50/50 (2 page)

First, I secured an athlete sponsorship agreement with The North Face, an outdoor apparel and gear company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I still needed a day job to pay the bills, but the corporate support helped defray some of the costs of traveling around the world to compete. Moreover, I believed it gave me a launchpad for bigger goals. Mere months after officially signing with The North Face, I worked up the gumption to submit a proposal for my “50 marathons, 50 states, 50 days” adventure to the company’s marketing department. It was a fairly modest proposal. I basically just asked them to cover gas and food while I gallivanted across the country with my family. However, I made the classic inexperienced sponsored athlete’s mistake of not really thinking through the small matter of what was in it for the sponsor. I just figured I would wear their stuff and maybe provide a little logo exposure in
Outside
or
Runner’s World
.

The marketing folks at The North Face clearly did not see much in the proposal for them, and they sat on it. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. I think they hoped I would just forget about it.

Then another fortunate accident happened: I wrote a book that, almost overnight, made me one of the better-known runners in America—one of the few whom nonrunners actually knew about. The book chronicled my wild adventures as an all-night runner and became a surprise best seller. Suddenly the crazy long runs that I’d been doing for the past decade became “news.” I was interviewed on the
Late Show with David Letterman
, on
60 Minutes
, and by Howard Stern. Race directors and running club presidents around the world began inviting me to give motivational talks for their participants and members, which often attracted standing-room-only audiences.
Runner’s World
and
Outside
put me on their covers, and
Time
ran a feature story about me.
Time
magazine! My private adventures were now a public curiosity.

My visibility within The North Face also got a strong boost. Then, in 2005, three years after I had first conceived my big idea, a man named Joe Flannery became the company’s new vice president of marketing. He took one look at my moth-eaten proposal and had a vision of his own.

I was a bundle of nerves when I sat down in Joe’s roomy center office to talk about it.

“I want to make this bigger,” Joe said.

“What, you want me to run more than fifty?” I joked.

Joe laughed briefly. “Not longer, bigger,” he said.

Joe’s vision was to transform my eccentric family vacation into a massive transcontinental fitness lollapalooza and media extravaganza called The North Face Endurance 50. Instead of running fifty arbitrary solo marathons measured by the Mother Ship’s odometer wherever I felt like stretching my legs in a given state, I would run fifty official, certified marathon events that would be open to other participants. There would be pre- and post-marathon activities and additional events, just like at other marathons. Local and state government agencies at each marathon location would be brought on board. Joe and his staff would design an aggressive media campaign whose objective was to ensure that every man, woman, and child in the United States heard about the Endurance 50 at least once. The brand exposure for The North Face would be tremendous!

Great
, I thought.
My family vacation has just run amok
. Joe must have seen my face fall. That’s when he played his full hand.

“Dean, you’ve become an inspirational figure for a lot of people,” he said earnestly. “This is an opportunity to inspire more folks than you ever dreamed you could reach. Not to mention, a big fund-raiser for Karno’s Kids,” he added, referring to the charity I had created to motivate and empower young boys and girls to become physically active.

That settled it. I was back on board, with a vengeance. If I die having contributed nothing more to the world than inspiring a handful or more of nonrunners to become runners, I will die knowing I did what I could to make the world a better place. It’s not that I lack the imagination to find a bigger cause. It’s that I believe there is no bigger cause. Running is much more than a good way to lose weight. It’s a cure for depression and a potential path to personal growth and self-fulfillment. It’s my recipe for making this world a more harmonious home to the human species.

“I’m in,” I said.

Joe’s first move was to call Merrill Squires, founder of the Squires Sports Group. I guess you would classify SSG as an event production company. They’re logistics experts with extensive experience in creating roaming festivals, like the 2002 Olympic torch relay run across America.

“Sure, we can do this,” Merrill told Joe confidently. But SSG had never undertaken anything quite like the Endurance 50 before. They had never even
heard
of anything like it being attempted. I later learned that, behind his back, Merrill’s friends were giving him one-in-twenty odds of pulling it off.

The challenges were enormous. First, we had to find fifty marathon directors willing to re-create their events on a smaller scale on a date we suggested, or allow us to run our event concurrently with their normally scheduled marathon. Then we had to sequence these events so that it was feasible to caravan from one to the next in time to set up and run each marathon during the small window of opportunity that police support, local permits, and road closures afforded. Infinite details of transportation, supply sourcing, insurance, and personnel had to be worked out. And not least, we had to recruit enough sponsors to cover the whopping $1.2 million price tag for our unprecedented “expedition,” as it came to be designated.

Fortunately, I was not personally responsible for making all these things happen. The role I was destined to play in The North Face Endurance 50 was decidedly different from the one I had envisioned for my family vacation. If the Endurance 50 was a movie, then others would take on the responsibilities of producer, director, location scout, set crew, and camera operator. I would be the so-called talent. The small star of a very big show.

The fifteen months of intensive preparation—which included some six thousand miles’ worth of training runs and ultra-endurance tune-up races—that I endured between the time Joe Flannery layered his vision on top of mine and the start of marathon number one are a blur in my memory. The fast-forward button finally was released in September 2006, when I flew to St. Louis, Missouri, and from there drove to the bucolic town of St. Charles to begin what would turn out to be the most intense fifty days of my life, hands-down.

St. Charles was the site of the Lewis & Clark Marathon, which would be one of eight “live events” on our tour. A popular twelve-year-old event, it attracted roughly five thousand participants. St. Charles was also the starting site of the historic Lewis and Clark expedition. This year marked the two hundredth anniversary of that remarkable journey, so starting the Endurance 50 there seemed fitting.

The morning after arriving, I met up with Joe Flannery in a large parking lot. “There it is,” he said, “your new home for fifty days.” He was pointing at a huge tour bus fully cocooned in vinyl wrapping that displayed colorful graphics and attention-grabbing sponsor logos. “And here are your new friends,” he added.

