The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (42 page)

I was following in a more modern—but equally infamous—set of footsteps. A century after Gilbert, a British runner named Robert Garside also attempted to circle the globe on foot. But Garside disappeared too; not physically—he returned to his starting point unharmed—but via an angry incredulity that led him to be seen not as a trailblazer but as a fraud. I was here because I'd doubted Garside, and in my journalistic expression of that had helped instigate a media lynch mob that contributed to the destruction of his reputation. And of all the places Garside ran, those who didn't find him credible argued, the Nullarbor—the impossible, wasted, torrid Nullarbor—was where some of Garside's biggest lies played out.

But Robert Garside
did
run the Nullarbor. At least that's what I'd come to believe after an encounter with the runner in London a year after he finished his journey. And I realized that in the attacks I'd joined, one of the most incredible things a runner had ever done—run around the world—was wiped out. Almost eight years on foot erased because I and other journalists had been too willing to believe somebody else's definition of what a real runner is, and decided that Robert Garside couldn't possibly be one.

So now, I want to make amends. I want to prove that running this place is possible. And when I do, I hope the remorse that has haunted me for almost a decade will burn away. I wasn't running alone. My friend Morgan Beeby had joined me. We'd trained for months in Los Angeles, developing a strategy to address the lack of water, the great heat, the vast distances. But our confidence had been shaken from the moment we'd arrived in Australia. In Sydney, we'd heard ominous talk of murdered vagabonds. We were warned, repeatedly, to bring a satellite phone (we didn't). In Ceduna, at the plain's eastern edge, we stayed in a reeking-of-cigarettes house trailer, the owner of which, after hearing our plan and collecting $10 rent, instantly pegged me: “You,” he said, without a single hint from us, “must have something to atone for.”

 

Robert George Garside was born on January 6, 1967, in Stockport, England, a suburb of Manchester, part of an industrial region that sprawls along the banks of the Mersey River. He grew up playing many sports—a self-described “all-rounder”—but especially loved soccer and was captain of his school team. Garside's parents divorced when he was a teenager, and his mother returned to her native Slovakia. He says he developed a need to travel almost as a way to follow his own mother, who—in exiting a difficult relationship with the runner's father—had finally found a sense of contentment. “I remember the day she left,” Garside says. “She was so happy, leaving all that stuff behind.” The joy and freedom of that escape, Garside says, is what gave birth to his own inner wanderlust. “[I wanted to see] the world because it's a way of understanding things,” he says. But accomplishing that goal seemed elusive; instead, Garside says, he was haunted by a “sense of aimlessness.”

As a child, he says, he ran and played in the woods near his house, in “a huge forest stretching for miles. I had some of my best times there when I was a kid.” Beginning to run as a young adult, he says, brought him back to that state. “You have a good experience as a kid,” he says, “and it affects the rest of your life.” Despite this, Garside felt that his future was uncertain. He was at “a crossroads,” he says, and looking for a “way forward.” In 1993, at that point a psychology student at the University of London's Royal Holloway College (and a volunteer with the City of London police), he found it. Garside was thumbing through a copy of
The Guinness Book of Records
(during a “rare visit to the library,” he jokes) and came across the story of Dave Kunst, an American who—from 1970 through 1974—walked around the world. Garside wondered if anyone had ever tried it at a runner's pace. He contacted Guinness, which informed him that no such record existed. “That's when I knew what I was going to be,” he says. Garside quit school and began training. He planned a route and lined up sponsors, dubbing himself “The Runningman.”

In December 1995, Garside boarded a plane to South Africa. From Cape Town, he started running north, to Namibia. His plan was to curve up the western coast of Africa, fly north to Spain, and turn east at the Mediterranean. But the run sputtered out at around 1,000 miles. Garside says he was unprepared for the difficulties of the actual journey, especially the complications it created with his girlfriend, Joanna, whom he left behind in London. In March 1996, he returned home.

