Saturday, March 31, 2001
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Story by Chuck Haga
Polly's walking again, and about to finish Australia
Even now, thousands of miles and many months into her walk around the world, Minneapolis native Polly Letofsky gets emotional about her solo campaign to raise awareness of breast cancer and money for research.
"Speaking at the Spring Hill Breakfast Lions Club [in Brisbane, Australia], I talked about how my walk started, how the Breast Cancer Network Australia got on board, how the Lions have been taking me under their wing for the past four months and how -- only with the help of the Lions Clubs -- I've been able to raise over $11,000 now in this country," she wrote in her journal for March 9. "And I started to get all emotional. Within minutes, Lion Dave Evans stepped forward, offering to buy my next airfare, from Cairns [Australia] to Singapore. So then, of course, I got all teary again! Geez, I'm such a girl!"
Letofsky, 38, started her walk on Aug. 1, 1999, near her home in Vail, Colo. She had finished walking to the California coast and through both islands of New Zealand and was about to start the Australian leg of her 18,000-mile journey when she stopped last spring because of a dispute with a sponsoring organization. She returned to Los Angeles, where she reorganized her management team, secured new sponsors and set up a new Web site: http://www.globalwalk.org.
In a Star Tribune interview after she reached the California coast, Letofsky explained that she was a sixth-grader in 1974 when she read about David Kunst of Waseca, Minn., and his four-year, 15,000-mile walk around the world. The urge to make her own walk around the world never left her, she said. She expects that her current journey will take her through 24 countries on four continents.
She sometimes walks alone, sometimes with supporters -- including breast cancer survivors. She wears a floppy, wide-brimmed hat and a fanny pack stuffed with a world walker's essentials: pepper spray, mostly for stray dogs. Ibuprofen. Apples. Bottles of water. Point-and-shoot camera. Radio/tape player and music cassettes. Blister kit. Swiss army knife. Sunglasses. She also carries brochures on breast cancer.
The toughest question
Letofsky, who is single, has been interviewed by scores of newspapers and radio and TV stations in New Zealand and Australia. The toughest question, she said, is always "Why? Why are you doing this?" The original motivation was simply to walk around the world. But as she planned her trek, Letofsky thought it would be good to walk for something, to embrace a cause that might benefit from the attention she attracted.
Then a close friend died of cancer at age 26. "Her name was Sarah," Letofsky said. "She was from New Zealand. I lived there for 4½ years, and we worked together. She really wanted to be part of it and travel with me a bit. "I talked with her two days before she died. She loved the idea that cancer was a part of it. And she said she will be with me."
Still, the question keeps coming: "Why walk around the world?" Letofsky got an answer last month from Australian Brenton McGrath. McGrath and his brother, Sean, were in Minnesota last year to attempt a major feat of their own -- water-skiing the Mississippi River -- to prove that someone recovering from cancer could do such a thing. Brenton McGrath had dreamed about skiing Australia's longest river, the Murray, since age 12. Before he could try it, he nearly died of leukemia.
But four years after the disease went into remission, he covered the nearly 1,400-mile river on skis in 27 hours. The brothers water-skied the Mississippi -- Minnesota to Louisiana -- in six days. At the end, in the Gulf of Mexico, they scattered the ashes of a friend who had died of stomach cancer a few months earlier.
"How do you answer the question, 'Why?'" Letofsky asked Brenton McGrath, who met her Feb. 28 when she crossed the state border from New South Wales to Queensland.
"Oh, yeah, that's a tough one," McGrath said, "because if you have to ask why I'm doing it, you won't understand even when I tell you."
"That's it!" Letofsky said. "Say it again so I can write it down. Beautiful!"