After Shan ran across the country in 2020, we started thinking about how we could build our own expeditions around a simple idea: Shan running, me biking alongside and carrying what we needed. We had been thinking about a 3,000-mile trek down the East Coast, but we needed to know if the model actually worked. So we planned a nine-day traverse of the Erie Canalway Trail as our "test run".

​

Shan ran. I pedaled, towing our gear. We covered roughly 358 miles from Buffalo to Albany, passing through towns like Lockport, Macedon, Little Falls, and Amsterdam and sleeping in a combination of motels, campgrounds, and a stranger’s spare room along the way.

​

It wasn’t a streamlined operation. The trailer was so packed I could hard close the zipper; we hadn’t learned what we didn’t need. But the mostly traffic-free trail gave us the perfect place to figure things out: food, water, gear, lodging, recovery, laundry, and the logistics involved in moving ourselves down the road every day.

By Albany, we knew two things: the system worked, and we loved it.

​

Nearly everything we carried into the East Coast Greenway the following year - the gear we cut, the routines we built, and the way we learned to work together on the road - started here.