Introduction
On June 11, 1978, I started off on my 80-day, 3,452-mile run from Medford, OR to Medford, MA. For the first month, I averaged about 43 miles a day and then upped it to over 50 miles a day as I miscalculated the distance using AAA maps and a ruler! Geez, now I am lucky if I can do just one of those days! Every breath seems like a cliffhanger! Guess I should just be happy I’m still waking up every morning.
I started ceremonially in the Kingdome in Seattle during a Red Sox/Seattle Mariners game and then flew down to Medford, OR, to begin the run. In the group photo below, I am with the Mayor of Medford, OR, and a few members of the Oregon Sizzlers track club. My crew of Danny Carey, Jeff Donahue, Tom Kinder, and Kent Hawley were lifesavers. At the end of every day, I wrote a postcard and mailed it back to some friends at the Boston YMCA. Each card had the date, day on the road, weather and temperature, miles I ran and location I finished for the day, along with a brief message. No computers, no cell phones, no emails, no texting, no GPS, no nothing. Ran from phone booth to phone booth! The posts that follow are a day-by-day account of my 80 days on the road, all told through the postcards I mailed home each day.
I was 23-years-old, barely trained, and very naïve. That’s what probably got me through all this.