 

Over the next few months, Garside planned a new route that would take him from London, east through Europe—he could better stay in touch with Joanna, he says—and then into Russia. He'd veer south and work his way across Asia, then traverse Australia and the Americas lengthwise before returning to Europe. Garside departed London on December 7, 1996. This time, there was fanfare, media coverage, and a Greenpeace sponsorship. “It felt good,” he says, “to be a star.”

The runner's next decisions—more than anything else he'd do—would lead to the staining of his record, which would in turn foment outrage in the media and the running world. That outrage would peak over three years later as Garside, behind schedule and running a greatly modified route, crossed the United States.

Garside posted his proposed trajectory online, and was making entries in a web diary as often as he could (it was the early days of the Internet, and access was spotty). He arrived in Slovakia, where he was reunited with his mother, in January. But there Garside stalled, again preoccupied with his crumbling relationship back in London. He says he'd planned for the break to be brief—Guinness allowed pauses of up to 30 days for injury or moving from one land mass to another—but as the weeks wore on, the runner began to falsify his diaries. In early September 1997, Garside's online diaries offered a harrowing but fictional account of an attack in Pakistan: “I was robbed,” he wrote, “my tent slashed with a knife.” Garside says his biggest fear—driven by near-constant media coverage of his adventures—was that somebody else would set out and beat him by taking a more direct route. (The Kunst record of 14,452 miles bypassed Africa and South America.) Garside wanted to traverse every continent. “I wanted to see the world,” he says, by going “the long way, not the short way. But I didn't want other people to beat me. If they knew I was having trouble, everything could go down the drain.”

To himself, though, Garside had to admit that this run, like the first, had failed: he'd already stopped longer than Guinness would permit. But by the fall of 1997, Garside was ready to start a third attempt. The relationship with Joanna had ended, and it was a relief to Garside. “She wanted me to get on with my life,” he says. By then, however, the run
was
Garside's life. His third version of the quest would be done with less fanfare and limited sponsorship; his plan was to start in New Delhi, India, and find local support wherever he could, keeping the effort low-key. This strategy meant less pressure on him. But there was one ticking bomb: the online diaries of his second attempt, which Garside had not taken down. The runner's made-up tales of danger and deprivation in the Hindu Kush would be repeated in most media accounts of his journey; each repetition would cement the accounts as central to the run's narrative.

There would be genuine danger and adventure ahead. But on October 20, 1997, as he left New Delhi, running toward China, Robert Garside had no idea that the biggest threat to his run would be borne of his own past actions.

 

What does it mean to run around the world? Give the idea a moment's thought, and you'll soon conclude that it is unimaginable, perhaps impossible. The task shares little with ultramarathoning, or even a record attempt across a great—but defined—distance or time span. One term proposed for open-ended efforts like Garside's is “journey run,” and that's a good start. In such an effort, speed is unimportant; instead, there's a sort of strategic arcana. How does one define “around the world”? The criteria are a subject of debate among organizations that certify circumnavigations. Do you need to cross each continent? Is there a minimum mileage that should be required? Garside's conditions, supplied by Guinness, mandated that he travel a total distance that exceeded the length of the Tropic of Capricorn—almost 23,000 miles—cross the equator at least once, and start and finish at the same place. The record-keeping organization also set, in advance, the standards of evidence Garside would have to meet. Logbooks with official witness statements were to be the primary means of documentation, along with photographs and video—and, in a nod to the senselessness inherent in any such effort (as well as difficulty defining exactly what “running” is), Guinness noted that “the strategy employed in covering the distance is up to the participant . . . there are no minimum running distances each day.”

