Freedom Run

by Jamie Summerlin

  After climbing the steps, I passed under a bridge, thinking it was one I had seen in the video that was close to the end and that this is where Tiff would join me. But as I went under it, I realized I was nowhere near that point. On and on I went, finally coming to a clearing where I saw a familiar SUV parked near a gate with a light shining out the window towards me. I was elated to see Darren and Tiffany there just as the morning sun was starting to creep above the horizon. Tiffany joined me and we walked across a bridge and up our final hill until a clock tower came into view.

  “So what do you think?” Tiffany asked me.

  “About what?” I asked, grasping for anything to take my mind off of the pain I was feeling in my body.

  “About finishing a 100-mile race,” she said. “It’s a big deal!”

  I told her I hadn’t really thought about the magnitude of what I was about to accomplish, but later as I reflected back on the race, she was right—it was a pretty big deal!

  As we came to the finish, Tiff ran on ahead and I crossed the finish line in 24 hours, 53 minutes and 7 seconds. I made it!

  As I ran across the finish line, I scanned the area in search of Darren, who had driven to the finish and planned to film me coming into the finish. He showed up a couple of minutes later, apologizing profusely that after he parked the car nature called and he had to take care of that business. We laughed it off, and at the encouragement of others I ran back through the finish so he could capture it on film. He and I toasted the finish, then headed back to our respective homes, completely exhausted, but very proud of what had just been accomplished.

  Simulated Running

  After allowing my body to recover from running a 77-miler and 100-miler in the span of seven weeks, I began another important stage of my training. In September 2011, I began a three-month simulation of my 100-day journey. I knew that it was necessary for me to put myself through the mental and physical stress I would endure during the cross-country run prior to the actual run so that I wouldn’t be shocked by what my body would experience. It also enabled me to learn some crucial tips that would prove to be extremely valuable.

  During this mock cycle, I would typically run 16 miles each morning, stop at the house, and then run the seven miles to the office. I was fortunate that the building I worked in also housed the West Virginia University Police, so there was a locker room with showers that the police chief and building manager allowed me to use. After a day of work I would run the seven miles back home. My pattern was altered slightly on the first and last day of the work week. On Mondays, I would drive to the office in the morning with enough work clothes to last me the week, and then run home. On Fridays after work, I would drive my car back home.

  What I found was that putting in 30 miles a day for three months really prepared me more mentally than physically for the journey. The mental challenges of getting up around 3:30 a.m., running, stopping and picking up my day in a high-stress environment and then running home again, all while dealing with the daily duties and challenges of having a family, allowed me to test my ability to manage everything. I knew if I could balance my work and family while running 30 miles each day, I would be prepared to handle the daily grind of running 35 miles daily during the run across America. While at home, I had work and family duties to juggle while running, but during the journey, I knew I would basically just have to eat, sleep and run (a lot).

  Another benefit of going through this mock cycle was that I learned that my sleep habits had to change. When I really ramped up my long-distance running, I did alter my sleep pattern to go to bed earlier in order to get my runs out of the way early in the morning. I would typically go to bed at about 10 or 11 p.m. and get up at 4 a.m. But by the end of the first week of this simulated training, I was crawling into bed at 7:30 p.m. in order to be able to get up at 3:30 a.m. the next morning to start running. If I wouldn’t have gone through that mock cycle and learned that my body needed an additional two or three hours of sleep each night, I wouldn’t have made it the first couple of weeks during the actual journey.

  I have always been pretty comfortable at an eight minute-per-mile pace, no matter what distance I was running (I ran my only marathon in 3 hours and 31 minutes, which is an 8:03 pace). But I knew that even an eight-minute pace would not be something my body could tolerate based on the massive amount of mileage I would be logging. So during this mock cycle, I began focusing on purposefully slowing down during my training runs, getting my body used to the slower times. It actually hurt a bit when I started slowing down because my body had become comfortable to the stride and pace at which I had always previously run. Efficiency was what this run across America was going to be about, however, so altering my stride to shorter, choppier steps would be necessary, even though initially it affected my knees and hips. It was admittedly tough to adjust to that, and painful initially, but I wanted to try to put myself through what I was expecting my run to be like when we took off.

  In addition to the physical challenges this alteration in my pace and stride caused me, it was also a challenge mentally. No competitive runner wants to purposely run at about a two-minute pace slower than he or she is capable of, so it was difficult mentally to dial back and go slower. I also felt like I was doing the old man shuffle with my stride so short and my leg kick so minimal, but this had to be done. It was going to be a long, long trip.

  Lashcicles

  After completing my simulated training cycle, I continued to regularly run about 16 miles each morning throughout the winter of 2011-12. Living in West Virginia, winters bring brisk temperatures and snow and ice storms with regularity. Running in single-digit temps and several inches of snow presents plenty of challenges, but through trial and error, I found that my Vasque Velocity trail shoes are wonderful in this type of weather, and they helped me power through the snow, with the white powder crunching underneath my feet with each step.

