Cleveland Runners Finish Volstate 500K

Cleveland Runners Finish Volstate 500K

Wanna have some fun?

Let's run and walk 300 miles across the state of tennessee in the month of july.

Who's with me?

Anyone?

Bueller?

Cassulo?

Well there were two people crazy enough to do it from cleveland, jeff salyer and duane goff.

They just completed the volstate 500-k, a 314 mile trek that starts in kentucky and finishes atop sand mountain.

Runners have 10 days to complete the journey, and salyer and goff lived to tell about it.

Reporter:"first question why?"

Salyer:" mainly because it was an adventure.

Something hard to do.

Something difficult.

Something that's not guaranteed success.

So the first day we did 54 miles, which was not the smartest thing we could have done."

Goff:"and by day two our plan was completely destroyed.

Our feet were destroyed.

Our nutrition plan was destroyed.

Our packs were too heavy.

Our shoes were wrong."

Salyer:"we probably drank gallons of water."

Goff:"oh we were drinking over 300 ounces of fluid a day."

Salyer:"for the most part we were living on one or two meals a day, and then beef jerky and whatever we could find at the convenience store."

Reporter:"when you walk into these convenience stores, i mean you're probably looking pretty ragged.

Would they go hey, what's wrong with you?"

Salyer:"uh they look at you and thing what's wrong with you and have pity on you a lot of times.

So we did look ragged, but we probably smelled worse than anything.

You don't want to run in the middle of the day in tennessee heat and humidity and no shade.

Most of these roads have no shade, so we tried to flip our days, so we tried to flip it to night.

We tried to sleep between one and four or one and five, and then get up and get on the road late night."

Goff:"i think we had had a little over 20 hours of sleep that entire eight days, eleven hours, and 30 minutes or whatever it was."

Reporter:"and did you run up monteagle?"

Salyer:"we did.

In 57 minutes."

Goff:"it was pretty steep and surprisingly we thought when that was over, it would be done, but sand mountain was actually steeper, and we weren't expecting that."

Salyer:"it's not really a finish line.

You finish by touching a rock on the edge of a cliff that's a hundred foot drop."

Goff:"the battle in your mind is the hardest battle you will ever face, and we faced a really tough battle and actually won, so we were really proud of it."

Here's a final look at our forecast...