Books by
Hal Higdon
Only a small percentage of runners venture beyond 26 miles 385 yards into what is known as "ultramarathon" territory. There are, however, world and national championships at distances such as 50 kilometers, 50 miles and even 100 kilometers. An even smaller percentage of runners--a lunatic fringe, if you will--test the outermost edge of human endurance, competing in six-day races, running around the islands of Hawaii, or running from the bottom of the state of Indiana to the top. Publisher, author and one-time miler John L. Parker, Jr. decided to collect the best stories about ultramarathons and put them into a single book. Its title "And Then The Vulture Eats You" was borrowed (shamelessly, Parker admits) from Don Kardong. The following excerpt is from the chapter/article "Road Warriors," by Hal Higdon.
Looking back, the most pleasurable part about Trans-Indiana was the planning, the year of effort related to logistics: Which route? How far each day? What motel each night? I loved visiting county courthouses on town squares with Civil War monuments on the lawns, talking to old folks behind dusty desks, collecting multi-colored maps, which usually cost 50 cents. A bargain.
Sliding a ruler across an Indiana map, we determined that if we ran along the western border with Illinois, the distance was only 270 miles. But that would put us on heavily-traveled highways, which I wanted to avoid both for safety and aesthetic reasons. A friend with the state highway department helped select a 300-mile route using roads for which the traffic count was less than 2,000 vehicles a day, barely a car a minute.
Even that was more traffic than I desired, and eventually we chose roads with names like 600W or 1,000N. So successful were we in route selection that several times during the run we would go two hours without being passed by a car. One of our group counted five cars during another five-hour period.
But solitude bore a burden. Such low-traffic roads inevitably were hillier and more circuitous than better-traveled highways. Many were gravel. On one remote road, we would even need to ford a stream because there was no bridge. During a springtime reconnaissance, Steve reported that all our preliminary mileage estimates were low, that we would cover close to 350 miles.
Blame also my desire to start in Owensboro, Kentucky, about as far south as the Ohio River dips in its meandering route along the lower border of Indiana. Owensboro had special significance: my father had been born there. We would finish in Michiana Shores on Indiana's Michigan border, only a mile from where Rose and I raised our three children. So Trans-Indiana became, for me, a rite of passage.
Others would need to find their own excuses. Not wishing to waste all the planning on ourselves, Steve and I leaked word of Trans-Indiana via the monthly Ultrarunning. I received numerous inquiries, but most seemed put off by my insistence that this was a run, not a race. "No bugles, no drums, no trophies, no T-shirts," I warned inquirers. And little support. I could have sought sponsors, or tried to involve a charity, but I didn't want to make the run into something bigger than it was. Others had run farther, or faster--or farther and faster. I wasn't trying to compete with them; I simply wanted to run the length of my home state, whose license plates bear the motto: WANDER INDIANA. And that seemed like a neat thing to do.
"Road Warriors" appears in And Then The Vulture Eats You by John L. Parker, Jr., Copyright @ 1991 by John L. Parker, all rights reserved. Copies of this book autographed by Hal Higdon are available for $11.50 (includes shipping and handling) from Roadrunner Press, P.O. Box 1034, Michigan City, IN 46361-1034.