Stride Across America: Mapping the route.

This past week was spent working on mapping out the route for Betsy's run. There were a few guiding principles used to construct the route such as:

Direction -

• Generally a west to east route is preferred in order to take advantage of the prevailing Westerlies (wind blowing west to east).

• The route requires crossing the Sonoran desert, something that is much more appealing when the average temperature is in the 80's instead of in the 100's towards the mid to end of summer.

Specific way-points -

• Betsy wanted to run through both our current hometown of Flagstaff, AZ, as well as our home state of Wisconsin.

In plotting this route I didn't reinvent the wheel. For most of the route I used published sections for previous trans-con running routes. For the first 1500 miles the route follows a similar route that Paul Johnson very recently took (click for more information) Starting at Santa Monica and traveling east to Palm Springs then heading north around J Tree (slang for Joshua Tree:) and then east out of California. After entering Arizona, the route starts to creep more north as she goes through Prescott and into Flagstaff. She will then traverse The Navajo Nation (mostly on Route 15) which will take her out of Arizona and into New Mexico. After journeying through New Mexico, she will cross the northwestern part of Oklahoma and continue on northeast towards Kansas City. Near this point her route will shoot north. She will traverse the southeastern corner of Nebraska, cross Iowa and then enter Wisconsin via Dubuque. Continuing on a northeastern route, she will travel through Ridgeway, WI and Madison, WI on the way to Milwaukee.

Heading south from Milwaukee will take her into Illinois and through Chicago. A little jog further south takes her into Merrillville, Indiana where she picks up and continues on with Pete Kostelnick's route (click for more about Pete). Traversing northern Indiana, she will proceed through Ohio and Pennsylvania before crossing New Jersey, ultimately reaching and concluding her journey in New York. Please note that my familiarity with this specific region is limited, which is why there is less detail provided about this final section.

So there it is.. Day to day changes will likely occur as we start the journey but this is the general idea. Any helpful comments are welcome, either by commenting directly or contacting us via the contact link.

Betsy's longest runs this week were two 2.5 hour runs on back to back days. Her total mileage for the week is 54 miles.

Until next week...

Paul Johnson

Naval officer who completed his 51 day, 3000 mile run to raise money for team RWB. We enjoyed and were entertained by his teams postings on Instagram.  Even more exiting was the fact that Paul was able to raise over $500,000.00 for team RWB whose mission is to enrich Veterans' Lives.

Pete Kostelnick

Pete is the current world record holder for fastest coast-to-coast crossing of the United States by foot. His record, set in 2016 with a time of just over 42 days, still remains unbroken despite several attempts to surpass it. Click here to see Pete's route.