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07/30/2006
Immigrant runs the long trek for peaceHe's traveled through 54 countries on foot
"I'm a good mechanic; I can fix anything," said Reza Baluchi as he works on a cherry shaker at a Williamsburg farm on Friday afternoon. WILLIAMSBURG — Reza Baluchi probably isn't the only person working on a northern Michigan cherry farm who crossed the border into the United States illegally. In late 2002, a border patrol officer found him camped out 15 miles into Arizona. Baluchi said he got lost in the desert while waiting for a visa in Mexico. He spent the next four months in a federal detention facility. That was after he had cycled through 54 countries across six continents in the name of peace. That was after he left his home country of Iran, where he was imprisoned and tortured, allegedly for wearing a Michael Jackson T-shirt. When he was released in 2003, Baluchi ran cross-country from Los Angeles to New York, averaging 40 miles a day and arriving at Ground Zero on Sept. 11. This summer, his unusual journeys wound through northern Michigan. For the last three weeks, he's been helping with the cherry harvest on Rob Apap's Williamsburg farm, making $10 an hour repairing farm equipment and operating tree shakers. As temporary workers go, Apap said Baluchi is both hardworking and reliable. "I've run into some interesting characters," Apap said. "Never quite this interesting." Baluchi's travels read like a movie script — and the runner, who isn't shy of the media, hopes that someday it will be. He's only about 5'7", without an ounce of fat on his bones, and can run 80 miles a day with ease. He'll sleep on the sides of roads. He hardly eats. "He's used to just roughing it — eating a banana a day or whatever," said his girlfriend, Savannah Sheets. Since his 2003 cross-continent run, Baluchi has run six marathons. He recently won a race in Colorado, running 100 miles in just under 21 hours, a course record. He's been migrating around the country, from Arizona to Los Angeles to Colorado to the Traverse City area, where he and Sheets have spent the last five weeks visiting her family. When they return to Colorado today, Baluchi plans to work odd jobs raising money and training for his next goal. At roughly this time next year, he hopes to be crossing the Mackinac Bridge on a world record-setting run around the perimeter of the continental United States — some 10,600 miles. It's been done before, in nine months. "He'll do it a lot faster. He'll probably do it in less than six months," Sheets said. He's already attempted the trek once, making it about 650 miles from Los Angeles to Eureka this June, but was forced to stop when his left leg became inflamed from his ankle to his knee. He'll try again next spring, this time starting in Washington, D.C. Baluchi runs for a variety of causes — for peace, for children's charities, to make his family proud — but the native Farsi speaker has a hard time explaining his motivations in broken English. Running is second nature to Baluchi. He'll run to work at Apap's farm. When he had to head to a different field on Friday to fix a tractor, he simply took off running down Elk Lake Road. Los Angeleno Dave Hyslop, who spent five months with Baluchi during his 2003 run, said he doesn't even fully understand it. "I think he's stubborn as hell — I think you have to be," Hyslop said. After the deaths of his father, sister and brother, Baluchi finds running therapeutic, Sheets said. "I can go running, my mind clean," Baluchi said. Baluchi and his friends are confident he'll succeed in his next big run. "I think if anybody can do it, Reza can," Hyslop said. "He's one of these people that just has an unlimited supply of energy — and he just has to get rid of it." Baluchi, who has spent the last decade wandering the world, has no intention of stopping. "I no get tired, I keep running," he said.
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