Prescott Arizona News and Events - Read It News Magazine

Thomas Arnold sat outside the Raven Café looking like the Granola hulk. It was a cold morning, late November, but his legs and feet were bare. He wore a Coffee Roasters cap cut into a visor and a wu-wu sweatshirt with the collar torn out. A light breeze carried his scent like an anarchist credo. He says he quit deodorant about the same time he quit the suburbs. And now he runs.

Not just short jogs to pick up milk. More like the cross-country, expeditionary efforts of Forrest Gump, but for a cause. He’s been coordinating uber-distance events for over a year as part of the Sacred Earth Endurance Collective – his title for the non-competitive runs that help support indigenous people and grassroots organizations.

And on that November morning, he was gearing up to go again, to run 120 miles from his front porch in Prescott to rendezvous with a group of Navajo horsemen in Flagstaff. The plan was to not only run an incredible distance, but do a good part of it through the Sycamore Canyon Wilderness area, and he seemed understandably nervous.

“This is a unique route because there’s an ultra marathon’s worth of distance – unsupported – in a wilderness area,” he said. “I’ve never heard of that.”

The two poles of his run being so distant, Arnold had decided to support causes on both ends with his running. Here in Prescott, he planned to raise money to plant fruit trees in his neighborhood, and in Flagstaff he wanted to bring awareness to Save The Peaks, a group dedicated to the struggle of Native American tribes to maintain the San Francisco Peaks as a place of worship. In between, though, is pure wilderness.

On the morning of the run, I woke up late; late, by the standards of this run, was still the middle of the night. I arrived with about five minutes to spare, and Arnold, normally laconic, had timed the start of the run down to the second.

He’s a former Marine and, early in the morning, it shows. The dozen or so runners struggling to keep warm were hippy jocks who followed Arnold into the darkness like an entourage. I followed him, too, making it across town before I convinced myself it was best to turn around since I had no ride back. The rest of the runners continued on.

By nightfall, 50 miles later, Arnold reached the canyon. I found bare footprints at a trailhead near Perkinsville Road the following day and followed Arnold’s Chaco tracks up a faint trail marked by cairns leading to the canyon’s edge. He and his friend Brian Reardon had descended into the canyon after dark. They didn’t make it far.

“Instead of a smooth motion, this was down-climbing and bushwhacking,” Reardon said. “Twelve hundred vertical feet of hell.”

The pair had missed the faint trail and found themselves doubling back from slot canyons going nowhere. With no moon they were in total darkness, gathering cactus by the shinful. At length they decided to err on the safer side of valor.

Instead of making it through the canyon and to the San Francisco Peaks by Sunday morning as planned, he and Reardon were still at the beginning. It wasn’t a crisis; they were carrying a support pack with food, lighters, and a first aid kit. But Thomas had to define the change in plans for himself.

“When I first started realizing how long it was going to take to get out of the canyon, I was a little disappointed,” he said. But as they geared up for a different kind of journey, Thomas treated the canyon traverse as an extended prayer rooted in suffering.

“It suddenly started being pretty humbling,” he said.

On the north end of the canyon, a team of runners waited for the pair to emerge. By late afternoon they correctly inferred that Reardon and Arnold had decided to hole up the night before.

At sunset, Reardon and Arnold climbed out of the canyon. Arnold hunkered down next to a fire and Reardon set off down the road in search of their ride home.

Though he never made it to Flagstaff, Arnold declared the run a success. The event he’d staged drew the participation of runners and activists from all over northern Arizona.

“I knew that it was a success because all these people were activated,” he said. “They were doing something.”

Reardon chalks that activation up to the “Thomas Arnold Mystique.”

“If I asked all of my friends to show up and run at four o’clock in the morning with me, people wouldn’t come,” he said. “Thomas says that and 16 people show up at his house to go running. People who have never run more than 10 miles are running 20 miles. Just everyone is doing more than they ever thought they could do.”

Arnold fits some definitions of insanity. By his own admission, he feels manic a lot of the time, struggling constantly to keep powerful emotions in check. But he prefers the term “eccentric.”

“Being so obsessive in my nature anyway, it just makes sense for me to try to justify it by saying ‘I want to be an eccentric, so how do I benefit everyone?’” he said.

“Rather than ostracizing myself through eccentricity, I do the reverse.”

If Arnold suffered in the canyon, it hasn’t had a chastening effect.

“Personally, I broke though some boundaries of what I can do after a long time and after no sleep,” he said. “It kind of created a monster within myself.”

(Interested in Sacred Earth Endurance events? With no cell phone or email, Arnold is a tough man to track down. Stop by or call Prescott Natural Foods to leave a message.)

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