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23-year-old Gracie Hunt, the daughter of Kansas City Chiefs owner Clark Hunt, has already lived a life many people dream of living.
Of course, most people aren’t the granddaughter of Lamar Hunt, the founder of the American Football League, Major League Soccer, and the North American Soccer League, and the great-granddaughter of an oil tycoon like H.L. Hunt (who had a whopping 15 children).
Nor are they the daughter of a former Miss Missouri Teen USA and Miss Kansas USA, like her mother Tavia was.
Taking that family background, combined it with her stunning good looks, it’s little surprise that Gracie Hunt earned the title of Miss Kansas USA in 2021, just like her mom did.
This week, as she and her family get ready for their team’s fifth Super Bowl appearance and third in the last four years, Gracie Hunt was the subject of a profile published on Wednesday by the New York Post.
In the profile, we learn a lot more than we ever knew about the heiress to the Chiefs.
For example, did you know her “college soccer hopes were derailed after sustaining four concussions”?
Or that she is now a Special Olympics ambassador?
Or that she participated in her very first marathon this past July on a whim after stumbling upon a sign for the event after hiking with her mom?
“I signed up for my first marathon about 13 hours before the race started,” Hunt claimed.
“I had never run in a registered race before this point and had never run more than 13 miles consecutively, and that was on treadmill several years before… [I] took a chance, registered at about 5 p.m. that evening, and ran it at 6 a.m. the next day, and finished it in three hours and 45 minutes, and that is what started my marathon career.”
Wait… what?
According to MarathonHandbook.com, the average time to run a marathon for men is 4:21:03, and the average time to run a marathon for women is 4:48:45.
“…a ‘good’ marathon time across all sexes and ages is 3:48:20,” the site continues, citing a in-depth study. “Breaking it down by sex, 3:34:56 is a good marathon time for men, and 4:08:09 is a good marathon time for women.”
Breaking it down even further, they list a time of 3:40:30 as “advanced” and a time of 3:19:09 as “elite” for a woman in her twenties.
So without a lick of training, other than running 13 miles on a treadmill years before the event, Gracie Hunt says she ran a marathon less than 26 minutes short of being elite?
“When I played soccer, I loved to run to supplement my cardio for my endurance on the field. For marathons, it’s different because you really have to teach your body how to handle much longer durations of exertion,” Hunt said.
“You have to build up a tolerance and train yourself to handle it. It’s a lot of regular 13 mile runs, and 14 mile runs, so it’s been very different. I will say coming off Miss USA training, it’s very different, but I also love it because it’s allowed me to go back to my competitive roots.”
Listen, Gracie Hunt is obviously in tremendous shape.
It will be very interesting to see what time she runs in the Boston Marathon this coming April, where she says she will be competing.
If she just rolled up to a marathon on a lark and ran a 3:45 then her time at that event, after months of training, that ought to firmly place her dead center in the elite category in her next race.
UPDATE: There is video of Gracie Hunt finishing her marathon in 3:45, so it’s true. Something is missing from the story though. To go from never having “run more than 13 miles consecutively… on treadmill several years before” to running 26 miles straight on roads is quite a jump. Perhaps she was training in other ways, but it was left out of the story?