Just four short years ago, junior Nickademus Hollon’s world was turned upside-down. In chaos, Hollon found tranquility and a passion through ultra-marathon running. With his junior year winding down at Poway High School in San Diego, Hollon and his friend Andrew Bundy, a senior at the time, were both heavily involved his school’s drama club.
Bundy was up for the big supporting role in the upcoming Guys and Dolls play, but two weeks passed without any sign of him. Later in the week, Hollon heard through the grapevine that Bundy was in the hospital, but he did not know why.
Three weeks came and went, leaving just one week before Bundy’s graduation.
“I knew if he wanted to walk at his graduation he’d have to get better fast,” Hollon said.
Just days before graduation, Hollon discovered his dear friend had contracted leukemia, leaving Bundy’s body weak and in need of chemotherapy. This was Hollon’s first experience with cancer, and the news left him stunned.
“That was a really hard hit for me,” Hollon said. “Cancer had always been this foreign thing. You heard about it, you read about it, and yeah, people get it left and right, but it had never really been something personal for me. It took cancer and personalized it and made it this palpable thing in the world.”
As Bundy laid in his hospital bed with a hairless head from the chemotherapy, Hollon could see him suffering. He knew he had to take some action by either spreading awareness for cancer or fundraising money to help his friend. While visiting his father in Connecticut over the summer, Hollon stared out the window, thinking of a senior project. The project had to involve helping the San Diego community or a future career. All he knew was he could run, and he wanted to help Bundy.
For Bundy to know Hollon was in his corner, fighting for him, was a major relief.
“It was very comforting,” Bundy said. “It was nice to know that Nick was there for me. It really was special.”
After reading a book written by ultra-marathon runner Dean Karnazes, Hollon came away inspired. In the book, Karnazes recommends athletes pull media stunts to get recognition. With this in mind, Hollon came to the conclusion that he needed to do something big.
“I started out thinking, ‘What is a number that sounds cool, some big number I could run over the entire school year?’” Hollon said. “First, I thought 5,000 miles. But at about 139 miles per week, I thought that may be too much to do. Then I went with 3,000 miles, which would be about 75 miles per week. It came out to be 13 miles Monday through Friday, 26 miles on Saturday and a break on Sunday.”
Hollon kept running week in and week out, dedicating at least two hours a day to the task. In the midst of applying to universities, finishing up classes and pushing through senioritis, the 75 miles per week were becoming hard to maintain.
Seven months into Hollon’s 10-month senior project, Hollon realized fundraising was tougher than he had thought. During the first six months he only received $255, which was quite short of the $10,000 goal he had set. So sometime in late March, he decided he’d run 100 miles on his high school track, equivalent to running four marathons consecutively. He started advertising throughout his community and all over his high school, telling everyone he knew. He was fortunate enough to be picked up by the local NBC channel and another local station, which spread the word throughout the entire San Diego community, and he received a couple $1,000 donations because of it.
Because temperatures were expected to reach up to 98 degrees, Hollon figured he’d do as much as he could before it started to heat up. His three friends biked the first 26 miles (about four hours) while he paced himself for the 100-mile journey. Later in the day, Hollon’s family, his girlfriend and some of his teachers showed up to run or walk with him on the track.
Marina Perenti, Hollon’s mother, said she was taken back by the support the community was showing.
“I was overwhelmed,” Perenti said. “That one day when he went out on the track and he started running, it was amazing. I wasn’t able to do a lot as far as support him, so he did it on his own. He had a couple of friends come out and hang up some signs when he was running the 100 miles on the track. People just started coming in off the road. There was a lacrosse game there, and they announced what he was doing. The principal ran with Nick, and that was really inspirational. It was a super hot day, and we had this really pathetic misting fan out, and he really looked forward to hitting it every time he finished a lap. The day progressed, and it kind of took on a life of its own.”
At the 16-mile mark, Hollon took a break to video chat with Bundy, who had just received a bone marrow transplant — a crucial part in the process of treating leukemia.
“I sat and talked to him, and he got me emotionally fired up to keep going,” Hollon said. “I wasn’t going to quit at the time, but seeing him suffer so involuntarily — and I was suffering voluntarily running around this track. I had the choice, I had the freedom, to say whether I wanted to hurt this much or if I wanted to stop. The easy choice is to stop, but what really makes it count is that you don’t stop. You push through all the hell, and you push through all the pain so that he doesn’t have to suffer through that.”
