The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (44 page)

When I read a story Blaikie wrote about Fulcher, I was struck by the way he compiled personal information about her, citing observers who noted her social behavior—Fulcher liked to party, the story implied—and questioning whether such behavior made her a fit runner. Blaikie had done the same thing with Robert Garside. As Garside ran across Australia, he was joined by McKinnon, the medical student who provided an eyewitness account of the runner's final weeks in her country; she rode alongside him on a bicycle for 870 kilometers. On his website, Blaikie detailed Garside's involvement with McKinnon, seeming to disapprove of the extra few weeks the runner spent in the company of a woman. “Most likely he simply wanted to enjoy himself,” Blaikie wrote, “which it seems he did, because it was at about this time that he met and became involved with Lucy.” In an emailed response that Blaikie also posted online, McKinnon—who has become a minor adventure celebrity in her own right; she's the on-set doctor for the television show
Survivor
—angrily vouched for her former boyfriend: “You will be hard-pressed to prove that Robert is anything but a motivated, hard-working, driven, and honest man. I have no doubts in my mind that he will [do what he claims to be doing] despite what appears to be a . . . jealous bunch of people who call themselves ultramarathon runners.”

The “right” kind of ultrarunner, Blaikie told me, was someone like Al Howie, who ran across Canada in 1991 over 72 days; according to Blaikie, Howie's run was meticulously organized, with a support vehicle, constant medical attention, and a strict regimen of massage, nutrition, and fluid replenishment. But Fulcher—whom I reached in North Carolina, where she now works at an animal shelter—says she represented a different kind of long-distance runner: one who does it out of the tradition of adventure rather than competitive athletics. “The real test is personality and character,” Fulcher says. “That's what drives you to do something special. What David Blaikie will never understand is that talent is important, but the answer to everything is the journey itself.” After her record was rested by Guinness, Fulcher says, she became withdrawn, finding it difficult to cope with the destruction of her own life's work. “I was in tears,” Fulcher says. “This man went after somebody he'd never met, never looked in my eyes.” Fulcher recovered, joining the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division, doing 42 combat parachute jumps; she resumed her running career and did 10-milers and triathlons for the Army. She remains, however, a nonpublished entity at Guinness.

I believe that David Blaikie thought Robert Garside was a fraud, and I believe Blaikie was defending a sport he loved. I also believe that Blaikie's expectations of ultrarunners—as much as anything Robert Garside did or said—influenced his condemnation of the Briton's entire effort, and that the acrimony between the two men so heated the atmosphere that what might have been a simple dispute turned into a protracted feud. I put this hypothesis directly to Blaikie, and he denied it; he said that his work was fair and objective, and that he was simply raising questions about Robert Garside.

I wrote my story for
Runner's World
vindicating him.

But it never got published. Reading back on it, I can see that I had gotten it right—but the piece was a mess. I sounded like a conspiracy theorist. When my editors asked me to rewrite it, I saw the request as an effort to soften my assertions. (This wasn't the case; I'd lost perspective.) I refused. Only by telling the story my way—written from inside a rabbit hole—could I redeem Robert Garside.

And so, I couldn't redeem Garside at all.

I'd failed him—I'd screwed him—again.

 

I lost touch with Robert Garside after that. The runner eventually
did
submit his records to Guinness, and—like me, and like anyone who'd actually seen the documentation—the book's editors concluded that the run was genuine. “I have approved many records, and this record had an astronomical amount of evidence, and it could be cross-checked, so we are happy and satisfied,” Marco Frigatti, Guinness's then head of records, told
The Telegraph
in 2007.

But when I received my copy of that year's record book, there was no sign of Garside. Nor was there in 2008, 2009, 2010, or 2011. The organization's database, which contains more than 40,000 records, returns a null result when the name “Garside” is searched for. I couldn't see this being a mere oversight: circumnavigation—if you judge by the prominence the organization gives such efforts in its annual editions—is a very popular Guinness record category.

Had Garside's record, like Fulcher's, been blotted out by being “rested”? My contact at Guinness had moved on, and the organization's new policy, I was told, was not to comment on such things. But I kept at it, and in late 2010—perhaps I'd worn them down—Guinness spokesperson Sara Wilcox confirmed that Garside, despite the recognition, hadn't ever and would likely never appear in any Guinness publication, or even on the organization's massive web database. “This record is rested,” Wilcox wrote me in an email. “When Robert Garside completed the run, Guinness World Records carefully checked all documentation and evidence, and there was nothing to suggest the record wasn't true; however, with these records it is almost impossible to be absolutely sure, and so the category was rested.”

