Arrival time: 8:52 p.m.
Miles covered: 2,634.0
Miles to go: 429.2
The quaint country roads with scant traffic, the picturesque landscape, and the throwback lifestyle were all as I’d imagined they’d be. Moving across the commonwealth, we passed Amish families in horse-drawn buggies (and I picked up a horseshoe for good luck); a one-room schoolhouse with a bell on top, girls dressed in ankle-length skirts and bonnets, boys wearing black pants and white shirts; a huge house with an expansive front porch and laundry strung from one end to the other. Signs of fall surrounded us, with cornstalks browned and tied together, pumpkins carved and lit at night, and Halloween crafts floating in the trees.
Crew tensions had disappeared, thank God. That previously constant anxiety was gone, and there was no sign of Charlie. Everyone was doing their jobs, working together respectfully, and Kate had begun taking shifts, too, as Kira, Alex, and Cole had gone home and we’d be shorthanded for a few days until the second wave of friends and family arrived. Despite the few differences we’d had with Kate, on the whole our interactions with her and all the people from NEHST had been very positive. We were grateful to have Kate on board, along with her assistant, Amira Soliman, and Rick, when they weren’t strictly on duty with production. It seemed they were nearly always working, though. I can hardly remember ever seeing Rick without his camera perched on his shoulder, or in his lap when he was in the van, and Amira always had her clipboard in hand and pens stuck in her thick, black hair, wrapped in a loose knot at the back of her head.
As I had done since leaving San Francisco, I continued to tell corny jokes to whoever was around, and especially to those behind the camera, hoping to make them laugh or at least groan, but they were too professional, or I wasn’t funny enough. Either way, at least I could count on a smile.
Crossing the Allegheny River on day forty-seven: “Knock, knock!” Who’s there? “Allegheny!” Allegheny who? “Y’all-a-gain-y weight if you eat too much!”
We passed a few coal strip mines, which seemed out of place in this bucolic setting. Meandering creeks decorated rolling hills, the curves occasionally contrasted by angular old barns and farmhouses. I enjoyed reading the natural signs around me, which revealed what to expect ahead, such as the way a creek would trickle downhill toward me and signal that I’d be going uphill for some time, or how a tree’s branches, inclined to grow a certain way, indicated which direction the wind usually blew.
My crew was giving me signs, too. They’d surreptitiously picked up a few political yard placards and retooled them for our use, using the sturdy wire frames to post notes for me by the side of the road. I could only hope they’d selected an equal number of them from the opposing sides, and it amused me to know that the candidates were getting a little less promotion wherever we passed through.
As we were nearing the end of this transcontinental trip, we were also nearing the upcoming Election Day. This would be the year we’d elect our first African-American or our first woman to serve as either president or vice president, and while I’d been slogging it out across the country, another contest had been going on, holding the rapt attention of many citizens. Although I’d seen a great deal of America during this adventure, there was also an America that I hadn’t really seen at all: “Joe the plumber”? Never heard of him. I never watched the debates, saw the slogans, or heard any of the rumors. The political fracas wasn’t part of my consciousness, except when I saw those repurposed campaign signs, which made me chuckle. I had no idea what was happening, and I didn’t want to know. It’s not that I didn’t care about the outcome, just that I trusted the American people to make a good decision. This year, my job was to get across the nation; theirs was to choose our leaders.
There was an odd sort of synchronicity between what was happening in our country and what was happening in me. September and October 2008 were the most volatile and uncertain months in stock market history. People were losing their jobs and their homes, and they were being called upon to muster all their emotional reserves. Everyone was tightening their belts; our proud country had been humbled, and no one was sheltered from the economic environment, from the turmoil that had developed that fall and then come to a head right about the time we arrived in Pennsylvania.
Running through huge snowflakes, nearly every muscle in my body rebelling against the daily grind of my current reality, I desperately craved relief. I just need to hang on for a few more days, I’d tell myself. Soon this will be over. No doubt there were millions of other Americans who were telling themselves the exact same thing.
