Hi blog. It has been a while.

Now that we are almost 2 months into my “post-race” period, I think it’s safe to say I’ve recovered. Here’s the story of what happened when I ran from Rome to Assisi, what that means, and what’s coming next for me.

Let me be blunt. When I started out on the path of fundraising for Catholic mission projects, I was about as naive as it gets. The fundamental lessons I learned include especially something I have also learned from my limited business experience: the only person you can really count on is yourself. Others might say they’ll do this or that for you – that doesn’t matter until it’s real. Meetings are not progress. Soft-commitments are not progress. Fancy party invitations are not progress. Only contracts and cash are progress.

I also learned that credibility is king. Want to ask for $100,000 to work on some educational projects in the jungle? Great! Here is your interaction. “Who are you? …Who? Okay, well, here’s my card, email me.” You’ve just been politely shown the door to Nodonationsville.

But the coldest, hardest truth I learned is that nobody cares. What I mean is that no matter how good the cause, how well-crafted the proposal, or how exotic the promotional hook is, if it does not correspond to the potential donor’s interests, it will be a failure. It’s not like you’re the only person asking for funds. People with means have many options, and they have many people treating them like wallets with legs. You have to find out what the donor cares about and show that your project corresponds to their interests and values. Otherwise, you are climbing up an even steeper hill than before. Now instead of simply building trust and asking for help you are trying to reform someone’s values. Don’t try to do that. And if their interests are too divergent to make a real connection, then YOU must become their interest. It’s easier to build a relationship with Mr. Billionaire than it is to teach him why YOUR hospital project should get funded as opposed to the ones he is already working on in the USA in a context he understands with people and bank accounts he trusts to work. And then he will fly away from the island in his helicopter to go to Monaco a day early. (This is a true story.)

So, as much as I wish I could say I was playing 5-dimensional chess from the start, the truth is that it was about 99% fake-it-til-you-make-it, fly by the seat of your pants, jump in and find out what happens…

Here’s what happened.

I finally identified a single project to support with direct philanthropy. A small one, with a realistic goal. Relatively uncontroversial – help sisters in Africa with their clinical work by funding the purchase of medicines. In the meantime, and on the side, I would work on finding the right partners and investors for some kind of commercial work with Malawi’s large numbers of very poor tobacco farmers.

“But Eamonn, tobacco is bad for you.”

The truth is that the farmers aren’t even really consuming the tobacco they produce. That would almost literally be burning money. They go to sell it at the government market, and they collect their pennies. If the tobacco market dips, some farmers make the switch to growing marijuana. So let’s move on. (Besides, I just don’t want to hear the bad moral arguments against tobacco use. We’ll debunk that another time.)

The logistics of setting up an indie ultramarathon are… not for the faint of heart. You need a driver, a back up driver, a plan for navigation, a plan for checkpoints, a plan for medicine, a plan for pacers if you will use them, a plan for food and drink. All of these have to connect with your own running plan. Then you need to have a system in place for when everything goes wrong, which it will. I also needed a plan for communications, live tracking, charging my phone, advertising… All to connect with the philanthropic project. I needed a chaplain too – just in case, you know… if things got too difficult.

I found a great group of guys to help me along what I thought would be a 26 or 27 hour event. Sort of last minute I created a WhatsApp group to document the event and show my live location during the race. That was a great call.

The preparations wound down, and so did I. The few days before the race, I tried to relax a bit, but there was so much work to do. I was very tired, actually. But at this point, it was not possible to delay the run.

The day finally came. Words cannot describe how surreal it is to know that you are about to attempt to run for 100 miles in one go.

Unfortunately, I forgot my bus pass and had to walk all the way to the house where I had mass and got geared up… But what I’ll never forget was how sick I felt walking to the starting line. Like, really sick. I’ve never been that nervous for an event in my entire life.

The energy at the starting line was great. Fun. Plenty of friends, and some curious police as well who made us put our Malawian flag away for fear of a “manifestation.” (The starting line was at San Lorenzo in Panisperna, immediately next to the back gate of the Viminale, the Italian Ministry of the Interior.)

The moment arrived – “GO.”

After a small push of energy from the rush of adrenaline and a bit of showmanship, I settled into a plodding pace and began looking for the correct turns to get to the Porta Pia, the great northern gate of Rome. A friend linked up with me on a bike, and we cruised for a bit towards the northeastern limits of the city.

After getting out of Rome, I really started to realize that this was happening. And that’s when the wild animals started to become a problem… First it was a family of boar, hanging around a farmhouse. I was deep in the dirt paths that crisscross the Roman countryside – there was not really a way around. I made a small retreat, considered my options, got a big stick, and walked carefully toward the mom… They all ran away! Huzzah! Then I booked it.

Later a wolf crossed my trail. Same thing. Step back, get a big stick, walk slowly, then bolt.

The checkpoints were a mixture of chaos and order. Arrive, be greeted, sit down, complain about the hills. Eat. Drink some Coke. Get a leg massage. Fill up my bag with what I need. Get a blessing. Off. Meanwhile everyone was trying to figure out the turns I needed to take, while calculating the time it would be to the next stop given the distance and elevation changes, trying to find the food and gear I needed… While getting enough of the right kind of footage to put together a nice documentary.

The evening came. Things were going much more slowly than I had expected. The hills were WAY worse than I thought they would be, and I had taken a seriously wrong turn at one point early on that went up an absurd hill and ultimately probably cost me close to an hour. But when I reached the famous Benedictine Abbey of Farfa, I was still feeling pretty good. Tired, but good.

