Wyoming News Exchange

Laramie runner completes historic crossing of all 50 states
 
By Eve Newman
Laramie Boomerang
Via Wyoming News Exchange
 
LARAMIE — After 13,850 miles in nine years, Laramie runner Helene Neville reached the shore of the Arctic Ocean on Aug. 17, becoming the first person to run across all 50 states.
Neville, 59, spent 48 days running south to north across Alaska, from Anchorage to Prudhoe Bay, to complete her final state. The second leg of her Alaska trek, which she started in July, took from her 414 miles along the Dalton Highway, a dirt haul road used by truckers ferrying supplies to oil fields on the North Slope. She ran the first half of Alaska in March and April.
The notorious highway, the subject of television shows such as Ice Road Truckers and World’s Most Dangerous Roads, had never been run before, and for good reason. Heavy trucks rumble up and down its steep grades and sharp turns. Food stops, cellular service and medical care are nonexistent. Polar bears patrol the unpopulated northern tundra.
Of the 13,000 miles she’s run in the last decade, Neville said the last 400 were the hardest — physically, mentally, emotionally and even logistically.
“It was so hard,” she said.
She encountered deep gravel and slick mud that made running itself very difficult, plus grades as steep as 30-40 percent that lasted for miles. Besides unrelenting hills, she was constantly on the lookout for dangerous wildlife while running through freezing rain, blizzards and wind.
Among the physical ailments that beset her, she dislocated her shoulder during the run and suffered a corneal abrasion three days after starting.
Each day, Neville ran while a volunteer drove ahead in a truck. They slept in a borrowed camper, which popped off its hitch while they were towing it one day because the road was so bumpy.
“It was a challenge to me every day,” she said.
Despite the remoteness of the Dalton Highway, Neville encountered dozens of truckers every day. Most of them stopped to say hello or take a picture. They brought her coffee, chocolate and champagne.
“The truckers were so sweet, so protective and so inspiring,” she said.
Neville, who moved to Laramie in early 2018 and works as a nurse at Laramie Care Center, first started running in the 1990s after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer that attacks the immune system. She completed the Chicago marathon in 1998 after chemotherapy and radiation treatments and three brain surgeries.
In 2010, living in Arizona, she had just turned 50 and decided to go for a long run. She trained for about a year and then did just that, running 2,520 miles from Ocean Beach, California, to Atlantic Beach, Florida, over 93 days in the summer.
As she neared the Atlantic Ocean, she decided she wasn’t ready to hang up the shoes, so in 2013, after a cancer relapse, she ran 1,520 miles from Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, to the Mexican border town of Tijuana in 45 days.
She stowed her gear in an Isuzu Trooper and relied on strangers she met along the way to drive ahead with her so she could drop off the car, then drive her back to the stopping point from the day before. Neville continued that trend on runs from Florida to Maine in 2014 and New Brunswick, Canada, to the Washington coast in 2015. She supported her runs by selling T-shirts and books.
After finishing her run around the perimeter of the country, Neville experienced another cancer recurrence and went through more chemotherapy treatment. In 2017, she decided to run almost 4,000 miles through the remaining 12 states in the country’s interior, including Wyoming. Two weeks after her chemo port was removed, in May 2017, she set off from Evanston.
A year ago, she completed her 49th state with a 132-mile run around the island of Oahu in Hawaii.
For the last six years, Neville has been carrying an urn that contains the ashes of her brother. Among her next projects, she plans to return to Iowa in December to finally lay his ashes to rest.
Neville has updated her runs on her Facebook page, One on the Run, a name that’s taken on a deeper meaning as the run has progressed.
When she started running in 2010, One on the Run referred to a single person going for a long run. Then she began meeting people everywhere she traveled who cared about her. That one person found oneness with strangers through shared kindness.
“It changed quickly, and it just got deeper and deeper — the beautiful display of humanity,” she said.