Now there remains but one week before I set out for Castle Rock, Georgia, the place that serves as both gathering point and finish line for this curious undertaking. On June 7th, I shall leave the comfort of home behind and drive seven hundred miles southward, joining nearly one hundred other runners who have undoubtedly spent the better part of the spring staring suspiciously at pieces of gear and muttering about ounces.

For what is an ounce, after all, but a tiny stone that grows heavier with every mile?

My running vest has become the center of much debate. Not with others, mind you, but with itself. It has been packed, unpacked, repacked, and rearranged so many times that even the socks seem uncertain where they belong. Every item has faced questioning.

There are roads in this world that sensible folk do not walk willingly.

They twist through forgotten hollers and over weary ridgelines. They wander beneath pines older than memory and across creeks cold enough to bite the bones. They vanish into swamp mist and emerge again beneath the amber glow of lonely gas stations where coffee has simmered since dawn. Such roads are best left to mail carriers, moonshiners, and the occasional wandering fool.

And yet, every year, a curious company gathers to travel them all the same.

This is the tale of the Last Annual Heart of the South 400-Mile Journey Run — though “race,” as the organizers insist upon calling it, is perhaps too tidy a word for such a thing. For this is no ordinary contest of speed and stopwatch. It is a pilgrimage of sore feet and stubborn hearts; a rambling odyssey through the deep and weathered country of the South, where the miles rise like mountains and the nights seem to have no end.