THE JOURNAL
It was in the Oklahoma Panhandle that ultra-runner Mr William Goodge first began to realise that he might have bitten off more than he could chew.
His epic run across the breadth of the US – a 3,076-mile journey from Huntington Beach in Los Angeles to Central Park in New York – had so far been a succession of picture-postcard vistas, taking him through the monumental landscape of the Mojave Desert and into the mountains of northeastern Arizona, through red pine forests and along freezing rivers, to the ski resort of Angel Fire in New Mexico.
But as he descended from the Rocky Mountains and headed eastwards into the Great Plains, he found himself overwhelmed. Not only by the scale of this new landscape, but by the sheer sameness of it.
“It felt like every mile was a copy and paste of the mile before,” he recalls of the Oklahoma Panhandle, a 34-mile-wide sliver of land between Kansas and Texas left unallocated when state boundaries shifted to accommodate 19th-century slavery laws. Stateless from 1850 to 1890, it was officially dubbed the “Public Land Strip”. But the squatters, bootleggers and outlaws who made it their home knew it by another name: No Man’s Land.
If the monotony of it wasn’t enough, the elements were conspiring against him to make things even more of a challenge. “One time, it rained all day for 50 miles – 60mph gusts in my face,” says Goodge. “I power-walked for 12 hours straight. I’d been running for two weeks straight by that point. I’d put in so much, and I knew that I was nowhere near the end.”
What got him through was a radical change of mindset. “The way I looked at it, it was almost like being in prison. Every morning, I’d tell myself, ‘You’re trapped here. The only way out is to reach New York’.” After a couple of weeks, he says, the whole experience had been reframed. “This is what I do now. I wake up, I have some food, I get changed, and then I run until I have to stop.”
It sounds simple when you put it like that; in practice, it was anything but. Goodge travelled with a small team that included the American endurance athlete Mr Robbie Balenger, whose own successful run across the US four years earlier had provided the inspiration and the route for Goodge’s effort. Also along for the ride were two content creators and a friend from London, Mr Peter John, who “can cook anything in a pan, even a pie,” according to Goodge.
“This is what I do now. I wake up, I have some food, I get changed, and then I run until I have to stop”
Nutrition – or “fuelling”, as he more prosaically puts it – was vital, with Goodge burning anywhere between 6,000 to 7,000 calories a day. Regular naps helped, too. And then, of course, there were the shoes: more than a dozen pairs, all told, over the course of the run. “I’d start the day wearing the ON Cloudmonster,” he says. “It’s a good long-run road shoe. It’s lightweight and has big energy return, but it’s not as aggressive as shoes that have a carbon plate.” He would switch shoes after the day’s big break at 30 miles, usually opting for the even lighter Cloudgo.
“Switching up shoes is important when you’re taking 110,000 steps in a day,” he says. “The subtle change helps to take the stress off tendons, joints and muscle groups, it gives certain areas a rest and works others.” For the same reason, he’d switch to the other side of the road every 10 to 15 miles to adjust for the asymmetric stress of running on a camber.
If this all sounds like self-imposed torture – and, to most, it surely will – then there is one question that begs to be asked: why? What pushes a man to run roughly 56 miles a day for 55 days straight? For Goodge, a 29-year-old from London who lost his mother to cancer five and a half years ago, the motivation comes from a deeply personal place.
“I was 23 when she passed away,” he recalls. “It’s an interesting time to go through an event like that, because you’re an adult. You’re old enough to make your own decisions. But you’re still maturing mentally.” He could have channelled his emotions into destructive behaviour – “I could really screw things up here,” he remembers thinking – but he chose to run instead. “I’d run when I was sad or when I was angry, which was a lot of the time.”
The first serious challenge he took on was running the length of Great Britain, from John o’Groats to Land’s End, which he completed in 2019. And while he was physically up to the task, he admits now that he was still processing a lot of grief. “To me, running was an acceptable form of self-harm,” he says. “I wasn’t abusing alcohol or drugs and I was raising money for charity, so it seemed OK. But it was clear that I was on a self-destructive path.” It was particularly tough for his dad to grasp. “He’s just lost the love of his life, and now his son is like a zombie on the side of the road. He can hardly talk because he’s pushed himself so hard.”
But what began as a coping strategy has grown over the years into something altogether more constructive, and today he views running as a celebration. “If it wasn’t for my mum’s passing, I would have never raised all this money for charity,” he says. “I hope that what I’ve been through can show people that you can turn pain into a positive.”