One Dog and Two Complete Strangers Set Out to Run Across America

The mutt wheezed and shivered, but the salesman didn’t panic. They had run 15 miles together that morning, west toward California. The mutt had chased rabbits and cattle and an antelope, and when the mutt seemed thirsty, the salesman took a gulp from one of the four 20-ounce water bottles he carried and then spit it into the mutt’s mouth. It was 3:45 p.m., Sunday, August 22, 2021, and the salesman and the mutt stood next to a water pump in the high country of Sweetwater County, at the intersection of U.S. 191 and Wyoming Highway 28, outside the front entrance of the larger of the two restaurants in Farson, Wyoming, population 211. The salesman poured cold water from the pump onto the mutt’s broad back, stroked his sides, and felt fur come loose into his hands. They’d started their journey in Georgia, 78 days and 1,926 miles ago. Watching from 30 feet away, worrying, stood the third member of their party, a chef by profession who handled driving, caring for the mutt, shopping, cooking, gassing up the RV, pulling up the jacks and stabilizing bars every morning, finding water, and dumping sewage. The chef wrote in his journal a lot, about the agony of the settlers who’d lost family members to disease and violence as they traveled this way hundreds of years ago, or the genocide wrought by those settlers on the indigenous people. Everyone who knew the chef spoke of his generosity and compassion, but he did have a tendency to brood. The salesman, whose name is David Green, was 57 years old, an ultrarunner and entrepreneur who owned five companies and had started and sold a dozen others. He lived in Jacksonville, Florida, with his wife of 29 years, Monica, in a 5,000-square-foot house on the Intracoastal Waterway with an enclosed pool. The chef, whose name is Chris Genoversa, was 59, divorced for 30 years, had been living with his mother in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and was soon to be homeless. He was a lifelong lover of couches and recliners, a very heavy drinker when he drank, overweight, and so slow on his feet that his childhood friends would invite him on their capers because they knew he—and not they—would be caught. The dog’s name was Lucky. [View in Browser]( [Runner's World Logo]( [SHOP]( [RW+ EXCLUSIVE]( [SUBSCRIBE](   [One Dog and Two Complete Strangers Set Out to Run Across America]( [One Dog and Two Complete Strangers Set Out to Run Across America]( The mutt wheezed and shivered, but the salesman didn’t panic. They had run 15 miles together that morning, west toward California. The mutt had chased rabbits and cattle and an antelope, and when the mutt seemed thirsty, the salesman took a gulp from one of the four 20-ounce water bottles he carried and then spit it into the mutt’s mouth. It was 3:45 p.m., Sunday, August 22, 2021, and the salesman and the mutt stood next to a water pump in the high country of Sweetwater County, at the intersection of U.S. 191 and Wyoming Highway 28, outside the front entrance of the larger of the two restaurants in Farson, Wyoming, population 211. The salesman poured cold water from the pump onto the mutt’s broad back, stroked his sides, and felt fur come loose into his hands. They’d started their journey in Georgia, 78 days and 1,926 miles ago. Watching from 30 feet away, worrying, stood the third member of their party, a chef by profession who handled driving, caring for the mutt, shopping, cooking, gassing up the RV, pulling up the jacks and stabilizing bars every morning, finding water, and dumping sewage. The chef wrote in his journal a lot, about the agony of the settlers who’d lost family members to disease and violence as they traveled this way hundreds of years ago, or the genocide wrought by those settlers on the indigenous people. Everyone who knew the chef spoke of his generosity and compassion, but he did have a tendency to brood. The salesman, whose name is David Green, was 57 years old, an ultrarunner and entrepreneur who owned five companies and had started and sold a dozen others. He lived in Jacksonville, Florida, with his wife of 29 years, Monica, in a 5,000-square-foot house on the Intracoastal Waterway with an enclosed pool. The chef, whose name is Chris Genoversa, was 59, divorced for 30 years, had been living with his mother in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and was soon to be homeless. 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