Every day, we got a little weaker, a little more frustrated. Even our voices were going. Most of the crew were sick, including Doc, who had to teach Don how to hook him up to an IV. Ray’s leg was so painful that we suspected it could be a stress fracture, but there was no way to find out. Ray was terrified that he was going to have to stop.
- - - -
It took twenty-eight days to get across Libya. Most days we ate pasta and Tuareg pizza, staples in the country, thanks to its occupation by Italy in the first part of the twentieth century. In the last town before the Egyptian border, we were given a big send-off: horns honked, people cheered, and kids slapped our hands. Our security guys hugged us good-bye.
The excitement of reaching Egypt was muted by the knowledge that this was where Don Webster would leave us. I was deeply disappointed that he had chosen to go. I thought not finishing what he had started was a big mistake—something that he would forever regret. Still, we embraced each other before he climbed into the truck.
“Get there, guys!” Don said.
We also said good-bye to Doc and Chuck Dale, who were going to Cairo to get medical supplies—and to meet up with Chuck’s wife. They said they would be back in a few days.
There was no time off for Kevin, Ray, and me. Now that we were in Egypt, I decided that we needed to ditch our usual goal of fifty miles a day and go farther. We would run for as long as we could every day. We were all ready for this to be done. It made sense to push ourselves to our max. But I also had another motive. I wanted us to suffer. We had all been weak and we had all been strong, and now I wanted us to all be empty. That was the only sure way to let in something new.
Most days, we got in close to sixty miles. Midway across Egypt, Nicole and a large contingent of Taiwanese friends and supporters showed up to cheer Kevin on. His spirits soared. Whether he genuinely felt better or was just determined to look strong in front of his friends, Kevin was back to being a running superstar.
Kathy also rejoined the expedition, and Ray bubbled over with happiness. Chuck and Doc finally returned from Cairo after nine days away. I was pissed they had been gone for so long at a crucial time during the expedition. Ray and Kevin and I were out here falling apart, and no one was here to patch us up. I was cold to them when they came back, but Ray hugged them like lost puppies.
I didn’t understand how they could leave us like that. They thought I was being a jerk, but my feelings were hurt. From the start, I had asked for their trust and loyalty. I had told them this would be the hardest thing they had ever done. I had asked them to leave their egos at home and give all they had to help this expedition be successful. They had done almost everything I asked for until the very end. I wanted to forgive them and to ask for their forgiveness if they thought I had been too hard on them. But I didn’t have that in me.
On day 108, I woke up in serious pain. A blister, deep under a callous on the bottom of my foot, had grown to baseball size. I knew I was close to the end and that these final days could teach me the most about endurance and about life. But personal growth was the last thing on my mind. All I could think about was stopping.
Lisa’s arrival the next day didn’t so much give me a surge of energy as give me someone I didn’t have to be strong for. I could be broken and hurt and scared. I had spent nearly four months trying not to show weakness or fear. But now I needed to be propped up. I needed someone to tell me I wasn’t a bad person. I needed someone who believed that my words and actions came from a place of compassion and love. Lisa reminded me that none of this would have been possible without my commitment and determination. She told me that she was proud of me and that she loved me—and gave me strength to go on.
On day 110, we got up at 3:00 a.m. so that we could reach the Pyramids of Giza before they opened to the public—something Don’s friend Zahi Hawass had arranged for us. We had only a two-hour window for the production guys to film. I tried to block out the pain in my foot as we ran in heavy fog toward the landmarks. I could see the cameramen set up, waiting for this crucial shot. Then the sun broke through the fog and the triangular silhouettes emerged. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Ray, Kevin, and I joined hands and laughed and ran to the Pyramid’s base. I had imagined this moment so many times, and now it was here. I touched the rocks and felt powerful and powerless at the same time. We lingered there, not wanting to let this moment go.
We decided to run the last 160 kilometers to the Red Sea without stopping. We had no reason to hold back now, nothing to save ourselves for. We made our way into the chaotic heart of Cairo, running along the shoulder of a busy highway. Buses spewed dark exhaust; cars and motorbikes darted around one another in a mad, unchoreographed dance. It felt more dangerous than anything else we had done so far. Darkness fell, headlights came on, and still we ran. The blister on my foot was growing larger and more painful with every step. I tried to focus only on forward movement. We stopped to eat and lie down for an hour or so, then we dragged ourselves off the pavement and went again.
James had told me long ago that the final scene of the film had to be shot in daylight. We had to pick up the pace to make that happen. But I couldn’t go any faster. After 110 days of exhorting Kevin and Ray to move, I had slowed to a walk. I couldn’t believe this was happening. We would never make it to the sea in daylight at this rate. It was going to be my fault that we had to spend another night on the road. I couldn’t do that to everyone. We needed to be done, whatever it took, whatever pain it caused.
The three of us walked all night. At about 10:00 a.m., on what would be our final day if we could get to the sea by sundown, Ray and Kevin said they wanted to take a break.
“Why don’t I keep going?” I said. “I’ll make it a goal to just get as far down the road as I can. Then you can run and catch up.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “That sounds good.”