The structural challenges involved in completing—and proving—a journey run were what initially attracted the person who would become Garside's primary nemesis, a Canadian distance-running enthusiast named David Blaikie. During the time of Garside's efforts, Blaikie wielded huge influence via his now-defunct website,
Ultramarathonworld.com
. At first, Blaikie viewed Garside with a sort of removed skepticism. But over time, Blaikie came to believe the runner was a fraud. He became a primary source for journalists (including me) writing about Garside. Blaikie's reporting was obsessive and meticulous; page after page dissected every element of Garside's effort, including the runner's route; his media claims; his qualifications; his physical and emotional state; even his social life. Between 1998 and 2000, Blaikie's doubts shifted toward certainty: Garside was a fake.
Ultramarathonworld.com
's coverage of the runner often resembled a prosecution, and one of Blaikie's key exhibits was the Nullarbor. Garside had arrived in Perth, Australia, on August 13, 1998—he'd traveled from India through China to Japan over the previous eight months—and set out from the Nullarbor's westernmost roadhouse, at Balladonia, on September 14. Less than four weeks later, Garside claimed, he arrived at Ceduna.

Blaikie believed none of this. In an article titled “Analysis of Run Across Australia—Very Long and Carefully Documented,” Blaikie implied that nobody could accomplish a solo foot-crossing of the desert expanse: “Where did he get the 12 litres of water a day he says he required in hot conditions? Roadhouses along the Nullarbor are up to 190 km apart, and there are no rivers, lakes, streams, or puddles to drink from.”

Good question, if you haven't crossed the Nullarbor, if you're reading about it or forming a thesis based on maps that depict nothing but barrenness. From an armchair, it is absolutely impossible to run the Nullarbor. Once you're out there, however, there is a way. Robert Garside discovered it. So would I.

 

Garside didn't detail his “method” for running the Nullarbor as he crossed the plain. Instead, his online diaries were filled with anecdotes and snapshots; he was having fun, literally hitting his stride. He was getting what he wanted out of running: “I like to be out in the wilderness—that's more in keeping with who I am.” But there were also the social interactions. “I like the world,” he says. “[I like] the people.” Garside had found a girlfriend in Australia—a young medical student named Lucy McKinnon—and was getting ready for what he believed was the most important leg of his journey: the Americas. Garside's plan was to fly from Sydney, Australia, to Chile, and run north, all the way to the United States. The runner's planned route from there was to hug the Pacific through San Francisco, then turn east to New York, but he had a key stop to make: Hollywood. There, Garside thought, fame and riches awaited.

It wasn't going to happen. In early 2000, Garside was in Venezuela, where he met and fell in love with another woman, Endrina Perez, who then accompanied him for much of the rest of his run (and whom he would later marry). But in May, soon after he left Caracas, the simmering conflict with Blaikie became personal. In his introduction to a reposted wire-service story, Blaikie, increasingly strident, wrote: “The accounts are awash in strong prose about the dangers he faces but not much about his actual running.” On May 15, Garside responded with a series of angry emails. Calling Blaikie a “mummies' boy,” the Briton wrote: “Running is supposed to be a positive thing BUT the only criticism I have EVER had in the past five years is from YOU.” Blaikie's reaction was to finally pronounce Garside an outright fraud: “I can't accept his claims,” the Canadian retorted. “There is too much . . . to swallow at face value. And a thorough review of the diaries and press releases . . . only drives the point home.”

Blaikie's tactics moved from written skepticism to near provocation; he began posting letters from his readers who sought “The Runningman” out to test him on the road. A typical challenge came from a Louisiana attorney who offered to pay Garside to compete in the Ultracentric 48-Hour Track Run, scheduled for November of that year in Dallas. The wording of the invitation, published on Blaikie's website, showed how ugly the dispute had become: “Should be a piece of cake considering your accomplishments to date,” the lawyer wrote. “I'll have to warn you, though, no ‘mummies' boys.' . . . only the laps you run, walk, or crawl will be counted.” Garside ignored the solicitation.

On September 1, 2000, Robert Garside crossed from Mexico into southern California. TV crews recorded the event. Wearing a sombrero, the runner talked excitedly about his adventure, his plans. He had no idea that everything was about to come apart.

 

I met Garside by accident. I'd been assigned to write a story about another long-distance daredevil—a 19-year-old from Truckee, California, who was attempting to become the first person to skateboard across the United States. The skater had briefly traveled with Garside. A person trying to run around the world would make for a good magazine article, and when my preliminary research led me to Blaikie and Garside's likely fraudulence, the piece I was contemplating became even juicier.