Before me stood a motley crew of scruffy-looking guys, mostly in their twenties, some of whom I had met once or twice before, others of whom were complete strangers to me. I would spend the majority of the next fifty days and nights within breath-smelling distance of these fellows in a cramped, mobile locker room, complete with barracks-style bunk beds stacked three-high. I hoped we wouldn’t kill one another.

Among the crew members I knew slightly already were Jason Koop and Jimmy Hopper. With his lanky build, square jaw, and matted hair, “Koop” looked like he’d just walked off the set of
Chariots of Fire
. An accomplished former collegiate runner now working with Chris Carmichael, Lance Armstrong’s personal coach and trainer, Koop was here principally to monitor my nutrition and physiological adaptations. “Hopps” had the look of a Southern California surfer dude, with a nest of blond hair that he would inexplicably shave off before I saw him again the next morning.

New to me were English, our English bus driver (it took me all too long to discern that the man was from England
and
his name was English), and Dave, veteran manager of many a rock band tour who had been hired to manage our expedition because, well, a rock band tour was the closest model for our expedition we could think of. English had feathery silver hair, a matching goatee, and a meaty handshake. Dave had darting eyes, slicked-back hair, and a way of seeming to hover in the background even as he stood and spoke with everyone else. They were the two elders in the group.

Unbeknownst to me, the younger members of the crew had already devised their own unique version of the Endurance 50: fifty states, fifty days, fifty phone numbers! They were hoping to entice some unsuspecting volunteer into giving them her phone number in each of the states across this great nation of ours. An ambitious goal, no doubt, but as I came to learn, they were every bit as determined as I was—darn resourceful too.

Dave explained that they were going to set up the “Finish Festival” in this parking lot as a sort of dress rehearsal for the performance that would be repeated tomorrow and again daily for seven weeks afterward. I then left for last-minute logistical meetings. When I returned two hours later, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The gang had erected a small city of tents, carpets, banners, and stages. The scene looked more like a corporate-sponsored Moroccan street bazaar than a hotel parking lot. People scurried around with hammers, drills, and other tools, lugged coolers filled with food and drink, and squinted at assembly instruction papers. Music blared from zillion-watt loudspeakers. Everybody was drenched in perspiration from hauling all this stuff around. A towering inflatable finish arch that served as a makeshift entrance to the dream city teetered back and forth like a blimp getting ready for flight as two local volunteers brought on board just for the weekend (a tactic we would repeat at each venue) struggled to stake it down.

I stood in silence, taking in the chaotic tableau, my stomach alive with a gnawing sense of foreboding.

That evening was to be my last chance to get a full night’s rest for nearly two months. My mind raced as I lay awake in our hotel room next to Julie. It hit me suddenly:
I have to run fifty marathons in fifty states in the next fifty days!
I believed then that I could do it, but I knew there were dozens of possible mishaps that might cause me to fail. Anything from a twisted ankle to out-of-control blistering to being hit by a car could bring the whole extravaganza crashing to a premature halt. And I was aware that the running would be the “easy” part of this quest. Running fifty marathons in fifty days from my front door would be one thing; running them between frenzied Finish Festivals and multi-hour bus drives would be quite another.

I had failed before, but never with so many people counting on me to succeed. I thought of the thousands of runners who had signed up to run with me at the forty-two specially created events, the teachers all around the country who’d designed activities for their students centered on the Endurance 50, the scores of magazines, newspapers, and radio and TV stations that had budgeted space and time to cover my exploits, and the sponsors that had shelled out great sums of cash to make the whole thing possible.

When you spend as much time anticipating a major undertaking as I spent anticipating the Endurance 50, your mind imagines so many possible scenarios that, by the time you actually begin, you’re half convinced that the event can offer no surprises. But it always does. The Endurance 50 surprised me in many ways, but above all by the way it challenged me to apply virtually every lesson about running, and about life, that I had ever learned, and taught me countless new lessons to apply in the future. Lessons worth sharing. So, here goes . . .

CHAPTER 1

The Right Foot

Day 1

September 17, 2006

Lewis & Clark Marathon

St. Charles, Missouri

Elevation: 989'

Weather: 82 degrees; humid

Time: 3:50:52

Net calories burned: 3,187
^*

Number of runners: 4,800

I
sat stiffly in a cold hotel conference
room with a needle in my arm. It was five thirty in the morning on Day 1 of The North Face Endurance 50. The phlebotomist who had been hired to stick this needle in my arm—a stout, thin-lipped woman in her mid fifties—filled three vials with blood and then handed me a small plastic cup.

“Urinate into this,” she said drily.

I would have to endure a version of this morning ritual roughly twice a week throughout my autumn tour of America.

Fifty days, fifty states, untold needle-sticks.

The idea was to monitor some of my body’s important health indicators over the next seven weeks. A couple of recent medical studies had suggested that running long distances might be physiologically damaging. I wanted to prove them wrong—or die trying.

I felt light-headed and mildly queasy as I made my way toward the marathon expo and starting area. But I had other reasons for that. The scene was chaotic. Runners, their supporters, race officials, and volunteers darted in every direction with harried determination. The Endurance 50 festival area was packed. That familiar-looking Moroccan street bazaar was now in full swing. I’d had no idea it would be this hectic.

Making my way through the crowd, I nearly ran headlong into a lean man wearing a priest’s robe. It was my dear friend, fellow ultrarunner, and licensed justice of the peace Topher Gaylord.

“Gaylord!” I exclaimed. “Er . . . I mean, Father! Man, am I glad to see you.”

“Follow me, son,” he said. Topher had flown from Italy to be here, clerical robe snugly packed in his suitcase.