Some people organize baked goods sales or can drives to raise money for causes they care about; others host spaghetti dinners.
Scot DeDeo? He runs.
In fact, from Nov. 7 to Nov. 8, the 46-year-old Belmont resident will run from the western border to the eastern border of Massachusetts — a 154-mile feat he plans to accomplish while raising money for the Michael J. Fox Foundation in memory of his mother, who died last fall after a 10-year battle with Parkinson’s disease.
“I like a challenge, and I like trying to use my running to do something good,” DeDeo said. “I’ve done other long charity runs in the past for causes I believe in.”
The idea to run the length of Massachusetts came to him in 2019, after running a race called the Midstate Massive Ultra Trail. That race took him 100 miles across Massachusetts from the New Hampshire border to the Rhode Island border. He wondered what it might be like to run across Massachusetts from west to east.
“At the time, tackling a 150-mile endeavor was not something I was ready to do,” he said. “Then the world shut down and everything got back-burnered.”
Then, in 2024, he signed up for the Tahoe 200, a 200-mile endurance race around North America’s largest alpine lake. He completed it in 79 hours, 29 minutes, and 44 seconds, averaging roughly 22 minutes and 40 seconds per mile.
Once again, he was inspired to attempt a cross-state run in 2025, but it turned out to be a “nightmare of a year” for him.
“My mother’s Parkinson’s got a lot worse, and my father was her primary caregiver, and then he got ill. We struggled with that for about six months,” DeDeo said. “They both passed away last October about three weeks apart. I’ve been pretty much digging out of that hole for a while now. Now that things have settled down, this concept came up: ‘What if I did this in my mother’s memory as a way to remember her?’”
DeDeo, who serves as race director for the Foundation for Belmont Education Apple Run 5K, has also raised money for Neurofibromatosis Northeast, which does a charity bike ride every September. One year, he showed up and ran the 67-mile course.
“I’ve only run over 100 miles once before, so this is going to be pretty challenging,” he said.
Other ultramarathons he’s completed include the Hennepin Hundred in 2017 and the Southern States 100 in 2026.
His run next month will take him from Richmond — a small town of about 1,400 residents in Berkshire County — to Castle Island, a 22-acre peninsula in Boston Harbor in South Boston. It’s a course he charted himself, with a notable 9,000 feet of elevation gain, that takes him from the New York border to Lenox (home of Tanglewood), southeast to Springfield, through Sturbridge, then northeast toward Framingham, then toward Newton, and finally to Boston.
Along the way, he’ll make about 15 stops.
“One of my little side projects for this is I plan on recording a bunch of the run and interviewing people and turning it into a documentary,” he said.
DeDeo has a stop planned in Lee, for example, at Joe’s Diner, known for being the inspiration for Norman Rockwell’s iconic painting, “The Runaway.” Another planned stop is at a mansion in Monson built by poet Emily Dickinson’s grandfather.
He’ll also pass by the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and — one of DeDeo’s personal favorites — Sturbridge Village.
His plan is to do the whole thing in one 36-hour effort.
“Worst-case scenario, it takes me 40 or 48 hours, and that’s effectively walking the back half,” DeDeo said. “I’m very optimistic I can do it in 36 to 40 hours.”
How does he train?
“The short answer is you run a lot,” he said. “The longer answer is after I trained for Tahoe, I felt like I had a really good appreciation for how to train for really long races and how to recover. You run high mileage but clump some really big runs together so you’re emulating what the body would go through.”
One weekend he ran back-to-back marathons; the next weekend he ran 31 miles on Saturday and 22 miles on Sunday.
“What’s also interesting from a training aspect is when you’re doing really high mileage like this, things like diet and hydration and sleep become super, super important,” DeDeo said. “If you aren’t paying attention to those, you’re really only doing about one-third of the preparation.”
To make the journey pass by a little more quickly, he’s roped in some friends from a running group he leads — Belmont Track Club — to run segments of the route with him. His family will also be there to support him, and his 14-year-old son is planning to run the final five or 10 miles with him.
DeDeo hopes to raise $8,000 for the Michael J. Fox Foundation, a nonprofit organization raising money to find a cure for Parkinson’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder. Donations can be made online at tinyurl.com/DeDeoRun.