I limped away, whimpering with every footfall. Then, a little while after I left them, the blister exploded, gushing pus and blood into my shoe. The relief was wonderful and immediate. I was a new man. I took a few tentative steps and found I could manage a shuffling run. It was slow, maybe a fourteen-minute-mile pace, but it was faster than a walk. If I kept it up, maybe we could finish today, after all.
I passed the Taiwanese contingent and yelled to them to let Ray and Kevin know that if they didn’t catch up with me soon, I would wait for them down the road. They clapped and nodded, but I wasn’t sure if they understood my English. I continued to run, slowly, listening for Ray and Kevin to come up behind me any minute.
A couple of hours passed with no sign of them. I thought maybe they had fallen asleep. Finally, they were at my side.
We silently fell into rhythm.
“Smell it?” I said.
It was the sea. Ten miles, then nine, then eight, then four and three. And then we could see the calm silver water in the distance.
“Can you believe we did it?” I said.
“I’m surprised as shit,” Ray said. “We ran all this way.”
“What’s next?” Kevin said.
“The Amazon?” I said.
“No,” Ray said. “That’s for crazy people.”
With one mile to go, Lisa, Kathy, Nicole, and the entire crew joined us, and we walked to the shore. We had run seventy-five hundred kilometers—178 marathons—in 111 days without taking a single day off.
I had pictured this moment a million times. I imagined running full bore into the water and diving under the surface and coming up to shout and splash each other. Instead, Ray, Kevin, and I walked quietly to the water and dipped our hands in it. Then we embraced each other. Of course I was happy. We had done it. But I was also sad. I didn’t want it to be over.
- - - -
On September 9, 2007, I joined Ray, Kevin, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and James Moll for the premiere of Running the Sahara at the Toronto Film Festival. In the darke
ned theater, I fought back tears. I loved the film—until I saw the end. James had used the footage of my going ahead of Ray and Kevin during those last miles to manufacture drama. He had gotten Ray and Kevin to say on camera that they were worried how far I was ahead of them and to wonder out loud if I might actually finish without them. I was stunned they could even entertain that idea. We were comrades; we were brothers.
If I had wanted to finish first, I would have encouraged them both to quit during the times they’d doubted they could go on. Or I would have just run away from them, since for most of the run, I was stronger than Kevin or Ray. I pushed the pace and went ahead on that final day to give us a chance to finish during daylight.
When I asked him later about how he put together those final scenes, James told me that he needed conflict to make the film more compelling—and that I was the best candidate to provide it. He was a storyteller and he had told a good story. There was no place for hurt feelings.
Despite my qualms with how I was portrayed in the final scenes, I knew it was a good film and I knew I had been part of something important. I spent the next year marketing it around the country—I’d run with a local club, give a talk about the expedition and the need for clean water, then screen the film. Thanks mostly to the audiences who saw Running the Sahara and felt moved to help, H2O Africa raised $6 million. If, after seeing the movie, a few people thought I was an ass (including my father, who told me he hated the film and the way I was portrayed in it), I could live with that.
CHAPTER 10
Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
—TRUMAN CAPOTE
After I recovered from the Sahara run, I started thinking of what to do next. I decided that I wanted to see my own country—all of it—in that same intimate way.
I would not be the first person to run coast-to-coast across America. Athletes had been making the journey since the 1920s, when runners competed for prize money. Recently, it had become a way to raise awareness and money for a cause. I definitely wanted to connect my transcontinental run with a charity—but I also wanted to try to do it faster than it had ever been done. The record was set in 1980 by Frank Giannino, who ran from San Francisco to New York City in forty-six days, eight hours, and thirty-six minutes, averaging nearly sixty-seven miles a day. Giannino had done it at the age of twenty-eight; I was pushing forty-five. The odds were not on my side, but just because it seemed almost impossible didn’t mean I shouldn’t try.
My friend and teammate Marshall Ulrich—one of the most accomplished endurance athletes in the world—was also contemplating a cross-country run. He was facing even longer odds. Not only was he past his running prime at age fifty-eight, he also had no idea how to finance the attempt. He contacted me about partnering with him, and we decided to do the run together—not as rivals, but as compatriots spurring each other on.
My plan was to use the same model I had used for the Sahara—find a film production company, bring in sponsors and investors, run across a giant landmass, then market the film about the adventure. After Running the Sahara, I received many invitations to do speaking gigs. I hoped that after another successful expedition, even more doors would open.
I spent most of the next year making calls, giving presentations, negotiating deals, calculating budgets, and planning the complex logistics for the cross-country run. It had been hard enough to line up financing with Matt Damon on board; without his star power, it was even more difficult. I finally found a production company that was interested in making a documentary about the run—and they shared my vision that the film could be about much more than running. We also wanted to explore how Americans were feeling about their country in the turbulent fall of 2008. As we traveled through their small towns and big cities, we would ask them their views on the wars we were fighting, the floundering economy, the housing-market crash, and the impending presidential election, which would take place about a week after we arrived, if all went well, in New York City. Then we would weave their stories into our own.
