3,000-Mile Race a Cakewalk?

The winner of Trans Am ‘92--a.k.a. Feet Across America--was trying to calculate just how much down time his body will now require before picking itself up and running again.

“They say that after you run a marathon, you’re supposed to take off one day for every mile of racing,” David Warady is saying. “So what’s that, 26 days?

“Going by that, I guess I’m not supposed to run again for 3,000 days.

“So, that means my next race will be in 10 years.”

Trans Am ‘02, here he comes.

Actually, Warady is kidding. He has already planned the where and when of his comeback, easing back into the sport next February with a casual little knock-off of a jog--the Las Vegas Marathon.

Let us review what Warady, a 35-year-old computer programmer from Huntington Beach, accomplished between the dates of June 20 and Aug. 23--or, for our purposes, how he spent his summer vacation.

He ran across the country.

Not bicycled.

Not hitchhiked.

Not carpooled.

Ran .

He ran 40 to 60 miles, every day, for 64 consecutive days.

He ran from 5 a.m., every day, until the early afternoon or dusk, depending on the lay of the land and that day’s array of blisters, cramps, shin splints, ankle sprains, pulled calf muscles and toenails that said, “To hell with it, I’m bailing here.”

He ran through 12 states and 400 towns, over purple mountained majesties, across fruited plains, from the Santa Ana River jetty to New York’s Central Park, around convoying truckers in Kensington, Kan., up hills outside Monongahela, Pa., and in and out of heavy traffic in Indianapolis.

He ran through 25 pairs of shoes.

Six days after crossing the finish line, after running more than 521 hours at a clip of 10 minutes 40 seconds per mile, Warady kicks back at his in-laws’ home in Orlando, Fla., returns a phone call and tells me, totally serious:

“It ended up being an easy race.”

Warady is talking to someone who wouldn’t run to catch a cross-country flight and who thinks 5 a.m. is a great time to roll over and let those last six hours of sleep kick in. When I laugh at his preposterous claim, Warady digs in and tries to explain himself.

“It wasn’t a real drain,” he insists. “The pace was much slower than a marathon. It was averaging 10:40 per mile, and I’ve run marathons at a 5:50 (per mile) pace, so it was significantly slower.”

And, speaking like someone who hasn’t set foot in Southern California since June 20, Warady adds that ‘The weather wasn’t bad at all, because this whole summer has been unseasonably cool. We ran through the desert, through the Midwest, where normally you’d think the humidity would kill you. But it rained all the time we were in Kansas. Everywhere we ran across the country, it was so cool.”

Day by day, Warady added to his lead--he led after 48 of the 64 stages--until “with two weeks to go, I knew that if I stayed away from injuries and wasn’t hit by a car, I would win pretty easily.”

Hit by a car?

“Don’t laugh,” Warady says. “Two people actually were nicked by a car and the race director had his bicycle smashed by a car. He was OK, but the bicycle was mangled.

“Milan Milanovich, who finished second behind me, had his elbow dinged pretty good. He was making a turn when a sideview mirror came by and nicked him.”

Warady became an artful dodger and avoided any and all vehicular collisions. Truck drivers, he is pleased to report, “were very respectful of us. In Kansas, we were running alongside of them with no shoulder on the road and they’d move over for us. Very professional.”

Warady outran the field largely because he outplanned the field. His wife, Kelly Babiak, quit her job and rented a minivan to act as Warady’s support staff. Together, they had the course scouted. At the end of every stage, Kelly’s van served as welcome wagon, there to provide refreshment and transportation to a nearby restaurant and then a previously booked hotel.

Except for Warady and fourth-place finisher Richard Westbrook of Jonesboro, Ga., the field ate and slept wherever race management provided food and shelter. Usually, that meant mess-hall style meals and sleeping bags on the floors of churches, gymnasiums and vacant warehouses.

Warady estimates he spent $10,000 to $12,000 to do it his way and claims, “It was vital. A lot of times, the aid stations would put out a gallon of Gatorade and a gallon of water and by the time you got there, it would be warm. You’d get to a stopover, go to the armory or the church, and they wouldn’t have a shower, the sleeping bags wouldn’t be there, and the meals were not provided until late in the evening.

“Everyone had the same opportunity to do it the way we did, but only one other runner had the same foresight. It made my life a lot easier. I was always well-rested and able to run pretty much stress-free.”

So Warady spends $10,000 of his own money, takes a three-month leave of absence from work, has his wife lose her job . . . and for what? Trans Am ’92 offered no prize money, only a small knickknack of a trophy and, for the winner only, the chance to spend one night in a $400 Trump’s Taj Mahal suite for a mere $50.

“I’ve been asked that question 2 million times,” Warady says. “I did it for the challenge, to put myself under the microscope and see how my 14 years of running experience might pay off.

“And I did it because this was a race that hadn’t been run in so many years. (The first, and previously only, was in 1928.)

“This was a once in a lifetime experience for us. They want to have this race every year, but I probably won’t run it again, unless I get corporate sponsorship. And even then, you lose so much money by taking time off of work.”

Winning a Trans Am hasn’t made Warady rich, and it hasn’t made him famous. “I never expected it to,” he says. “Rich in experience maybe.

“But to me, making a lot of money is not as important as living the full life. If I don’t become a millionaire, it’s not going to bother me. All my friends are rich, anyway. I can just mooch off them.”

In the meantime, Warady has two more weeks on his leave and things to do, places to see. On the way back to Huntington Beach, he and Kelly plan to visit relatives, go white-water rafting in New Mexico, check out the Grand Canyon.

They are traveling by minivan.

Easy as it was, left to right, Warady was in no mood to run all the way back.