It was the same night as
Donald Trump's
victory
in the 2016 United States presidential election when
Rickey Gates
, a regular at mountain races around the world, a friend of
Kilian Jornet
, discovered that he hardly knew his country.
He had traveled to Europe to compete in Switzerland, Italy, the United Kingdom or Slovenia, he had trained in Africa with great athletes in Ethiopia or Kenya, he had even won the South Pole marathon, but he did not know what was happening a few kilometers from his hometown, Aspen , in Colorado.
"I realized that nowadays it is very easy to live in a bubble. All my friends do the same things that I do, they generally believe in the same things that I believe in, they vote for the same party that I vote for. My family The same thing. I wanted to meet other people, talk to other people, "says Gates in the documentary 'Transamericana' that tells how he got it.
He designed a 6,500-kilometer route from South Carolina to California, from the end of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, passing mostly through states in which Trump had won and began to run it.
On March 1, 2017, she sold her car in Folly Beach for $ 1,000 and started striding.
He was only carrying a six-kilo backpack with clothes, a tarp to shelter him, a jacket and many, many eager to discover along the way.
And she did, boy did she.
"I was not the first runner to run across the United States, but in the towns I was passing through, they had only seen something like this in 'Forrest Gump'. I appeared in shorts and with my red beard and the conversation just came up," Gates recalls He also wrote a book about the trip, 'Cross Country: A 3,700-Mile Run to Explore Unseen America' (unedited in Spanish).
It was five months running a marathon a day with the only exceptions being his trips down the Tennessee and Colorado rivers, where he paddle surfed.
Generally, he did not suffer excessively on a physical level until he almost reached the end, the Nevada desert.
There he wished his death and needed an invention to survive.
"There were days when I did not eat and I entered a self-destructive loop. I convinced myself that it was worth dying looking for the end of the road because I had devised it for a noble cause. Then I realized that I was going crazy," recalls Gates that made two decisions.
First, he bought a golf club club from a thrift store to shove with food and water inside.
And then he gave up running in the middle of the day, avoiding the heat both at dawn and dusk.
In the end, on August 1, she crossed the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to finish her challenge.
"Along the way I thought that I had discovered myself, but finally I came to the conclusion that you can only know yourself in the specific moment in which you live, in the specific place where you live. Now I can only say that I am a guy who he lives with his girlfriend in Oakland, California, and pays the rent, and the bills, and thinks about what his next project will be, "ends Gates, whose latest projects, after the 'Transamericana' show his curiosity.
One day he decided to walk all the streets of San Francisco, one by one, and another he gathered whoever he wanted on a bus and took the group for a run through the mountains of Nevada, including a stop, of course, in Las Vegas.
After running across the United States, no goal is too much, although understanding all the reasons for Trump's victory remains difficult.
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