Serge Roetheli
Travel is easily one of life’s great aphrodisiacs. But as easily as it can bind two people, it can pull them apart. This can be especially true if you are a husband and wife team on a quest to run around the circumference of the earth. “The 25,000 Mile Love Story,” playing at independent film fests across the USA, is exactly that: a love story. And it is a life story with a gritty end.
It’s a mile-by-mile allegory about Serge Roetheli, one of the world’s leading endurance athletes who decides to run the belly of the earth with his wife, Nicole, on her motorbike at his side. What truths they find are the stuff of, well, movies and books, and perhaps philosophers.
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This real-life Forrest Gump was no stranger to endurance feats and nor was his wife. Serge and Nicole Roetheli had done this before – the Pan American Highway took two years in the mid-1990s, but that was only 14,984 miles. An extra 10,000 miles adds a lot to a runner’s course and can set any relationship on a dangerous trajectory. That is what happened between 2000-2005, as the Swiss couple took a 25,422-mile challenge to run the world’s most remote roads and find some of the heart’s darkest places as they aimed to set world records in endurance.
Through the film and then a book, The 25,000 Mile Love Story, The Epic Story of the Couple Who Sacrificed Everything to Run the World, released by Dunham Books in February, we follow along in a sort of interior and external travelogue through places few dare to go. We see the dust, feel the sweat. We meet the villagers, feel the fears and fight the battle of will over circumstance, of goal over emotion, shoes over circumference. This is a travelogue for the soul.
An Unforgiving Journey
Alone in some of the world’s most unforgiving landscapes, the Roethelis encountered exceptionally challenging situations along their route, including civil wars, dangerous animals, poisonous snakes and extreme weather conditions. Both Serge and Nicole were stricken with severe cases of malaria, and Serge suffered a fractured arm when hit by a vehicle. In spite of these and many other difficulties, they persisted to the finish line and raised over $400,000 to support humanitarian efforts in Africa, South America and Central America.
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At the heart of their journey is a love story – a relationship of two people who left their lives behind to achieve the impossible. But at the end of every dream is that difficult transition back into the solid world that surrounds us. And for this couple, that meant future roads would be traveled alone.
Serge Roetheli was born in Switzerland in 1955 and may, indeed, be the greatest endurance athlete in the world. His accomplishments have run the range of runner, climber, rower, boxer, bicyclist, and machete wielder.
For now, Serge considers running the distance of the circumference of the earth to be his greatest feat. In early 2011, he also rowed across the Atlantic Ocean in a canoe. In 2000, he ran 1,500 miles across the Sahara Desert in 118-degree heat. In 1986 he ran four marathons in as many days in Death Valley: 100 miles, in temperatures averaging 118 degrees.
That same year he took on the Grand Canyon – running up and down from rim to river (28.8 miles and climbs of 5,200 feet) in a single day. He ran Europe in 1989, a feat that took 219 days to go 6,500 miles. And the list goes on: the five mountaintops of the Swiss Alps in less than 20 hours; Annapurna to Thorong La Pass (17,589 feet) in a week; and successful, speedy climbs of Mt. McKinley, Mt. Aconcagua, Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Blanc.
In his grounded flight across the middle of the earth, Serge faced challenges most of us only experience in fiction and film: civil war, hostile villagers, relentless mosquitoes, snake bite to the eye, wild beasts, intense heat and humidity, thick jungle trails that went only into deeper jungle, sponsors dropping out, constant weakness, sickness, pain.
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The feat took them 1,910 days (consider this: you would be running a marathon every consecutive day for five years and three months). Serge drank six tons of Coca Cola on this trip, wore out 64 pairs of shoes, and 122 pairs of socks. Serge and Nicole had only each other through the entirety of this epic undertaking.
They both faced death and disease head on each day. Malaria still wracks Nicole. Still, they had each other for company and kept each other’s spirits alive, a love story, indeed.
‘There Is No Possibility to Fail’
In an interview this summer with Running News from Race-Calendar.com, Serge admitted the decision to commit to running the circumference of the earth was a hard one to make.
“You have only two decisions: You either decide to do it or you don’t and if you decide to do it, you commit 100 percent. There is no possibility to fail. It took lots of planning and it wasn’t a decision that my wife and I arrived at easily. We made all of our own arrangements and had no official sponsor of any kind. We handled all of our own logistics.”
Was it worth it?
“Yes,” said Serge. “There was a high price to pay for the pursuit of our dream. We risked to lose everything every day. When we finished! When we were in Nepal … absolutely beautiful!”
An adventurer? A modern day Marco Polo? Jules Verne with running shoes? The lands and landscapes and lessons learned by this far flung wayfarer may not be for the average tourist. But in a world torn asunder with strife and a marriage torn apart by the extremes of interior forces, perhaps a quote from his book tells it best:
“I am no longer with Nicole,” Serge wrote. “This fact always shocks people to a degree and saddens them, especially those who know and understand our journey.
“They think the world tour tore us apart. It is quite the opposite. The world tour is what held us together for so long.”
Lark Gould
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The post One Man’s Run Around the World: A Love Story, Sort of appeared first on genConnect.