Cleveland Residents Complete 300 Mile Race Across State of Tennessee

Cleveland, TN-(WDEF-TV) How would you like to run 300 miles across the state of Tennessee..in July?
Somebody was crazy enough to come up with a race called the Volstate 500K, and Cleveland residents Jeff Salyer and Duane Goff were crazy enough to do it.
The duo had 10 days to complete the 314 mile journey that started in Kentucky and finished atop Sand Mountain.

Reporter:”First question why?”

Said Jeff Salyer:”(chuckles) Mainly because it was an adventure. Something hard to do. Something difficult. Something that’s not guaranteed success. So the first day we did 54 miles, which was not the smartest thing we could have done.”

Said Duane Goff:”And by day two our plan was completely destroyed. Our feet were destroyed. Our nutrition plan was destroyed. Our packs were too heavy. Our shoes were wrong.”

Said Salyer:”We probably drank gallons of water.”

Said Goff:”Oh we were drinking over 300 ounces of fluid a day.”

Said Salyer:”For the most part we were living on one or two meals a day, and then beef jerky and whatever we could find at the convenience store.”

Reporter:”When you walk into these convenience stores, I mean you’re probably looking pretty ragged. Would they go hey, what’s wrong with you?”

Said Salyer:”Uh they look at you and thing what’s wrong with you and have pity on you a lot of times. So we did look ragged, but we probably smelled worse than anything. You don’t want to run in the middle of the day in Tennessee heat and humidity and no shade. Most of these roads have no shade, so we tried to flip our days, so we tried to flip it to night. We tried to sleep between one and four or one and five, and then get up and get on the road late night.”

Said Goff:”I think we had had a little over 20 hours of sleep that entire eight days, eleven hours, and 30 minutes or whatever it was.”

Reporter:”And did you run up Monteagle?”

Said Salyer:”We did. In 57 minutes.”

Said Goff:”It was pretty steep and surprisingly we thought when that was over, it would be done, but Sand Mountain was actually steeper, and we weren’t expecting that.”

Said Salyer:”It’s not really a finish line. You finish by touching a rock on the edge of a cliff that’s a hundred foot drop.”

Said Goff:”The battle in your mind is the hardest battle you will ever face, and we faced a really tough battle and actually won, so we were really proud of it.”