  One morning in January 2012, I woke up to what looked like a winter wonderland. I put on my winter running gear, including my balaclava facemask, which covers my entire head and face except for a portion of my nose, eyes and forehead just above my eyebrows, and stepped out into the 7-degree early morning air. But the moisture and humidity created by the balaclava covering my perspiring head, coupled with my watery eyes due to the windy conditions, formed what looked like icicles on my eyelashes. As I came up to the door that morning after my run, Nicholas opened the door and started laughing at my appearance. We both laughed as I gingerly pulled little chunks of ice away from my eyes. From that day forward, those became known as lashcicles.

  On that same run, my hands were absolutely freezing, despite wearing a good pair of cold-weather running gloves. I was doing everything I could think of to try to keep my hands warm, and I am sure I looked funny running down the road with my arms crossed and my hands shoved up under my armpits. There are a total of five American flags that fly on my regular morning running route, and I make it a point to salute each of them as I run by. But I’m sure my old drill instructor would have been screaming in my ear with his gravelly voice because of the way I was saluting that morning. I’m sure it didn’t look too sharp.

  Mental Training

  Even though I was gaining confidence in my physical abilities to complete the journey through the various stages of my training regimen, I knew I also had to include some mental training. I was fortunate enough to connect with Chelsea Butters Wooding and Michelle “Mac” McAlarnen, both doctoral students in the Sport and Exercise Psychology Department at West Virginia University. Chelsea, in particular, assisted me greatly in providing me with the knowledge and tools necessary to train my mind to conquer the many mental challenges I would face throughout this journey.

  While all of the discussions and meetings with them were beneficial, there were three key things that Chelsea was instrumental in passing along to me that really proved most helpful. Early in our talks, she helped me realize that effectively focusing on running helped me to not get stressed o
ut and put too much effort into the planning and logistics of the journey. That’s what Tiffany had agreed to do and I needed to allow her to handle that.

  The second tip, I picked up a couple of weeks before the departure for the run. Tiffany and I met Chelsea at a Bob Evans restaurant to discuss last-minute thoughts about the journey, and I told her, “The past few days have really sucked.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I was doing an eight-mile taper run and as I was running back to the house it hit me that I’m two weeks away from this endeavor. But after it’s over, then what?”

  A feeling of depression had begun to sink in with me, mourning the upcoming completion of something I had put so much focus into for the past two years. I had been working so long and hard to achieve this run across America, and before I had even started the journey I was depressed and confused about what I would do after it was over.

  “A lot of Olympic athletes go through the same thing,” she reassured me. “They train for four years for 10 seconds or one minute of competition. It’s just a form of postpartum depression and it is normal. It’s important to focus on the now and your purpose for running to complete and enjoy your journey.”

  She allowed me to realize that it’s nothing out of the ordinary for athletes who put so much focus and time into one particular event to experience those sorts of emotions. Once she helped me realize it, we were then able to work through it.

  Finally, Chelsea provided me with an effective way to communicate with my wife about the pain I would experience on the run without burdening Tiffany with intimate details about the breakdown of my body. Chelsea helped me to use a scale of 1-10 to describe my pain management, with a 10 being I feel great, and a 1 being I feel terrible. She also helped me to manage my expectations and suggested that I not get too caught up in trying to get to a 10 every day.

  “If you are a 5 on the pain management scale one day, expecting to get to a 7 or 8 may not be realistic,” she told me. “Work on trying to get to a 6. Take baby steps to get to the next level rather than trying to get to a 10 every day.”

  That scale also gave me a different way to communicate with Tiffany without being too descriptive of the injuries and pain I was dealing with. Tiffany and I used that scale quite a bit the first few weeks of the journey. There were times when I was feeling bad, and Tiffany would ask me what number I was on the scale. What I learned was that I couldn’t be too descriptive about the pain that I was enduring because that would add stress to Tiffany, and she also didn’t share logistical struggles or issues that came up while being stuck in an RV with our two kids all day because she didn’t want those things to distract me. She was strong enough to keep those things to herself and she trusted me enough to allow me to keep most of the details of my pain management to myself. It really created great teamwork. I focused on the running and she focused on the logistics.

  Chapter 3: Mapping Out America

  While training to run 35 miles every day for 100 days straight is certainly challenging, there were times when it was honestly the easiest part of the preparation. There were plenty of books, blogs and training plans at my disposal that could assist me in creating a running plan to train for the run across America. Unfortunately, there is no Running Across America for Dummies manual that I could purchase at my local bookstore that would provide my wife and me with all of the necessary steps to plan out the logistics of such a monumental trip.

  Thankfully, my wife accepted the often overwhelming task of translating this dream into reality by ensuring that all of the necessary preparations were made. And trust her, there were a lot of preparations to be made! Without her help, I wouldn’t have been able to take even one step on this journey, let alone the estimated six million steps that I took in running from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean.

