In a pair of Adidas Adizero Adios Pro 4 shoes, Daniel O’Connell is on a mission to run 50 marathons in 50 states. And he’s already completed six of them with his seventh scheduled for January 2027 in downtown Houston.

His seventh will be special, he said, because he is raising funds for Bo’s Place, a Houston nonprofit organization focused on helping community members grieve and heal during bereavement. He chose Bo’s Place in Houston as the recipient of any donations he receives in the months leading up the January race, and he has to raise $650 minimum for the donation.

The grief support organization offers free services to families through groups run by volunteer facilitators. The groups consist of people who all are experiencing grief. Pot luck dinners are hosted to give people time to sit together and find ways to connect outside of the group.

“They feel supported, seen and known,” O’Connell said. “The experiences people have are so different. They experience the death of their kids, partners, parents, sometimes multiple kids or both parents. In the grief circle, they understand what others are going through. It’s a very supportive place; sometimes, they just cry together.”

But there’s another reason O’Connell is on his 50-marathon mission.

“I’m a living kidney donor. I donated my kidney to a stranger in 2021,” he said. “I want to show people they can do whatever they want to do – run marathons, live a regular life, anything – after having donated. I’m hoping people will look into and think about it.”

O’Connell is a doctoral student in the midst of clinical training in Baylor College of Medicine’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) Program under Dr. Eric Storch, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and interim dean of the School of Health Professions. O’Connell is delivering therapy sessions under supervision for multiple research trials set up by Storch.

While in college, he took a sociology class with an assigned reading of “Mama Might Be Better Off Dead: The Failure of Health Care in Urban America” by Laurie Kaye Abraham. It details a story of a family in Chicago’s Southside who faced multiple health issues with little access to adequate healthcare.

In the nonfiction book, a family member is on dialysis and eligible for a kidney donation. With a long waiting list, the individual’s health continued to decline, and they suffered because of it. It made O’Connell consider his own health and privilege.

“I thought, ‘I feel like I’m healthy; I should see if I’m eligible to donate and what would that be like,” he said. “I was living in St. Louis, and I went to the hospital to check eligibility. I got matched and donated a year later.”

Once he recovered, O’Connell trained and ran his first marathon in the same city in 2022. Later, he ran the Chicago Marathon, which he considers his hometown race since he grew up in a Chicago suburb.

Donate now to O’Connell’s marathon cause and raise funds for Bo’s Place.

By Julie Garcia, senior communications associate in the Office of Communications and Community Outreach