What Does a Day Actually Look Like?
Updated: Sep 8
If you've been following along, you already know the setup: no campervan, no support vehicle. Just Shan on foot and me on my bike, towing everything we needed in a 55-pound trailer, covering thousands of miles over several months, more than once. 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. Our system was built around a handful of non-negotiables: finish the running day early enough to actually recover; keep up with sleep, showers, and laundry; find reliable cell service and WiFi for work; find somewhere to stay each night with food nearby. Within those constraints, the route dictated a lot; we rarely planned more than two or three days ahead.
Most mornings started the same way. Coffee - 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 to those questions shaped our day.
One of our most unremarkable days started in Eulonia, Georgia. We were staying at the Country Inn - affordable, perfectly adequate. When I arrived to check in and take some work calls, the maintenance guy was in the middle of refinishing every door in the building, including ours. He waved me into our room, which was wide open to the humid Georgia afternoon, covered in wood paneling, and completely doorless.
I hurried into the room to join my first meeting. Midway through the call, he reappeared: "I've got something for you!" and cheerfully reinstalled our door. I moved outside to finish my workday on the front stoop, laughing and shaking my head at the whole situation.
Later, Shan texted asking for our room number. I looked outside to confirm and found that the room numbers were also gone - casualties of the renovation. I had to send him a photo of the motel exterior with a shaky arrow and a circle drawn around our door. I added a note: "this is us; I'll explain when you get here."
He found it.
The next morning, we were up early taking care of our individual needs: running / 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 and then Shan started running. I would usually follow behind after taking care of the usual things - sorting our gear, packing the trailer, getting a little work done, and I would always share a daily update to social media so our friends, and more importantly, our moms, knew where we were headed.
The plan for this day was simple, Shan would mostly take care of himself. We planned to meet once mid-morning, again for lunch, and then meet at the finish in Richmond Hill, 41 miles away.
About ten miles in, I saw a sign pointed toward Christ’s Chapel in Memory Park, the Smallest Church in America. 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 of the little building. 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 behind me. One of them struck up a conversation while I waited for Shan, and it turned out they were cycling up the East Coast 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 shaking hands and 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 that while we made our way up the East Coast, Wayne and his group were completing the TransAmTri: an open-water swim, a cross-country bike ride, and over a hundred miles hiking/running the Appalachian Trail, completed in sequence. Here we were, two separate expeditions crossing 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. And while we thought it was random or coincidental to see them, we also thought, of course we’re going to bump into other people on a trip as insane as ours, even if they aren’t too many of us.
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. For the rest of the day we covered quiet roads and trees heavy with Spanish moss. 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 bumping into Wayne and his crew.
But not every day ran that smoothly.
Crossing into Virginia, we hit a snag: 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 knowing 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, what, 16 hours?"
I looked at him. "That's crazy even for you."
We kept thinking.
Eventually, we figured out something workable: I would bike two days mileage - 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. It was probably one of the worst weather days of the entire trip. There were tornado watches. Wind and rain came in waves all day. 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 walk through the park on the map was actually a hiking trail - rocky and narrow, definitely not intended for a road bike towing a packed trailer. The rain had turned the trail into a slip-and-slide. I picked my lines carefully, letting the bike move under me, trying my best not to panic and grab the brakes when things got squirrely. It was sketchy - and completely exhilarating. I arrived at the rental office soaking wet, 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. It was a nice end to my miles and one of those small moments of unexpected generosity that just becomes part of the story.
I drove straight to the snack bar just in time to meet Shan as he finished 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 and chit chatted on the drive back to his starting point, a special moment that felt enormous after weeks of moving entirely under our own power with little time to pause and breathe.
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 grateful 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 types of days with the same thing - a smile and a by-the-seat-of-our-pants plan.
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