All the while, my WhatsApp group was how I stayed plugged into the real world, and how my friends and fans stayed plugged into my world. It was exhilarating to take a picture of a hill and have 6 reactions within minutes, encouraging me. This was a huge deal for me psychologically. And I know the group enjoyed it too.

Night came. Fatigue came. Pain came.

The crossing into Umbria in the absolute dead of night was definitely the most intense part of the race. I brought my chaplain with me as a pacer for this stretch, after having had my medical assistant as a pacer a bit earlier on, when we were doing merely very difficult terrain at the tender hour of midnight. Around 2AM, there I was slogging through mud puddles in the middle of the forest between tiny farms on awfully maintained rocky dirt roads on large hills. We got turned around. We got barked at by angry dogs. We made jokes about my digestive system.

We emerged back into civilization, and my chaplain got to take a well-earned nap. Then it was off to the checkpoint at Stroncone. This was where things started to become very, very difficult physically and psychologically. Thankfully, the daylight was gracing the sky as I sat down for a while after around 22 hours or so of running.

The run from Stroncone towards Terni was uplifting in some ways, because the sun was out again after one of the roughest nights I’ve ever experienced, but it was also brutal. Every step was like being stabbed in my feet. By that point I think my digestive issues were reducing – it had been like every part of my body was angry with my stomach, and every movement made my stomach scream at each part of my body individually. Now it was just my feet telling me that they were on fire. Here’s a few clips of that section:

I almost quit at Terni, when I was told about the climb that I had right in front of me. 300 meters of elevation in a short stretch. Nope, wasn’t happening. But with some strategic thinking, I rearranged my planned shuttle for then rather than later. (I had about 10 miles of shuttle to use… Bringing the 110 mile course down to 100 miles.)

After Terni was when the heat started to become a real issue. I was continually being told about how little I was drinking. And I continually thought, “Yeah. Ok. It’s true. But they don’t understand what my stomach thinks about that.” (Though, oddly, I was never sick. That is still incredible to me.)

The mantra at that point in my head was so firmly rooted that it was like breathing… “If I get to Acquasparta, I will get to Massa Martana. If I get to Massa Martana, I will get to Assisi.” Repeat the phrase. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I got to Acquasparta. We were 30 or so hours into the race at this point. And I had around a marathon left to run.

Just a marathon.

Off to Massa Martana I went.

At Massa Martana, some of my team had to go back to Rome. Only my main driver and chaplain remained.

The evening started to come, and it hit me that I was really going to make it. Not just in my head, but really. A few small logistical hurdles jumped, and there I was, up on the hills overlooking the valley near Assisi. The song that I remember Spotify hitting me with was OneRepublic’s “Better Days.”

I was bawling. You have no idea what it is like until you’ve been there. 35 or so hours into a run. Seeing the place next to the finish line from afar. After dreaming about this for years, it was happening. It was real.

One of the weirdest things, which some of my crew apparently also experienced, was that my sense of time really just went out the window. When I was coming up to the last checkpoints of the run, over 30 hours in, if you had told me that my starting line was yesterday, it would have seemed like nonsense. It felt like a month had passed. And I was having a kind of out-of-body experience, like I was just attached somehow to this man who kept running, wishing he would stop. It was very weird.

The final leg of the run was not without its challenges. It got dark, which was unhelpful for smooth movement over the rocky dirt roads in the fields below Assisi. Then my phone battery was dangerously low, and there was a serious scare from my team that I’d taken a major wrong turn – but it was my GPS glitching. I was able to pull off something like a 10-minute mile to get within a navigable distance just in case my phone died. Oh, and it was starting to rain.

At long last, I came to the base of the hill. It was easy by that point, despite some hallucinations starting to creep in. My crew was there, along with my Malawian priest friend who had given me a blessing at the starting line. We approached the basilica, and then I touched the outer wall of the upper sanctuary at 12:15 AM on May 17, 2024… 40 hours exactly.

The run was finished. And so was I. Off to sleep.

The documentary drops on August 10. Here’s another teaser:

We’ve raised around $8,000 so far for St. Patrick’s Health Centre, a small Catholic clinic in Malawi. (We are still raising funds here until October.) But this is just the beginning. I have a lead now for tobacco exports, and we are already setting up my next event.

I am heading off once again into the unknown, albeit a little wiser than I was before. I will be doing more crowdfunding, both for straight-up donations and also for investments to help build businesses in the Catholic missions. Part of that will continue to be based on athletics – we will do the 100-mile again, along with other events TBA – but I am also setting up some media projects.

The first thing is that I will be launching a kind of weekly “training vlog” for my upcoming athletic event, in November. (It will be in Corsica – a “pedal-paddle,” bike and kayak, around the whole coast.) It will also be for the events that follow. You can watch me as I plan the event logistics, suffer through countless hours of physical pain, and also give thoughts on fundraising, philanthropy, Catholic social teaching, economics, entrepreneurship… all of that kind of stuff. If you want to subscribe, here is the door. BE ADVISED: it is not free… The truth is that I need a bit of income, and so does my company, Pro Fide. The funds help me to put on these events in the first place, and ultimately the cashflow helps us to build businesses in the Catholic missions together. (The group for watching the athletic events themselves remains free. That group is here.)

I’m also now preparing to host the world’s only show on Catholic history. Ever wanted to have a personalized and interactive tour of Roman basilicas while you sit on your couch? Well, now you can. We start in September when I get back to Rome. Here is that group, and here is the trailer:

That’s enough for today. I’m coming back now to more regular writing – and no, not just promotions of my stuff, though that’s coming too, sorry not sorry.

Thanks for being a reader!