something that we set out to do
a while ago. You know, we were just running marathons
and we realized that we had knocked off so many states,
and one moment where it was like, oh, we have
you know, ten or twelve states already knocked off.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
And that's when Joe said, well, why don't we try
to do all fifty states? And at the time I
said sure, let's just yeah, why not, let's do it.
And so what happened was kind of before the pandemic,
we said we probably need to pick up the pace.
No pun intended there, and then my daughter in law,
(01:37):
Vicky is the one who organizes everything. We could not
have done it without Vicki because she's our pit crew
extraordinary and she lines everything up. But we would turn
it into like many vacations like Alaska, that was a
family vacation and some of the family ran a half,
but Joe and I ran the full and that's where
(01:58):
we saw the moose. It was this little guy that
kept running ahead of us and dropping back, and he's
running ahead of us and he sees the moose and
he just kind of stops and looks around. And there
was this other guy who was big football player kind
of guy, and he says, it's okay, and he puts
out his arms and just kind of walked us all
(02:20):
through the moose passage right there. But you want to
tell about how you broke your leg in why was it? Montana? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (02:28):
I broke my leg around about five or six and
then shuffle walked the last twenty miles of it in
pure pain. But I was determined not to have to
go back to Montana.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
We're knocking off that state, so because if you don't finish,
she got to go back to that state. And we
were happy to be able to finish that, but he
wasn't quite a bit of pain.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Yeah, I mean it was hurting before the marathon quite
a bit, and I pretty much stopped running for about
two weeks. The pain subsided a little bit, but right
away when we started, I knew it wasn't going to last.
And then pretty much around mile four five or six,
I just felt you could just feel it pop. I
(03:13):
knew it had it was it was. It wasn't full break.
It was a stress fracture. So but you get but
you felt I felt this moment where it's like blinding
pain that I knew something was wrong, and then it
was just I was, you know, I'm like, okay, I
can get through this. So I I hobbled, so to speak.
(03:34):
They I was obviously I was dead last.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
It took him six hours and forty nine minutes, which
actually that's not bad time when you think about the
broken leg. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
I remember stopping at a rest stop and having you
leave the bathroom and being unable to get out of
the vehicle.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
So another one was Maui. That was wonderful. And when
we finished the marathon and Maui, you go, you walk
right into the ocean. It was just amazing. Yeah, so
I think our our favorites would probably be, well, Maui's mine,
(04:12):
Maui is mine. Alaska, Maine was beautiful too, and that
was our last one. Maine was our very last one.
It was beautiful. We ran into Vicky Hilton, we ran
into Canada, went by Campilo, Teddy Bosebels.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Camp Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
We went by Loveing, Maine is where we were, and
it was just beautiful. Yeah. And we had to bring
our passports because we ran into Canada. So some of
the marathons you run into other countries. So Detroit Detroit
was another one, so you so if you're going to
do that, you have to bring your passport so that
(04:53):
you can but you know, get in, get in and
out of the country. Gosh, can you think of any
other one that you really liked.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
I have a tendency not to remember them at all,
like at all, So I'm like the worst source of
information about them because I don't remember them. They all
blend together. There's certain moments I remember, like the painful ones,
but other than that, they just all seem to blend together.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah. So how many marathons would we do a year?
Speaker 3 (05:23):
About well, at at the high we do five or six.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
So it's really important and helpful to have somebody follow
you through the marathon. Picky brings, she has water, she
has vasoline because that bil because what happens is you
chafe really bad. I remember my very first marathon was
actually in Saint Louis, and somebody would offered, do you
(05:49):
want fasoline? I'm like, well, whatever far And I finished
and it looked like somebody had grabbed my arm and
just held it to It was like, look bruised, but
it was bruised. It was from the rubbing and the
chafing of you know, your arms rubbing against your body.
And I went, oh, and it hurts. I make a mistakes.
It's almost a bruise would feel better, but the chafing
(06:11):
is very painful. So it took us how many years
to do this? Seventeen? It took us seventeen years to
do this. So as time went on, you know, I
got slower and he got faster. Of course I really
never trained. I would run at least four miles a day.
I mean when I say at least, I mean at
(06:32):
least four miles a day. And then before marathon I'm
maybe up at thirteen, you know, not every day, but
just you know, like i'd run a week before, I'd
try to get in a thirteen miler for a while
toward the end, VICKI would run with me to help me,
help me prep, But basically we would just I would
just increase my mile age every day. That's pretty much
(06:54):
all I did to train. Did you ever train, Joe?
Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah, I mean I run a lot every week. She's
done running marathons, but I have quite a few more
goals to achieve. So you know, I've run sixty seventy
miles a week for training.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
So yeah, and I'm not sure I'm quite done running marathons,
but maybe I don't know. One of the things we
like to do before a marathon is to go out
and have sushi, and then afterwards, I am very sore.
You've always heard of, you know, be kind of gross.
(07:30):
But you lose toenails, Yes, you do. There were a
couple of years where I wouldn't wear sandals because my
feet looks so horrible. But it kind of feels like
you got the flu, like you got a really bad
case of the flu, where everything's sore. Yeah, that's that's
kind of what it feels like for me, and so
this you know, this too will pass. So yeah, we
(07:54):
got to the point where we started making a point
to finish together. So we would come across the finish
and we join hands and would hold them up high
so and they would have they wouldn't. It's always always
a thrill when they announced us. Actually toward the end,
I kind of just start, you know, visualizing that and
(08:14):
hearing the announcer in my head to kind of get
me through that last part.
Speaker 3 (08:18):
It's like it's almost over.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
It's almost over, and sometimes it's kind of emotional that
you you made it through another twenty six point two miles.
So for my sixtieth birthday, I wanted to do the
m R. It's called the m R three forty and
it's a race down the Missouri River from Kansas City
to Saint Charles. And Joe drove us to Kansas City
(08:41):
and we're sitting in the safety meeting because everybody has
to go to safety meeting because it's kind of a
dangerous thing to do. And I said, oh, this is
a race, and Joseph, yeah, Mom, it's a race. So
my husband and I have an old town canoe and
we paddled it as fast as we could, which is
(09:02):
like paddling a barge, and we made it from Kansas
City to Saint Charles. And the time those four days
that it took us to do it, we slept maybe
seven hours. So you don't sleep. You just keep paddling. Yeah,
just keep going, keep going. Just like a marathon, you
just keep going.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
You just keep going.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
And this year I'm sixty five, so we're going to
do it again. So that's kind of replaced my marathons
for now. We'll see what happens as time goes on.
I still run every day. My husband and I run
every day. And Joe, you want to he's still running.
He's still going to be doing marathons. So yeah, no,
I'm still still doing marathons. You know.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I have a marathon in a couple of weeks here,
so I'm going to keep going. I have quite a
few more to You.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Had a great job on the storytelling by Greg Angler,
and a special thanks to Karen Thompson and her son
Joe Milink, along with Joe's wife Vicki their story and
the kids in the background. Well, they in their own way,
shared their story too, they'd run marathons in twelve states,
and in came that suggestion. Every family knows that person
who suggests something like this, Hey, let's do all fifty,
(10:13):
and what do you know? They do it, and they
finish them all over a seventeen year period, treating each
one like a family vacation, with family rituals including that
sushi meal, and coming to the finish line as a
family holding their hands up. A remarkable and beautiful listeners story.
Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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