When This Runner Hits 26 Miles, She’s Just Getting Started

When hundreds of women line up for the start of next Sunday’s San Diego International Marathon, the most prolific entrant in the field will not be among the contenders.

Just ask her.

“Oh nooooo,” said Sarah Covington Fulcher. “Noooo way. Those people will be jamming .”

The marathon, you see, is not Fulcher’s distance. To her, a runner has to be a veritable sprinter to cover 26 miles in something as outlandish as 2 hours 30 minutes. The distance is much too short.

Ask her to name the greatest sprinters of all time, and she will probably answer: “Frank Shorter and Grete Waitz.”

Her perception is just a little different from that of the rest of the world.

For example, a typical marathon runner’s idea of hitting the wall is the often excruciating experience of getting to the 20-mile mark.

Fulcher’s idea of hitting the wall was Louisiana . . . and she started running in Orange County. What’s more, she had run somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,000 miles by the time she hit Louisiana, mainly because she went north from Orange County and traveled clockwise around the perimeter of the country.

By her definition, Fulcher is a “journey runner.” A journey, to her, is not a quicky loop from Balboa Park out to Mission Bay and back to the Community Concourse. Her idea of a run is something that starts in Sydney and finishes in Perth, a distance of 2,727 miles. If her support vehicles don’t have to stop for at least one oil change, she’s not running far enough.

One afternoon this week, she took a pit stop between an ocean swim and a jog up Mission Boulevard for a bite of lunch. I found that you can get her into a chair, but you can’t keep her in one place.

If SDG&E; could somehow tap her energy, it could probably get our monthly bills down to about $10 a household.

“Wes Smith of the Chicago Tribune did a column about me,” she said, “and I couldn’t believe all the exclamation points.”

By the time we finished talking, I understood. In any sentence quoting Fulcher, you can substitute an exclamation point for every period . . . and some commas.

Take, for example, a Fulcher-esque recollection of a village she visited on her run across Australia.

“It was called Penong . . . spelled P-E-N-O-N-G . . . and it had a cactus beach.”

A cactus beach?

“Ohhh yeea ah !,” she said. “And there was a Great White breeding ground! and they had some old surfers who lived in trees! and one of them was a guy who’d been bitten! by sharks, and they called him Sharkie!”

Oh yeah! You had the punctuation right, Wes.

Fulcher is a 26-year-old exclamation point who was born in New Jersey, went to high school in Georgia, went to college at the University of North Carolina, went to film school in New York and . . .

“I was fascinated by Australian films,” she exclaimed.

So she went to work as a jillaroo in Queensland.

“You know, on the Australian outback,” she said. “You know, kangaroos all over . . . like rabbits. I rode motorcycles and horses and chased cattle.”

Fulcher, who has either a residence or a mailing address in Pacific Beach--I’m not sure which--obviously has a zest for adventure.

Why else would anyone set out on a 2,727-mile journey, across the south of Australia, that would take 96 days beginning in late 1986 and ending in early 1987? And then set out on July 21, 1987, on an 11,134-mile trip that would take 438 days and take her through 35 states around the perimeter of the United States?

Crazy?

Oh yeah!

But crazy with nice intentions. The Sydney-to-Perth run raised $51,000 (“Australian,” she said) for the Australian Freedom from Hunger campaign. The Run-Around-the-U.S. was to promote the National Fitness Foundation.

But there had to be times when she was wondering if all the effort was worthwhile.

“Oh yeah,” she said, “like on days when it was snowing and really gross. Or when the wind chill was 50 below, like it was in Utica and Rochester.”

How about heat?

“Oh yeah,” she said. “It was 124 in Baker.”

In the long run, and these were long runs, such inconveniences were overcome by simple joys such as having kangaroo stew for Thanksgiving dinner in Australia or getting into, and winning, a pull-up contest with a cocky ninth-grade boy in Erie, Pa., or any of numerous police escorts through congested East Coast cities.

Her next goal, outside of getting into triathlons, and that’s another story, is to make a run across the Soviet Union.

“But,” she said, “I haven’t been able to find any maps.”

I assume the Auto Club doesn’t have such things.

However, it must seem to her that she has already been to everywhere and nowhere.

“I haven’t been to nowhere,” she said, “but, oh yeah! I did run through Nothing, Ariz.”

And so can’t this San Diego International Marathon be considered a new frontier among challenges?

“Not really,” she demurred. “I don’t know what to expect from a marathon. I’ve never run one.”