I was there too

I was standing at the finish line when he crossed it.

It was December 1, 2020, a cold and windy Connecticut afternoon, and I was wearing a mask - because, of course, I was; it was that year. He had just run 3,255 miles across the country. Ninety-four days. San Francisco to the Connecticut shoreline. And I was right there, close enough to touch him, beaming behind a piece of cloth, watching him run toward the water with his crew chief while news cameras rolled.

I didn't exist that day. Not publicly, anyway.

I've written around this fact before. I've used words like "complications" and "tension" and "plans that quietly fell apart." I've wrapped the hard parts in hopeful endings and nostalgic reflections, because that's what you do when the story turns out okay. You lead with the okay.

But I've been carrying something for more than five years now, and I think it's time to just say it.

When Shan ran across the country in 2020, there was a woman in Connecticut who loved him. She texted him good morning every single day. She followed his progress on Strava and Instagram and watched his miles like a countdown. She helped him move out of his apartment, stowed his stuff at her house, and held onto the fragile, beautiful thing they had built during a pandemic - when the world had gone sideways, and love was one of the few things that actually made sense.

That woman was me. And almost no one knew I existed.

Here's the truth about what happened, as plainly as I can tell it.

Shan and I met in January 2020, right before everything changed. We fell in love during lockdown. It was an intense, no-distractions kind of falling, where you really see someone in their raw and vulnerable self. At the end of July, he lost his job and was trying to figure out what came next. I suggested the thing he'd always dreamed of: running across the country. He invited me to join. I wanted desperately to say yes, but I couldn't get my life organized quickly enough. He needed to leave right away to clear the Rockies before winter.

So he went without me. A friend offered to drive the campervan and crew for him, and off they went.

I understood. I really did. These were extraordinary circumstances - pandemic, job loss, a once-in-a-lifetime window. I encouraged him with all of my heart, and I made my peace with watching from afar.

We had talked about potential complications before he left, and they came. He navigated them up close. I navigated them from a thousand miles away, alone. For ninety-four days, while I texted him good morning and good night and you've got this and I love you, the public story being told - through social posts, through photos, through the careful curation of their shared adventure - was a story in which I did not exist.

I was supposed to meet them in the Midwest. That didn't happen. I was supposed to crew for a stretch. That didn't happen either. What did happen: I ran with him on his second-to-last day, quietly, without fanfare. He crossed the finish line, and I watched from the crowd. He ran to the ocean with her. The cameras followed them.

I drove home. He drove her back to Chicago.

I want to be clear about something. Shan came back. He came back to Connecticut, to me, to the life we'd been building. We got married. We have done extraordinary things together since then - run and cycled thousands of miles, built something real and joyful and completely ours. I am not writing this because our marriage is troubled. I'm writing this because I am still a little troubled, and I've finally decided that it's okay to say it out loud.

For a long time, I thought the answer was public acknowledgement - for him to mention, in some interview or social post, that there had been a woman back home during his 2020 run. I have wanted that since he took that first step in San Francisco. It never happened. And I've had to sit with the question of why that still hurts, even now, even amidst the beautiful moments that came after.

I think the answer is this: I didn't just lose ninety-four days. I lost the version of that story where I existed in it. Where the invisible labor - the love letters masquerading as text messages, the spreadsheets, the holding-things-together from afar - was part of the narrative. Everyone who followed his run saw one story. The real story had another character in it. And she never got to show up.

I'm not asking for anything from anyone with this post. Shan knows how I feel. We've talked about it more times than either of us probably wanted to. We have found our peace as a couple.

I'm writing this because I spent five years waiting for someone else to tell my side of the story, and I've finally accepted that no one is going to do that except me.

So here it is. In 2020, Shan ran across the country, and I loved him through every mile of it from Connecticut. It was hard and lonely and sometimes humiliating, and I did it anyway, because I knew what we had was real. The finish line wasn't just the end of his run. It was the beginning of us - the us that people actually got to see.

I existed then. I just didn't get to prove it until later.

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This is the third in an unplanned trilogy of posts about Shan's 2020 transcon. The first - "The Long Road to Us" - was written in 2022, just before our East Coast Greenway expedition, full of hope and forward momentum. The second - "Love on the Other Side of a Transcon" - came in 2024, reflective and (mostly) at peace.

This one is the one I should have written first.