Las Vegas woman finishes cross-country run after 7 years
Helene Neville pressed play on Madonna’s “Dress You Up.”
Then, she ran.
More than 12,800 miles, 48 states, three countries and 33 pairs of shoes later, Neville, a 57-year-old grandma-turned-nurse-turned-cancer-survivor, is expected to be back on her home turf of Las Vegas this weekend at the end of her trek to run across each of the 48 continental states.
It started as a 93-day, 2,520-mile journey from Ocean Beach, California, to Atlantic Beach, Florida, in 2010. At 50, as a Hodgkin’s lymphoma survivor, Neville would run in memory of her mother and call it good.
“My mom was so good to people,” Neville said recently during a running break at a diner about 15 miles from Orem, Utah, her rest spot that day. “She was just a saint, and believed that we should focus on strengths rather than weaknesses.”
But she fell in love with the journey, and three years after that first trek, she ran her second in memory of her late brother.
Seven years and almost five legs of her cross-country run later, Neville said she’s just “taking it a step further. It became my little study.”
Training, tricky logistics
Neville, who sports a spunky, black pixie haircut and wears a farmer’s sunhat and Altra running shoes, has hit every state except Alaska and Hawaii on her journey, with Las Vegas being her final stop.
She hit the ground running, literally, on May 1, 2010, after training for three months in Phoenix, where she lived until moving to Las Vegas in 2011. Jay Schroeder, founder of EvoUltraFit gym in Phoenix, created for her one of the most advanced training plans he said he’s ever written.
None of that training included running.
Instead, Neville would do lunges and wall squats, meanwhile eating enough to gain about 14 pounds she later would drop on the run.
“The whole idea is to teach you to stay in position with perfect alignment,” Neville said.
Neville imagined her run across the states — which she has done in segments in order to save up for each journey in between — would be a stroll across the beach.
“The beauty I’d dreamt of — prancing down the beach and the ocean waves — that lasted about a minute,” she recalled. San Diego, where she began her journey, proved to be more concrete than beach, but she continued undeterred.
‘Tough as nails’
Except for that first journey, Neville has traveled solo in a 1998 Isuzu Trooper — a car “tough as nails, like me,” she said — covered in the 3,000 signatures of Americans she has met along her journey. After starting each day with a steak and bacon breakfast — she ends her day with the same, plus a salad — the runner asks someone, friend or stranger, to follow her truck to that day’s finish line.
Neville then drops off the car anywhere from 8 to 100 miles away from where she began the day and hitches a ride with her helper, staggering bottles of water every few miles along the route.
“I literally run to my car everyday,” Neville said. If she can’t find a door to knock on or a motel to crash in that night, she’ll camp or sleep in the car.
“Running is really the easiest part of this whole thing,” Neville said, a nod to the tricky logistics of racing across the country. “Every day there’s a reason to quit, and I stay the course because I want to give back some hope to everybody.”
Toughest leg of the race
Neville has battled cancer, won national recognition as a nurse, owned a health coaching business and founded the National Nurses Health Institute. She has published books, was awarded a star on the Flag for Hope alongside people like Colin Powell, Muhammad Ali and Sandra Day O’Connor, and raised two sons, Steven, 32, and Daniel, 30.
On her journey, Neville visits hospitals and schools, cancer support groups and businesses, just to provide words of encouragement. Though she’s an athlete, she averages a 10- to 11-minute mile “on a good day” — “I’m slow and there’s nothing pretty about it,” Neville said — and has had to delay her journey at points due to a broken rib and ankle and altitude sickness.
And while she’s a trooper, this leg of the race, she said, has been the toughest, from pneumonia in Tennessee, to an ear infection in Missouri, to the blizzard in Arkansas.
But people are counting on her.
“If I quit, then people can say, ‘See, I told you nobody can do this,’” Neville said. “I have to be a leader by example.”
She attributes her success to people who help her along the way by providing shelter or a meal.
Like a woman in Maine — Neville can’t remember her name — who opened her door on a rainy July night in 2014, fed her lentil soup and corn bread, and let her wear an oversized tracksuit while Neville’s running clothes dried.
“I was crying because I was so cold, and there was this house,” Neville remembers. So she ran toward the little brown bungalow and knocked.
Bring on the margaritas
In her backpack, Neville carries water, pain medication, a portable phone charger, red lipstick and a tape recorder, pencil and paper, making sure to leave room for roadside treasures — a stuffed rabbit from Wyoming, about $68 in coins from across the country.
“Yesterday I found the emblem of a Volvo,” Neville said. “It was in mint condition.”
While her run across the U.S. is coming to an end, her journey isn’t. She’s been invited to run across Cuba, and wants to tackle Alaska next, although she wouldn’t do that run solo. “It would really be a shame if I went there and got eaten by a bear after all this work.”
But first, Helene Neville is coming home.
On Saturday, the cast of the Westgate’s SEXXY topless show — good friends of Neville’s — will greet her, toting gifts, champagne and a cake. The cast might even invite Neville to the stage.
Apparently, she’s been asking for the chance to make her big debut for a while now, SEXXY producer and choreographer Jennifer Romas said.
Neville, who last strayed from her strict steak-and-bacon diet on her birthday last month, said she wants just one thing: “You know what I’m dying for is a frozen margarita.”
“Nobody can make margaritas like Vegas.”
This story has been updated.
Contact Jessie Bekker at jbekker@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4563. Follow @jessiebekks on Twitter.
By the numbers
Helene Neville’s journey across America (oneontherun.com)
12,855: Miles covered
33: Pairs of Altra running shoes
100 miles: Longest distance in a single run, along the Columbia River in Washington
2,800: Cities and towns visited
