Miles and points open up a world of places to race. That was the reason I first started Running with Miles, to give fellow runners a chance to run more races in more places – for less. There are so many beautiful places in the world to run, yet travel costs money. Sometimes, it costs a lot of money! To be able to get to races in America for less than the cost of a dinner for two is the beauty of miles and points.
However (you know that had to be coming, right? :), while miles and points allow us to get to many places we may not have otherwise thought possible, it is sometimes not as easy to do it as one might first think. It is incredibly easy to earn an abundance of miles and points, thanks to credit card bonuses (like the current American Airlines Executive AAdvantage card with 100,000 miles). The number of miles you can earn gives a ton of travel opportunity. Using them for your desired race can sometimes be a headache. For instance, someone may sign-up for a Delta Skymiles card that gives someone 30,000 Skymiles. They sign-up for it because Delta offers round-trip award travel in the US for 25,000 miles and they want to travel to the Fargo Marathon. They figure they will have enough miles for that plus 5,000 extra. But, then they go to get the award ticket by punching their trip dates and cities in:
Oops – what happened to the 25,000 mile tickets?
Unfortunately, that happens all too often! Of course, with some flexibility and some advanced searching, it is possible to get the trip down to the 25K mark. But, there are some cities in America where it can be incredibly difficult to get to on award tickets. So, here is a question to challenge everyone here: What do you think is the most difficult race in America to get to? This is in terms of award travel. Our desire is to get there with just one credit card bonus. Is there a race in American that is impossible to get to with awards? Put the race, race date, and the departure airport in the comments. If no one can think of, I will try to find one on my own. 🙂
Most likely Hawaii is the most expensive but I would guess some odd race in Alaska or one of the island territories. 48 states would be rural races like the Abilene Kansas marathon or some other strange location like that.