July 16-19, 2004

Minneapolis Star Tribune 
Minneapolis, MN

   Minneapolis native's world trek for cancer nears end

by Chuck Haga

Letofsky, 42, started her solo trek in 1999 from Vail, her home for the past several years, heading south and west to the Southern California coast and an assist by plane to New Zealand. 

"Can't say I've missed these hills one wee bit," she wrote wearily in her journal on June 23 from Daniel's Parkway, Colo. But earlier, as she advanced from the Kansas flatlands into eastern Colorado, the familiar view forced her to stop and catch her breath. 

"There, poking out of the flat plains, was my long-lost Colorado," she wrote. "Her mountain peaks jabbing at the sky all across the West, jagged and layered, serene and powerful, sky as blue as I remember." 

Denver lay to the north, "popping out of the Front Range like a jack-in-the-box," the city she hopes to call her new home when she resumes a more normal life -- more normal, anyway, than strolling through Malaysia, France or Wisconsin with a pushcart packed with pepper spray and brochures on breast cancer. 

Letofsky expects to walk the last of more than 14,000 miles Friday with scores of family members and old friends -- some of whom still live in Minnesota -- and a host of breast-cancer survivors who have drawn on her spirit and shared theirs with her. 

"We'll whoop it up at Billy's Bar and Grill," she said. 

Was it worth it? 

"A thousand times over," Letofsky said, speaking by cell phone from a mountain pass outside Vail. 

"Even the bad times, now that I've survived them, I can look back and laugh about them," she said. "And in five years, I never once thought about quitting. I thought when I started that it might come to that, so I wrote myself a letter explaining why I couldn't. I never had to look at it." 

Money is still coming in, but she believes she raised about $200,000 (in eight currencies) for breast-cancer research and awareness programs. The loss of a close friend to breast cancer helped her decide to dedicate her walk to fighting and preventing the disease. 

"I wish it was more, but I don't know if I could have done more," she said. 

"And the awareness work -- it was full-on in some places. In New Zealand, the government put out a toll-free number for women to call about a subsidy program for mammograms. In Singapore, a breast cancer foundation had just opened, so it was perfect timing for me to be there."

 The $2,500 she raised in Thailand was enough to start a breast-cancer department at a regional hospital. In Singapore, Malaysia, Turkey and Ireland, Lions clubs have formed permanent relationships with women's groups. 

An idea took hold 

As a girl growing up in Minneapolis, Letofsky was captivated by newspaper accounts of the four-year world walk by David Kunst of Waseca, Minn., in the mid-1970s. 

"The idea really took hold in my brain," she said. "As I got older, it never went away." 

She left the Twin Cities in 1983 and worked in a variety of places, in a variety of fields: radio, advertising, the travel industry, hotel sales. The world always beckoned. 

She is a slight woman, 5 feet, 2 inches and 100 pounds, but she was fit when she started her walk -- a veteran mountain biker and swimmer -- and she is fitter now after hiking across four continents. 

"There's certainly more confidence," she said, doing a self-assessment as she strode along a Rocky Mountain highway, dodging trucks. "I assumed I'd get the naiveté kicked right out of me, but I'm still naive. It's a part of me, like a wart."

She has become "a voracious reader" and gained a new interest in history and current affairs. "Politically, I've evolved," she said. "You can't walk around the world as I have, dealing with local leaders, sitting at dinner with them, with farmers and nurses, listening to how some programs work here but not there -- and not be affected." 

The hardest part was walking through India, where Letofsky, who is proudly single, was plagued by men offended or intrigued that she walked alone. The saddest and loneliest time, which surprised and disappointed her, was crossing Europe during the buildup to the Iraq war and "getting lambasted left and right for being an American." 

That probably added to the joy of her homecoming. 

"I absolutely skipped and whistled across the USA," she said. "I felt this warmth around me and I fell in love with my country." 

She was giddy, too, about returning to her native Minnesota in summer 2003, crossing the Bong Bridge from Superior, Wis., into Duluth with Nancy Young, a woman in the fifth year of a struggle with cancer. "She's a gift to our cause," Young told the Duluth newspaper. 

In Bemidji, a therapist donated a massage to the local cancer survivors group in Letofsky's honor. They insisted Letofsky take it. In Detroit Lakes, the Lions donated $1,000 in her name to the Roger Maris Cancer Fund in Fargo, N.D., and the Elk River Lions treated Letofsky to dinner at Broadway Pizza, which donated $3 from every large pizza sold that day to breast cancer work. The Lions threw in $1,000. 

Good health 

In five years, Letofsky never lost a day of walking because of sickness, though she took occasional extended breaks to rest. On the advice of the U.S. State Department, she bypassed Afghanistan and Iraq, and Myanmar denied her a visa. Elsewhere she had to dodge floods, endure hail and skirt forest fires. 

She was in Malaysia on Sept. 11, 2001, unaware of what had happened back in the United States until a tearful woman broke the news and showed her pictures in a newspaper. On a palm oil plantation, a Muslim family opened its home later that day and left Letofsky to CNN and her lonely grief. 

There were many lighter moments. Letofsky learned that movie popcorn comes sprinkled with sugar in Malaysia, butterscotch powder in India. She accepted 15 Bibles but turned down six marriage proposals; three times she had to call police to thwart overly zealous suitors.

 An elderly New Zealand woman who recognized her from news reports smiled and flashed her to show the scars of her personal fight with cancer.

 Letofsky was adopted and befriended by Lions in Australia (starting an international sponsorship that eased her way in many countries) and by members of the Rice Lake (Wis.) Curling Club. 

Most of the way, she pushed a jogger's cart stuffed with survival gear: water, maps, ibuprofen, pepper spray, a camera, a cell phone, apples, Aretha Franklin CDs and a laptop computer. Over time, dozens of names were scrawled on the cart's canvas -- names faded now by time and exposure, each representing a woman with breast cancer who joined Letofsky to walk a mile or two or who signed her cart from a hospital bed. Thus, Stella from Ireland traversed the world, too. So did Katey from New Zealand. 

Letofsky, who kept an online journal throughout her walk around the world (www.globalwalk.org), said she hopes to put her experiences into a book. She also needs to find work, having used her savings and borrowed money to supplement the support of three dozen sponsors.

 "A couple of nights ago, I woke up with a little anxiety: 'I'm going to be homeless! I'm going to be living in the gutter with hoboes!' But I want to nose around for the first month or so and see what gets me excited. 

"It's time for this to end," she said as she walked, chipping away at the last few miles. "But that doesn't mean I won't be going through the grief of it ending. There will be all the emotion of my family and friends coming in for the ending, but it's not just the wrapping up of a lifelong dream. It really took on a life of its own." 

Chuck Haga is at crhaga@startribune.com.

Go back to