The 100 miles took Hollon 22 hours and 15 minutes to complete. Straight. Soon he started receiving phone calls and emails from cancer survivors from the San Diego area all the way to the the East Coast.
“I thought it was a terrific way for him to express his feelings on being out of control, this disease that he had no control over, or what it was doing to his friend,” Parenti said. “The thing that he did have control over was his running, so he just channeled that into something he could do about his friend. It was a real expression as the love he has for his friend.”
Although Hollon’s intentions were to help his friend, he never thought of the effect he’d have on the San Diego community.
“They’d tell me things like, ‘You’re making such an impact at your age. … You’re doing a great thing for the community … it’s huge,’” Hollon said. “I had no idea. To me, I was just doing the project and running, and people were donating. Running 100 miles is something in itself personally, but when you fundraise — when you know you’re making an impact on other people’s lives — you’re bettering someone’s life. You’re taking it to the next level. It’s for cancer and to change these lives; it makes the run so meaningful.”
Soon after completing his run on the track, Hollon knew he had found his calling in ultra-marathon running.
“I knew after I had ran those 100 miles, this is it for me,” Hollon said. “This is my niche.”
Ultra-marathons are races over 26.3 miles in which courses are constructed through trails, mountains, deserts, blizzards and snowstorms.
During Hollon’s sophomore year of high school, he had overheard some older athletes talking about a race called the Badwater 135. The mystique of the race caught Hollon’s attention. Badwater is a 135-mile race through the desert from the bottom of Death Valley to the top of Mount Whitney in 130-degree weather. To many, the Badwater looks like a suffer fest, but to Hollon, it seemed fun. The fun of not knowing whether he could do the race is what attracted him to it. He helped crew (assist) other runners in the race one year, and in doing so, he saw what he was capable of, and he saw the excitement in other runners prior to the race.
Two races Hollon competed in after his first experience in an ultra-marathon were the Javelina 100 in Scottsdale and McDowell Mountain Park. Those two qualified him for the Badwater in January, when he received his acceptance letter. There were more than 3,000 applicants for 90 race spots, and then there Hollon was, an 18-year-old, right in the middle of the cream of the crop. He is still the youngest to compete in the race.
More recently, Hollon competed in The Barkley in Tennessee on April 2. It’s a 100-mile race with five loops, each loop being 20 miles long. Since 1986, only 10 runners have finished the race. The average 100-mile course record is about 14–15 hours; the course record at The Barkley is 55 hours and 45 minutes. After completing loops, runners will have covered 57,000 feet in elevation — the equivalent of stacking Mount Everest on top of itself, starting from sea level and going up and back down.
On June 25, Hollon will start what is arguably the most mentally and physically challenging race out there: the Death Race. Out of the 500 runners who entered last year, only five finished. The race has 15 to 16 challenges to complete in 24 hours. Challenges depend on what the nearby community needs done; past challenges have included farmers needing land cleared and cut, so particpants had to crawl through 200 yards on their knees through muddy rivers, then were given an ax to cut down countless acres of trees into small stumps and carry them back. Another challenge has been for competitors to crawl 200 miles on their knees through barbed wire, take a pencil and notepad, copy a Lego house with exact colors and pieces, and then reconstruct it.
While others look at these races and wouldn’t think twice about competing, Hollon likes to see himself succeed where others are failing, or to see where people are failing and why.
“It is certainly impressive and very inspiring,” Bundy said. “The guy is absolutely crazy, but … it’s what he loves. It’s really cool to see what he is up to and what he is doing with his life.”
One of Hollon’s goals outside of ultra-marathon running is inspirational speaking. He hopes to tell his story to students at high schools and middle schools; he believes he can relate to the youth because of his age. His main messages in his speeches are to live life to the fullest and take advantage of every opportunity presented to you.
Hollon likes to end his speeches with a question: “Where is richest place in world?” Typical answers include the Middle East for its oil, Africa for its diamonds, China for owning the U.S economically, or the United States.
“In my opinion, it is graveyards,” Hollon said. “People go to the grave with songs never sung, books never written, college degrees never earned; that’s where people die with the chances they never took. The message I try to deliver is to live your life to the fullest and bring nothing to the grave.”
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