"Professional runner Rickey Gates documents his epic experience of running 3,700 miles across the entire continental United States with just a small backpack and an anthropologist's curiosity to discover the divided America in which we live. Rickey shares first-person essays and roughly 200 photographs of the fascinating (and ordinary) characters he met and the breathtaking (and ugly) things he saw and endured, delivering a patchwork portrait of America rarely even seen. Rickey's heartfelt story captures the spirit of our country. While Rickey is delivering unparalleled insight into the extreme athletic and mental challenge of this transcontinental run, running is not the focus of the book-it is the means by which Rickey is telling his story. The more personal aspects of his experiences running are contained in the introduction and then woven into the interactions he documents in the book. And while the characters he met represent a politically divided nation, this is not a heavy-handed book about politics, but rather a closer look at a handful of remarkable/ordinary people we would otherwise never meet"-- Provided by publisher.