I lined up investors and sponsors, including Super 8 Motels, where we would stay as we moved east. I teamed up with United Way’s Live United campaign for youth fitness. I also asked News-2-You, a newspaper for special-needs students that had covered my Sahara adventure, for help in coordinating visits to schools along the route. I assembled a great crew, led by Chuck Dale, who was, amazingly, willing to follow me slowly across yet another continent. And while I was doing all of this planning, I was also logging about a hundred miles of training a week. Oh, and I had gone through a breakup.
After we got back from the Sahara, it felt as if Lisa and I had reached some kind of natural stopping point. We decided that it made sense to take a break. But we both knew it was the end. Lisa had shown me that I was capable of love and I was grateful for that, but we were spending too much time arguing about what direction we should go next. I wanted to move ahead to the next race, the next big adventure, but I could feel that she was ready to go exploring on her own. I had opened her eyes to the bigger world outside North Carolina, and Lisa wanted to keep traveling—but not with me. We agreed that we were better off apart, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t stressful.
- - - -
”It looks like MRSA to me.” I was lying on a bed in a San Francisco Super 8 Motel room, surrounded by camera equipment, food, and gear. Dr. Paul Langevin, the Running America team physician, was examining the painful lump on my butt.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus—a staph infection that’s highly resistant to antibiotics. Tough to treat. Where’d you pick this up? You haven’t been in any hot tubs or saunas lately, have you?”
“Both,” I said, suddenly feeling guilty. I’d recently been invited to a spa to do a speaking gig. “But they were at a really fancy spa.”
“Most people, if they are exposed to it, can fight it off. But if you’re run-down . . .”
“Okay, but it’s no big deal, right?”
“It can be. MRSA can be deadly.”
“Can you give me something for it?”
“If I put you on a heavy course of antibiotics, there’s no way you’ll be able to run seventy miles a day. And they probably won’t help, anyway. We’ll watch it. Just try to keep your stress level low.”
I looked at him and laughed. I was about to run eighteen hours a day—about five hundred miles a week—for the next month and a half. I had investors and sponsors who were expecting a return on their dollars, a film crew ready to document my every move—and a website that was about to go live with a tracking system that would let the world know where I was night and day.
Plus, I was executive-producing the film, and my budget was already screwed; it had been prepared based on gas being about $2.50 a gallon; now gas was up around $4—and we had two big RVs and several support cars to fuel for three-thousand-plus miles.
I’d also just found out that the one big job I had delegated—making a detailed turn-by-turn map of our route—hadn’t been done. We could take any roads we wanted, but a record cross-country run would only be official if the runner logged at least 3,103 miles, as Frank Giannino had. That meant that the night before we were to begin, we had only a vague notion of where we were going. I was going to have to get on the computer and study some maps and figure it out quickly. No wonder MRSA was having a party in my bloodstream.
Despite all of this, at 5:00 a.m. on September 13, 2008, Running America began as scheduled on the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall. Marshall and I smiled for the cameras and took off together on the hilly city streets, toward the waterfront. The smell of eucalyptus and salt air near the Golden Gate Bridge instantly brought me back to my days at the Presidio Adventure Racing Academy, where all of this happy madness had started. We ran through Sausalito, then back across San Francisco Bay on the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge and headed into the Napa Valley.
Marshall moved out ahead of me and disappeared from view.
Every footfall sent a shock wave of pain from my infected butt cheek through my body. Still, I covered almost 140 miles in the first two days. On day three, at 4:30 a.m. I was back on the road, taking inventory as I ran the first few miles. The report was not encouraging: besides several new MRSA eruptions on my legs, I had sore hips, knees, and ankles, and a painful blister on the ball of my foot. Plus, I had a bad cold—my first in years. I had expected to struggle at the beginning. I knew from the Sahara that you had to be patient. Allow your body to break down, and then, after a few days, you could start building it back up. But this felt very different.
Highway 88 began its relentless climb toward Carson Pass at 8,650 feet. At about 5,000 feet, I caught up with Marshall, who had stopped for lunch. While we took our break, we heard the news on the radio that Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy—sending the New York Stock Exchange plummeting. The landslide of mortgage defaults and foreclosures had brought them down. It was a small comfort to know that I was not alone in having to deal with foreclosures. But there was no time to dwell on that. I had to keep moving.
Marshall lived at altitude in Colorado and was an outstanding mountain runner. I was a sea-level guy. He moved easily past me, and though I fought to keep him in sight, before long he disappeared around a switchback and I was alone. I had a terrible altitude headache, my body hurt, and the road just kept going up. It was one of the worst running days I had ever had. I finally crested the pass near Kirkwood at about 7:00 p.m.
Now we were headed into Nevada on Highway 50, which, according to the road signs, was THE LONELIEST ROAD IN AMERICA. Not exactly a morale booster. The road rolled straight across desolate sagebrush scrublands and over a series of mountain ranges. The late-summer heat made the MRSA sores worse, which caused me to change my gait, which led to new blisters, which led to more gait changes, which brought on Achilles problems and severe bruising on the bottoms of my feet. Dr. Paul and I talked again about trying antibiotics, but he told me it was pointless to take them if I didn’t also stop punishing my body. I was getting four or five hours of sleep a night; I couldn’t afford more if I wanted to stay on a record pace.
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