On November 1, I awoke in Pennsylvania at the Millheim Hotel after five hours of my usual strange, deep sleep. These days, anytime I’d wake up a little, to turn over or for any other reason, I was disoriented. Am I at home, in Colorado? In the RV? What state is this? This bed feels nice. Is this a hotel? Ah, there’s Heather. And I’d drift off again to sleep. The nightmares had finally stopped, but I would replay the days’ efforts in my dreams, and Heather would nudge me, as my arms and legs moved in the bed, and tell me, “Marsh, honey, you’re running in your sleep again. Rest, sweetheart.”
We’d come to the pretty little hotel the night before, on Halloween, just before one in the morning. It had been built sometime in the 1800s and boasted a claw-foot tub in the bathroom shared by everyone on our floor. Who knows how long that tub had been there, or how many travelers before me had sunk into its warm waters? I do know that no one appreciated the deep soak more than I did that night. The heat eased my taut leg and back muscles, soothed my aching feet (the plantar fasciitis was acting up again), and took the persistent chill off my bones. I went to bed feeling grateful and relaxed.
At daybreak, though, I was confused and emotionally fragile, a condition that had been building slowly for a long time but had seemed to really be charging at me during the last couple of mornings. As I put my tender feet on the hard, cold, wooden floor, I felt unhinged, the pain in my soles shouting at me about the nearly five million times they’d already hit the ground in the last forty-nine days. I hobbled around for a minute or two looking for my socks, to no avail.
When I asked Heather for them, she responded sharply that she didn’t know where they were, either. Immediately, I felt the tears come, and I put my head in my hands. My emotions were so raw, and the least little thing could set me off. Seeing my sad state, Heather came to me, held me in her arms, and whispered assurances.
“Ssssh, it will be okay. You will be okay. I’m sorry, Marshall. I didn’t mean to snap at you. We’re both just tired . . . We’ll get through this. Ssssssssh, now. You’re all right . . .” Over and over again, she stroked my head and helped me get it together.
My breakdown was over quickly, and I composed myself. I knew I had to put those thoughts of distance and pain aside, tuck them away until after we reached New York and they’d be moot—only then could I allow myself to “process” that emotion. Not now. Gotta run. Only a few hundred more miles to go.
Dealing with this kind of self-doubt wasn’t foreign to me. I’ve had these thoughts before: entering active military service, going into college, seeing my children being born, other races in other places. Am I man enough to rise to the occasion? Will I fail? How could I have ever thought I could do this? It would be so much easier to just lie back and not take the steep and challenging high road.
In moments of questioning and self-pity, including the morning when errant socks had me at my wit’s end, I’ve reminded myself that others have gone this way before me. My life, including my extreme adventures, I remember, is so much easier than those of the pioneers who set out on uncharted routes, in inhospitable climates, with wild animals and even hostile people to make it infinitely harder than anything I’ve ever experienced. My ancestors, most recently my parents, once struggled just to survive; for the most part, I’ve chosen my hardships and always had the option to make them stop. Even when I don’t allow myself to seriously entertain the idea of quitting, it’
s still there, still a choice I could make if things get unbearable.
On rare occasions, I have thrown in the towel. In training for the transcon, for example, that seventy-two-hour run broke me when I started questioning myself. The sometimes overwhelming desire to quit comes from the mind whispering I can’t or I’m not good enough, strong enough, smart enough. Whatever. Enough. We can be our own worst enemies when it comes to those doubts and negative self-talk. Being around people with positive attitudes helps, but ultimately it has to come from within. In the darkest times, no amount of schmaltzy platitudes will get you through it. When it counts, when you have to pull through, what you need is grit. You wrestle that bear to the ground, chasing it out of your psyche. You remind yourself that it’s easy to quit but hard to live with it afterward—it can turn into a virus that spreads and becomes an uncontrollable urge.
