Just Passing Through
Getting the feel of his first pair of shoes five days into a walk across America to raise money and awareness for at-risk youth, Frank Chiarelli passed through Annapolis on May 6.
“It feels like I’ve been doing this for months. That’s how my body feels,” he said of his walk to the Pacific Ocean begun May 1 in the Cape May/Lewes area.
“I have an app,” he says, “that calculates how many steps I’ll walk in each pair of shoes.”
Chiarelli’s walk will take him 3,100 miles in 250 days, for some 15 miles a day or seven million strides.
So far he has passed out from heat stroke, filtered water on the side of the highway, slept in a barn and been taken in by “a couple of good guys,” who look out for “thru-hikers” and offer them food and a place to stay. He met his “Trail Angels” in Greenwood, Delaware, where they drank traditional Guatemalan pour-over coffee and watched Forensic Files.
The walk is sponsored by Kids Off the Block, a do-good organization on that invests in career-readiness programs for young people.
Track his progress and donate on his website sevenmillionstrides.com plus Instagram and Facebook.