DENVER — Todd Lubas will tell you that marathon runners don't take up the sport by accident.
He's spent years running nine different marathons in various cities across the country. It was just a few weeks ago that he went to the bottom of the Earth to compete.
"It was my first marathon outside of the U.S.," Lubas, who lives in Denver, says. "I've done Boston, and Chicago, and some big U.S. marathons, but it was the first exotic marathon, in a place like Antarctica."
The trip there could be considered a marathon on its own. With his brother-law, Matt Grove, he traveled from Denver to Dallas, from Dallas to Buenos Aires, from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia, and then spent two days on the choppy waters of the Drake Passage to get to the final destination.
"You earn it, once you step foot on the Antarctic continent," he says.
Then, the race began. Among the penguins on King George Island, the brothers-in-law competed in the Antarctica Marathon on March 16. It was 28 degrees with winds as fast as 30 mph, according to race organizers.
Lubas won 1st place, finishing in 3:07:17. Grove finished the race - his first-ever marathon - in 8th place, in 4:01:24.
"He was actually able to see me finish because the way the course was designed, he was finishing his last loop as I was coming in," Lubas says. "I think that was Josie at work, actually. That the timing worked out that he actually saw me break the tape and finish the race."
Josie is the entire force behind this journey, but she didn't get to watch them finish.
She was Lubas' niece and Matt's daughter. Josie, 4, died in 2015 from a rare form of brain cancer called DIPG.
"When she was receiving her cancer treatments at the Children’s Hospital in Hershey, Penn., one of her nurses there had just come back from the Antarctica Marathon and was showing Josie these pictures of the penguins in this far away land where she ran a race," Lubas says. "And her father, my brother-in-law, had said, 'You know, Josie, I’m going to run that some day. When you get better, I’m going to run that.'"
They saw it as a promise to fulfill. It's something they would do, somewhere they would go, when she got better. Josie died about a year after that, but Lubas and Grove decided they would keep their promise.
"You can ask yourself 'Why?' a million times and then some, and then you can say 'What?' And my 'what' is what I am going to do that everyone gets to meet this little girl somehow - get to know her story," Lubas says, as he recalls words his sister told him after Josie died. "You need to live your life for the little girl who never got a shot to live hers."
Lubas says he and his brother-in-law knew Josie was there that day, cheering them on during the marathon.
"There was a point in the race when it was pretty much a complete whiteout. You could barely see your hand in front of you and all of the sudden, the snow stops and the sun just slightly creeps out of a cloud. And that's the type of stuff Matt and I talked about. Yep, she was there," he says.
Lubas sought out to raise money for cancer research as part of his run. Donors gave him almost $14,000.