Knowing someone loved me and was keeping the faith with me—or for me—made it tolerable that morning in Pennsylvania. Heather and I knew what we had to do. She knew what to say to me, and what not to say. She understood that one of the keys to not giving in has always been to suppress the whispers and never give them voice. I don’t say “I want to stop” unless I intend to stop with that very next step. If I’m truly done, then okay, I’ll say that I’m done, we’re packing up. Taking a lesson from some hard-core Russian mountaineers, there’s no complaining or else you really are finished. Just because your hands are cold doesn’t mean you have to say they are.
So we found a pair of socks, I finished getting dressed, and we continued on.
KIDDING AROUND
Footloose
Of all the chance and arranged meetings I had while running, the ones that stand out the most for me are those with the kids, from a tiny baby to university students.
Early on, there were the two soccer teams, near Carson City in Nevada and then near Steamboat Springs in Colorado, who lifted my spirits and enlivened my run with their cheering and jostling and nonstop banter.
Midway, I ran with two teenaged boys in Hastings, Nebraska, who told me that Kool-Aid had been invented there. I reminisced with them about how my mom had made me cherry and grape Kool-Aid as a kid, and enthused about how Heather and Roger were using the sugary mix to make me slushies on the road, one of my favorite treats. It also turned out that one boy’s aunt worked for the United Way. Delightful! We were raising money for the Live United campaign to combat childhood obesity. How fitting was it that I’d be out there burning some calories with these energetic and healthy boys?
Just west of the Iowa border, I spent those magical minutes looking into the eyes of the Beasley baby. Such a light for me in the darkness of a long, long night.
The morning after we crossed the Mississippi River, on a particularly low start of the day for me, I noticed a farmstead right across from where we’d parked the RV at one point, with about a one-acre yard set up as a fall festival, “Rogers Pumpkin Patch.” Little ones ran to and fro with painted faces, not a care in the world. They jumped in a bounce house, took wagon rides, petted the horses, navigated the corn maze. What a godsend they were; just when my heart was heaviest, during probably the most difficult emotional “crash” I’d experienced during this cross-country trek, they came along with their joyful play and laughter. I stood and watched them for a while, refreshing myself for the thirty-five more miles I had yet to complete that day.
And the kids kept coming: Jim Simone brought his boys out from the drug treatment program south of Chicago; about a dozen Amish elementary school children playing in the yard of an old schoolhouse just across the Pennsylvania border shyly waved and smiled at me; and a huge group of college kids in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, made a big fuss over what I was doing.
East of Millheim, I met a fourteen-year-old entrepreneur, David Beiler, the proprietor of David’s Awesome Cookies. He and his younger brother, Sam Jr., had grown a roadside business into a seasonal full-time “shop” selling their wares mostly to football fans headed to games at Penn State. Dave hopes to put himself through college with the profits, and I’d say he has a good chance: Since it first started, the kids have gained such a following that they (and their dad) had to upgrade the business from a stand to a health department–certified shed, complete with a commercial stove and large Hobart mixer. They can move one hundred dozen cookies in a day, and they offer nearly a dozen types. Sometimes, Dave breaks out his guitar and serenades the customers.
The Beilers have done it up right in the true spirit of American free enterprise: Who doesn’t want to spend time and money in a place with warm hospitality, live music, and delicious chocolate chip cookies? All brought to you by a couple of kids.
Each of these encounters encouraged me when I really needed it. The cliché is true: Children are our future. But if we’re paying attention, we see that they’re also our present. Children’s exuberance, their lightheartedness, and even their silliness can reconnect us with our best selves. I get a kick out of kids just being kids.