I felt indignant. The
Guinness Book
contains other records that can't be absolutely verified—claims of longevity, for example, are notoriously porous. Though the organization wouldn't confirm whether anyone had lobbied for the retirement of the Garside category, I wondered if the runner's opponents had triumphed again. And I wondered how Robert Garside felt. I tried to contact him, but he'd vanished—emails to the addresses I had bounced back to me. Phone numbers were disconnected.

Garside had met with another betrayal, this time not by me, but I was the one who was going to do something about it. David Blaikie asserted that running the Nullarbor alone was virtually impossible.

So that's where I decided to go.

 

My strategy for the Nullarbor was based on an email I'd gotten from Garside years earlier. In it, he wrote: “I was able to play the passing traffic to my advantage. If I needed water, it was there. If I needed to stop, I could choose a road sign and log off there, and then go to another place to sleep. In this way, it wasn't hard at all. No tougher than anywhere else.”

So there it was: Garside sometimes commuted between start and stop points by hitchhiking. At first, this disconcerted me—but it made sense; without doing so, the runner would have had to simply collapse at his end point every day, curl up in a ball, and sleep there.

Garside's documentation and photo diary suggest that even when this primary tactic failed, the relative frequency of traffic on the Nullarbor made the logistics of the run less pressing. Beeby and I learned that on our fourth day, after we arrived at the Nundroo Roadhouse. The longest “uninhabited” stretch of our journey—nearly 90 miles—was to follow. Earlier, we'd persuaded a couple in a caravan to forward-drop our supplies at 10-mile intervals up the road. We reached our first cache as evening fell. Beeby found a sheltered spot off the road; we pitched our tents and pried open the cans of beans and tuna the travelers stowed for us.

It wasn't a calm night. Venomous snakes are common to the region, and it isn't unknown to find one, in the morning, warming itself inside your shoe or underneath the floor of your tent. An unexpected and brief thunderstorm had turned the red dirt of our campsite to sticky clay, and we emerged from the brush filmy and soaked.

The next morning's pace was good. Beeby took a lead, and I told him to keep going; we'd meet at the next food drop. Soon I could barely see him against the horizon. After 10 brisk miles, though, his figure loomed larger. He was stopped, standing by the side of the road. Cache number two had been destroyed. The gallon-sized water jugs were empty. Even the cans of food were scattered; our gear bags were torn open. Wild dogs, most likely, we speculated.

Beeby and I quickly calculated our reserves. Beeby is a scientist—he spends all day looking into an electron microscope—and one of the reasons I asked him to come along is that I trust his rational and sober judgment. “We've got enough,” he said. “Even if we're all alone for the next 20 miles.”

But we weren't alone, and couldn't be. Bob Bongiorno, manager of the Balladonia Roadhouse, told me that he remembered Garside. “We looked after him for a couple of days,” he said. “And we saw him run. We took him to his start point each day for a few days, then picked him up, and gave him a bed to sleep in.” We were cradled in that typical Australian friendliness an hour later, when a car stopped in front of us. “I heard about you,” the driver said, presenting us with two bottles of fresh orange juice—the best I've ever tasted—and an unopened can of insect repellent. Robert Garside's diary contained a similar account, and in person, he told me, “The key to running the Nullarbor turned out to be Australian hospitality.”

 

My body was breaking down. Blisters had erupted along my heels and toes. My right pinky toe had split open, becoming infected, soaking my sock with blood. The ball of my left foot had also become swollen with fluid, feeling as if it was trying to burst out of my shoe. And an ominous blood clot seemed to be spreading beneath my heel, creating a stain that expanded with every step. I wanted to stop. What was I trying to prove?
Let it go
, I said to myself,
and you can go home right now
.

