The Point of No Return

Why would anyone drop everything for a cross-country run?

Francesco Bongiorni

Woody Guthrie sang that "from the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me." Maybe so, Woody, but still, I wouldn't want to run across it.

Yet Adam Meyer and Ashley Donovan did. And when their joint community-engagement-promoting, general why-the-hell-not "Run2Connect" project, in which they ran (on foot! All four of them!) from Portland, Oregon, to Washington, D.C., reached Chicago, I joined them for a few miles. I wanted to ask them not just why but how? How exactly do you run across the country, crossing a fairly rocky mountain range and some pretty great plains, without losing your mind, wrecking your feet, and getting lost and having to eat each other in a mountain pass?

Turns out it's really simple. All you need to do is: (1) Buy an old RV to sleep in. (2) Buy or wheedle lots of shoes and running gear. Also maybe a case of beer. (3) Start. (4) Stop when you see the U.S. Capitol. It also helps to be young, athletic, and almost annoyingly nice. Adam, 28, is a hyperactive do-gooder, a guy who jumped from college to college seeking more stuff to learn, then ended up in Washington, D.C., working for a series of nonprofit advocacy groups. Ashley, 31, had just spent eight years getting her chemistry Ph.D. at Princeton but is possessed by the same bright urge to improve the world. They're also both freakishly attractive and surprisingly not a couple, but they should be, if only for the prospect of gorgeous babies who presumably would sprint out of the delivery room to help orderlies improve their working conditions.

It all began, they explained to me, in a Washington, D.C., coffee shop. He told her that he'd always wanted to run across the country. To which Ashley replied, "Let's do it!" I remind you, they were drinking coffee.

Their project required organization, about $20,000 for expenses, and a little patience—they had to wait until Adam got back from the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. Which he drove to. From D.C. Adam likes road trips.

And it needed a purpose—apparently, running across the country just because you feel like it, Forrest Gump–style, is not done. According to Run2Connect's website, the aim of the run was to "search for ways to connect individuals, support communities, and encourage improvements to our public systems." What this amounted to, in practice, was arriving in some small town, introducing themselves to a wide range of local officials, and finding out what they were doing that was cool. They talked about energy efficiency in Jackson, Wyoming, and "the positive economic impact of a Coca-Cola bottling plant and rotational molding manufacturing company" in Atlantic, Iowa.

Okay, great. I'm for rotational molding as much as the next guy. But what about the running across the country part?

"Well," Ashley told me, "we have learned to appreciate trails and sidewalks." This is because American roads (outside of cities) are made to drive on, quickly, while texting with one hand and drinking a Slurpee with the other. Both Ashley and Adam had had enough close calls to be wary. It was a little scarier, of course, when they were by themselves. For part of the trip, they had volunteers who drove the RV, so they could run together. But for much of the eastern half of the journey, one runner drove the RV, and the other logged the miles. Taking shifts, they ran about a marathon's worth of miles a day.

And what was that like?

"Wonderful," Adam said.

"Never once been bored," Ashley added.

I found that hard to believe. But then again: I ran with them for eight miles along the Chicago Lakefront. And I found out, much to my amazement, that after lunch they were continuing their run across the country. Their plan was to push on to Washington, D.C., and they showed no fatigue or unhappiness with the prospect of the miles and miles ahead of them. In fact, as I paid for lunch (40 bucks, enough to become an official Run2Connect sponsor), they were eager to roll.

Ashley and Adam think about a dozen people run across the country every year, for charity or acting out of individual obsessions. Myself, I like to start my run from my own bed and know I'll end up back in it, sooner rather than later. Call me crazy, but I also have a thing for hot showers. To break the country down into 3,000 eight- to nine-minute miles, and then count them off? It sounds daunting, impossibly long, impossibly monotonous.

And yet. For all our talk of running as "a lifestyle," we don't mean it. For almost everyone, it is an addition to our day, or an extension to our daily travails. What would it be like to run, say, 10 miles a day for a week, and, as in the old joke, actually end up 70 miles from where you started? When I met Adam and Ashley, they had been on the road for three months, and by that I mean on the road, every single foot of asphalt traversed by a foot of their own.

I have no desire to spend all day in my running clothes, counting miles until lunch and then again until dark, and then get my paperwork done and food shoveled and a beer guzzled before the next day begins. But I will confess, writing here at my desk, surrounded by papers and bills and books, with the floors of my house above me threatening to crush me with the weight of furniture and responsibility, thinking of Ashley's and Adam's warm enthusiasm for their mission and their journey…maybe it wouldn't be so bad. What if, instead of "fitting in" a run, I could make it the entirety of my life, if only for a short time? Would I grow to love it even more, and go to sleep, as Ashley and Adam did, looking forward to the next day's morning run? Or would I start to resent it, the way one does any obligation, and wish I could sit in an office and file expenses? Just to take a break?

I'm not sold either way. But after meeting Ashley and Adam, the Barbie and Ken of transcontinental do-gooding, I'm willing to entertain the idea. Perhaps I shall strike the desk, say "No more!" and hit the road, finally giving up the "back" part of out-and-back. All I know is that if Ashley and Adam ever run back across the country and pass through Chicago, I'll be waiting at my door, shorts on, spare shoes in a sack, ready to throw into their RV. It may be, by then, that I'll be ready to see how far I can go.

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Peter Sagal is a 3:09 marathoner and the host of NPR's Wait, Wait…Don't Tell Me! For more, click here.

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