And evidently, they get a kick out of watching some of us grown-ups. A group of elementary school students in my hometown of Greeley, Colorado, decided to “race” us across the United States. Their P.E. teacher, Tracy Pugh, challenged his first- through fifth-graders to run laps on the playground and around the school, as well as on a makeshift 440-yard track, and log their miles; they’d “compete” as a team, using their cumulative, combined total miles to compare with what we were doing as we trudged along during our transcon. They learned the capital cities of the states we crossed (one of the children already knew about Carson City because his dad watches Bonanza, Mr. Pugh reported), talked about how to eat and drink when going such long distances, and debated whether—if they finished ahead of us—they might be awarded a world record.
In fact, the kids did win the race. They’d logged 3,078 miles by 1:30 p.m. on October 31, 2008, and reached their finish line well ahead of us. Believe me, if I could give the children at Jackson Elementary a record, I would.
In the Poconos, I slowed to a walk as a reporter interviewed me for his local paper. His questions struck me as shallow and irrelevant (“What kind of shoes are you wearing?”), and I was in a bit of a mood—impatient to be on the road, run on to New York, and get this whole damn thing done with. Not that I was impolite. I answered his questions reasonably well, I hope. Then he asked me something worthwhile.
“What’s the first thing you want to do when you finish this run?”
If he expected me to say something refined, like how I wanted to pop the cork on a bottle of Dom Perignon, I’m afraid I disappointed him.
“Three things: I’d like to sit in a chair, take the time to have a meaningful conversation with someone—and I’d like to stop having to crap in cornfields.”
Funny, he didn’t really have any more questions for me after that.
On day fifty-one, I woke up in tears again. What sent me over the edge this morning was having spent the night in bed feeling Heather’s warm, soft skin against mine. The prospect of getting up, leaving her, and going out for another day onto the cold, unforgiving highway left me sobbing. Once again, she pulled me close and soothed me, telling me everything would be all right.
God, when would this be over? We had, perhaps, only three more days to go, but nothing was a given. Anything could happen, even in these final miles. If we’d learned nothing else, the road had taught us that lesson quite thoroughly. I was losing faith. Would that be the thing that would keep me from the finish?
No, it wouldn’t. My connection with Heather would hold me up. When it felt as if I had nothing left—no will to continue, no strength to take another step, no air to breathe—her touch and her words would motivate me to keep going. Years before, she had rescued me when I was drowning in my loneliness and taught me how to love again. And now, one more time, she would help me out of my despair so that I could recognize how much I had to be grateful for. The crew, the sponsors, my friends who had come when we called, bringing fresh smiles, clot
hes, and hot food. My family, including my children, who’d suffered years of having a father who was gone much of the time racing around the world, lost on some level, his heart and soul having taken a blow when Jean died.
Now it was time, finally, to let go of Jean. Years ago, I’d held on to her body just after her death, cradling her in my arms and crying out her name, alone in that bedroom at her parents’ house. It had been quite a while, I don’t know how long, before I’d released her, willed myself up off the bed, wiped my tears, and gone to tell the family that Jean was gone.
Yes, it was time to let go. Completely, now. Time to rise. Time to go on, finish the race, and then stop running.
How could I not realize that the people who surrounded me today were reason enough to go on? How could I not embrace who and what I had become? How could I not finish? Life was unbelievably simple, and the beauty of it lay in every individual footstep, taken one at a time, over and over again.
When we got started for the day, we headed up Nescopeck Mountain and the hilly terrain. As expected, it was cold and, from all appearances, would stay that way. But now I didn’t care much about the weather, as I was moving well and at a fairly good pace. Off in the distance, two huge cooling towers, probably from a power plant, lit up the dark with their pinpoints of light. Winding up and over a two-mile road on a hill, I’d loop around those towers. This epitomized the run—slow and sure—and it also reminded me of approaching the summits on Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, or Everest. There, you coil around these gigantic mountains, just as I circled the towers here. It put me back in mind, again, of how great this nation is, and the immensity of change we’ve experienced, from buckboards and buggies to towers and skyscrapers.
Now I was yearning to see those skyscrapers, imagining that I’d catch a glimpse of New York City every time we crested a hill. Perhaps tonight? Surely the glow of the city would reach me . . .
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