What Does a Day Actually Look Like?
- joshuaine
- Mar 16
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 21
If you've been following along, you already know the setup: no campervan, no support vehicle. Shan on foot, me on a bike, towing everything we needed in a 55-pound trailer. What we haven't talked about yet is what a day actually looked like from the inside.
We didn't have a routine so much as a system. It was built around a handful of non-negotiables: finish the running day early enough to actually recover; keep up with sleep, showers, and laundry; maintain reliable cell service and WiFi for work; find somewhere to stay with food nearby. Within those constraints, we improvised. The route dictated a lot; we rarely planned more than two or three days ahead.
Most mornings started the same way. Coffee first - usually Kapik1, brewed in a compact collapsible pour-over, sometimes on a camp stove, sometimes in a hotel room - then our breakfast and planning session. Without a support vehicle, the logistics required a lot of attention. What does my work schedule look like? Where should we meet mid-morning? Does Shan need support on this stretch, or can he move independently while I handle calls? Are there long service gaps ahead? Should he carry a pack?
The answers shaped everything that followed.
One of our most unremarkable days started in Eulonia, Georgia, which is exactly why it's worth telling.
We were staying at the Country Inn - affordable, perfectly adequate - except that when I arrived to check in and set up for afternoon work calls, the maintenance guy was refinishing every door in the building, including ours. He waved me into our room, which was wide open to a Georgia afternoon, completely doorless. I settled in and joined my first meeting. Midway through the call, he reappeared: "I've got something for you!" and cheerfully reinstalled our door while I moved outside to finish my workday on the front stoop.
Later, Shan texted asking for our room number. I looked up and realized the room numbers were also gone - casualties of the renovation. I sent him a photo of the motel exterior with our door circled and a brief: "I'll explain when you get here."
He found us.
The next morning, we were up early: running and cycling gear, low-chafe socks, chamois cream, bandaids on nipples (Shan's, not mine). We finalized the day's plan over coffee and Raisin Bran. Then Shan started running, and I followed behind after taking care of a few things - sorting our gear, packing the trailer, getting a little work done, posting our location to social media so our followers, and more importantly, our moms, knew where we were headed.
The plan: meet mid-morning, meet again for lunch, finish in Richmond Hill, 41 miles away.
About ten miles in, I made a detour. A sign off the route pointed toward the Smallest Church in America, just outside Midway, Georgia. I texted Shan that I'd meet him at a McDonald's up ahead and went to look. The church was closed (it was early), but I got out and took a photo. Tiny, immaculate, quietly remarkable. I lingered for a moment, then left just as a group of cyclists rolled in.
They didn't stay long. By the time I reached McDonald's, they were pulling into the parking lot right behind me. One of them struck up a conversation while I waited for Shan, and it turned out they were cycling the East Coast Greenway too. As we talked, one of his friends said, almost casually: "Oh yeah, I've been following those guys."
When Shan came out of McDonald's, I started making introductions — "Hey, these guys are doing this incredible thing, and they've been following us online—" and got about halfway through the sentence before Shan looked past me.
"Wayne! Great to see you, man!"
They were already hugging.
Shan had been crew support for Wayne a few years earlier when he was competing in a Deca-Ironman - 10 ironman races over 10 days. It turned out Wayne and his group were mid-TransAmTri: an open-water swim, a cross-country bike ride, and a hike on the Appalachian Trail, completed in sequence. Two separate expeditions crossed paths at a McDonald's near a tiny church in Georgia. The road has a way of doing that when you move through it slowly enough to notice.
The rest of the day was easy. We stopped for lunch at Melody's Coastal Café in Midway, and somewhere between ordering and eating, a stranger picked up our tab. We never found out who. The roads were quiet, the trees were heavy with Spanish moss, and by evening we were in Richmond Hill, walking to a steakhouse a short stroll from the hotel. We went to bed full and optimistic, still laughing about Wayne.
Not every day ran that smoothly.
Crossing into Virginia, we hit a problem: a 70-mile gap with no lodging anywhere in between. Our usual approach of running to wherever we'd be sleeping wouldn't work. We'd already sent our tent home; campgrounds north of North Carolina on the Greenway were too sparse to count on. We needed another plan.
Shan, ever the optimist, floated a solution, "I could cover the whole distance, I'd just need to run for 16 hours."
I looked at him. "That's crazy even for you."
We kept thinking.
Eventually, we figured out something workable: I would bike ahead - 70-plus miles - rent a car in Petersburg, drive back to get Shan, and shuttle him to the hotel. I'd drive him back to his starting point in the morning, return the rental car, and meet him when he finished. It wasn't elegant, but it would let him cover the miles without risking injury.
We were not lucky with the weather. In fact, it was one of the worst weather days of the entire trip. Tornado watches. Wind and rain came in waves all day, relentless. Shan sheltered in a church. I waited out a squall on the porch of a deli/convenience store. When the rain eased, we each kept moving.
The route to the car rental office took me through Petersburg National Battlefield Park. What looked like a literal walk through the park on the map turned out to be a hiking trail - rocky, narrow, definitely not intended for a road bike towing a packed trailer. The rain had turned it into a slip-and-slide. I picked my lines carefully, let the bike move under me, resisted grabbing the brakes when things got squirrely. It was sketchy and completely exhilarating. I arrived at the rental office soaked through, caked in mud, smiling like a little kid, and feeling like a complete badass.
Inside, I met two young men who took one look at me and wanted to know everything. When I explained what Shan and I were doing, they were genuinely astonished. Without being asked, they helped me load the mud-covered bike and trailer into the trunk of the rental car. One of those small moments of unexpected generosity that just becomes part of the story.
I drove straight to the snack bar where Shan was finishing his day. It felt strange to be in a car - the first time I'd driven since leaving Key West, 43 days earlier. The next morning, we sipped coffee on the drive back to his starting point, a small luxury that felt enormous after weeks of moving entirely under our own power.
My riding day was short since I'd already covered two days' worth of miles. I left the trailer in the room, dropped off the rental car, and rode eight easy miles back on a bare bike. After the tornado weather and the singletrack and the logistics marathon, I was glad for a quiet day. And so was the turtle I saved after dropping off Shan.
Both kinds of days are real. The easy days - when the system flows, the miles come together, and the evening feels like a reward - and the Virginia days, when you improvise your way through a gap that a campervan would have papered over without a second thought.
And after thousands of miles, we'd learned to meet both of them with the same thing - a smile and a by-the-seat-of-our-pants plan.
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