Beeby made me continue. It wasn't about proving something; it wasn't about Robert Garside. It was about, simply, choosing to run. No buses or trains are accessible from the Eyre Highway. The nearest rail line is more than 60 miles of untracked desert to the north. We'd arranged for a ride to Perth, but our pickup point was days—and miles—away. Unless we wanted to quit entirely and resort to hitching, there was nothing left to do but run, to move—slowly, if I had to, but keep moving—along the longest straight road on the planet, into a sun that seemed never to budge at all, at least until the very end of the day, when, in a heartbeat, it plunged below the horizon.

It was in that perfectly still sun, somehow, that I found my own stillness. It came after we passed the Yalata Roadhouse—abandoned at the time of my visit, but thriving when Garside visited. I'd felt a disheartening rush as we approached the ruined outpost; I'd hoped for cold drinks, but as we passed, I simply gazed forward and kept moving. What sensations I felt, over the next three days, were fleeting, almost tidal: the whoosh of a truck; the rhythm of my feet on gravel. I'd come out of my haze and realize, for a moment, that I'd been counting my footfalls, and that I'd been whispering the numbers, then fall back under the spell.

We were close to the sea now. Milky-white dunes rose at the road's southern edge. We detoured away from the highway to peer at the cliffs that tower above the Southern Ocean. I was told that a century ago, explorers attempting to cross the expanse watched helplessly—and sometimes starved or died of thirst—as vessels below signaled but were unable to effect a rescue. The palisades of the Nullarbor remain unclimbable to this day.

But the plain itself can be run. We returned to the road and decided we'd done enough for the day. We thumbed forward to the Nullarbor Roadhouse, which sits at the tail end of the plain's most barren, overheated section. At the roadhouse dorm, Beeby filled a plastic bin with ice and ordered me to plunge my feet in.

I kept them submerged as long as I could, pulled them out, waited, and did it again, and again. Finally, I wrapped everything in a towel and slept. The next morning, we woke up early. Word had spread, and at breakfast, our waiter hurried us along: “The fresh air is beautiful today,” he boomed. “Boys, go stretch your legs!”

And we did. We got a ride back to the mile marker we'd finished at the day before, and began our final stretch: 15 miles by my GPS log, which we covered in just over four hours. It wasn't pretty, but it was fast enough, especially the last kilometer. One mile beyond the roadhouse is the sign marking the terminus of the Nullarbor's most intense segment, and the end of our journey:
NULLARBOR PLAIN: WESTERN END OF TREELESS PLAIN
.

We reached it in a sprint.

 

More than a year later, my feet remain injured. The blisters reappear whenever I run more than five miles. My gait has changed, probably because of the damage. I ignore it. I run.

Two questions remain.

The first is whether I vindicated Robert Garside. As I recovered, I tried again to reach him; I found a mailing address, but got no response. Then, just as this story was going to press, I got a one-line email: “Are you trying to reach me?” That resulted in a series of strained and off-the-record exchanges; even if I could publish them, there was little information revealed. (Garside did agree to be photographed for this story, however, and provided pictures from his run.)

I wondered if others had softened their opinions. After several attempts, I finally managed to reach David Blaikie on the phone. “My views on Robert Garside have not changed, but it is not a subject I want to go back and revisit,” he told me. “What I reported at the time remains on the record and speaks for itself. I have no comment on Guinness's decision to recognize Garside. I leave it to the running community to draw its own conclusions on the issue.”

The battle over Garside went on in the pages of Wikipedia for years. Garside's opponents went through an angry back-and-forth over the content of the page; it became so ugly that the online encyclopedia's administrators have now blocked the entry from external edits.

I did make one truly new discovery, and it struck at the heart of the “smoking gun” that had inflicted the most damage. It turned out that the
Sunday Express
newspaper story—the one where Garside had first admitted his fabrications—had its own flaw: Fleming's coauthor, “James McDonald,” appeared to be a pseudonym. In my earlier research, Fleming told me he'd coaxed Garside into confessing, promising a story that would vindicate him. “I stitched him up,” the reporter said. “I felt bad about it, but I thought I had to.” But I'd never bothered to ask about the other name attached to the scoop, and when I tried to contact McDonald, I couldn't: no reporter by that name had appeared in the paper before or since. Fleming, when asked about McDonald, said, “He was a freelance journalist. That wasn't his real name. He had reasons he didn't want his real name used.” Whether or not Garside was guilty, the fact that one important accuser wasn't who he said he was made the story's hold on the moral high ground tenuous, at best.