  Fifteen years into our marriage, my wife and I were already aware of the fact that I am the one who sees the start and the finish, and she’s the one who considers all of the stops and details along the way in most of what we do. This adventure shined a megawatt spotlight on that fact. She spent hundreds of hours the year leading up to the run ensuring that the logistics of the trip would be as organized as possible. That meant she planned everything from the route we would take to the amount of underwear we’d pack.

  Obviously the most important and challenging aspect of planning this journey was literally mapping out America. I told Tiffany where I wanted to start—in Coos Bay, Oregon, where she grew up. I told her where I wanted to finish—in Baltimore, Maryland (at the time). I told her I wanted to finish on Independence Day. And I told her I wanted to complete the run across America in 100 days. All of the other details, I left up to her.

  Planning this trip consumed every ounce of Tiffany’s spare time. Fortunately, at the time, she was working two days a week as a dental hygienist, which afforded her the time to focus on the infinite details of the trip. She needed every bit of that time to accomplish everything that I was asking her to do.

  The first step was determining our mode of transportation during the journey. We had committed to bringing our two children along with us, so we knew that at minimum we would need a van. If we opted for that, it would mean we’d have to find lodging every night and eat most of our meals at restaurants, which after calculating those costs essentially eliminated that option. The best option, it seemed, was to utilize a motorhome.

  We contacted several different companies in an attempt to secure a motorhome for use during the trip in exchange for sponsorship opportunities. But after getting rebuffed by multiple dealers and manufacturers, we realized that was yet another expense that we would have to absorb. That would be a recurring theme in our attempt to obtain sponsorship and in-kind donations as we planned for the trip. Tiffany began investigating renting a motorhome. The lowest price she could find for 115 days and 8,000 miles was $17,000. Yikes! That was simply too much to invest in a rental with nothing to show for it at the trip’s completion. That left one real option: buying a motorhome. When my family committed to this trip, we knew we needed to do everything in our power to keep our expenses low. Securing sponsorship and donations was a way we hoped to accomplish that. But since no company was willing to provide use of a motorhome, we knew buying one had become a necessity, even though doing so was initially something we resisted.

  Yet, the more time Tiffany spent looking at used motorhomes online, the more we could see it becoming a reality. After doing some comparison shopping, we drove to Colerain RV in Cincinnati, Ohio, to purchase our transportation—and home—for the next four months. After buying our 31-foot 2004 Jayco Escapade, equipped with a very necessary shower stall, my wife’s mission was to become literate in the understanding and workings of the motorhome from headlight to taillight. She trawled blogs, reading as much as she could about how to operate the motorhome. Once, she even got up the courage to post a question on a blog, but that didn’t turn out to be too fruitful.

  “I can see in my mind a gray-haired man reading my question and just shaking his head and smirking to himself about the foolishness of what I was proposing to do,” she told me. “He’s probably thinking to himself, ‘Good luck with that!’”

  So back to trawling she went. By the time we were ready to start our trip, she had gathered so much information about motorhomes that I believe she could have been hired as a writer for RV Magazine, if there is such a tabloid. She, though, was a bit more modest about her knowledge of RVs.

  “I’m just trying to stuff as much information between my ears as possible,” she said. “And I hope that some of it will stick and I’ll be able to remember it when things happen or go wrong on the trip.”

  Getting from Point A to Point B

  With our mode of transportation now secured, Tiffany was then able to really hammer out the daily route. Much of her time was spent studying maps, routes, highways and elevation gains and losses as she plotted out the course for the run. The shortest distance between two points is a straight li
ne, but unfortunately going from Oregon to Maryland requires a few twists and turns. Tiffany did a marvelous job of figuring all that out, even though it caused her quite a bit of frustration.

  “You’re far from the first person to run across the country,” she told me, “but you definitely aren’t taking the path of least resistance.” That was due to the run starting in Oregon, where she grew up, because I wanted to pay homage to my wife. It happened to also be the hometown of Steve Prefontaine, a famous runner who tragically lost his life way too soon. Tiffany loved the idea, but after studying the road maps of America, we became a little less thrilled. I ultimately ended up running about 500 extra miles because of starting in Coos Bay, Oregon, instead of southern California like most USA crossers have done. We also organized a few events throughout the state of Oregon as I ran through, which at the time seemed like a great idea, but ended up adding to the mileage.

  So how do we get from Oregon to Maryland? This question haunted my wife for a few weeks before she got the courage (and time) to sit down and tackle the route. She had point A (Coos Bay, Oregon) and point B (at the time, Baltimore, Maryland), but she needed to chop it up into 100 bites that I could consume in 24-hour periods while still being able to wake up the next morning and ingest approximately the same distance again, and again, and again. She sat down at her computer in our dining room, said a little prayer for help and then probably spent more time on the Google Maps website than Google’s programmers did when designing the site.

  Initially, we were under the wrong impression that running on interstates was not allowed in any state. With that being the case, Tiffany set the parameters on Google Maps to pedestrian use only. Gulp! My eyes got a little big when Tiffany broke the news to me that the mileage was about 500 more miles than what I had guessed it would be. Undeterred, I told her to keep planning, and Tiffany began dissecting the route in 1% sections.