Ultramarathon runner picks up cross-country journey in Ohio, five years after near-death collision

Nick Ashill had been running across the United States for 81 days, starting before dawn in May of 2017 at the Pacific Ocean, at a pier near Los Angeles.

Just a few states away from his goal of reaching the sands of Coney Island, New York, a pickup truck veered to the side of the road and hit Ashill, who leapt over a guardrail in an attempt to save his life. The truck driver never stopped, leaving Ashill in a ditch on a rural highway outside of Columbus, Ohio.

He could see bones jutting out of his left leg that had propelled him over 2,000 miles. He could see the wide sky above as car after car sped by, no one noticing him.

When a rescue crew found him nearly an hour later, he was taken by helicopter to The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center where he would begin an even longer journey than the cross-country trek he set out to accomplish.

Over five years, he would relearn to stand, then walk, then run, without falling. A doctor had cautioned him he might never run again, but try telling that to a man who set out to run across America and had come close to finishing.

Ashill believed he would complete the run. The accident on Aug. 2, 2017, his many injuries and surgeries — a shattered pelvis, multiple fractures in his legs, bone fragments and the threat of possibly having to amputate his left leg — all of that was just part of what he viewed as a temporary delay.

“I had a completely false sense of reality,” Ashill says.

He figured he’d be in a hospital a few weeks, maybe a month, and then could restart the run across America.

“At the time, that was the headspace I was in,” he says. “Even though I had this huge will, a yearning to go back and finish it, my body wasn’t ready.”

Five years later, it was. On June 12, 2022, he dipped his blistered feet into the cool Atlantic Ocean at Coney Island, the feet that had carried him through 19 days of running 607 miles. He had just reached the end of his run across America.

“I knew deep down for a long time that I was a very stubborn guy,” Ashill says.

It was that stubbornness that led him to restart the run across America a few weeks ago giving himself a chance to finally finish. During the last portion of the journey — across Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York — he, at times, doubted he would reach the end. There were days his body overheated, and other days when it was just climb, climb, climb through the Pennsylvania mountains.

“It’s taken a couple of days to really sink in that it has really finished,” he says.

On Memorial Day, 2022, Ashill had stepped back on his running path right where he left off nearly five years earlier, by the ditch on U.S. Route 40 in Madison County, about 30 miles west of Columbus. He made a brief stop at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, where a cheering crowd of doctors, nurses, physical therapists and other staff greeted their former patient, in amazement. It was overwhelming for Ashill, 57, to see everyone all at once, each of them so important to his recovery.

“It’s been a huge awakening for me,” Ashill says. “I want to thank everybody who has helped me get there. As human beings, we forget about the importance of kindness and that kindness is there every single day.”

One foot in front of the other

An ultramarathon runner originally from Wales in the United Kingdom, Ashill was living in the United Arab Emirates and working as a professor of marketing when he began the trek across America. The UAE, being so much smaller than the United States, wouldn’t have been enough of a challenge to run across. Plus, Ashill had always been fascinated with Route 66, but rather than drive it, why not run it? And while he ran, he wanted to raise money and awareness for pulmonary fibrosis, the incurable lung disease that claimed his mother two years earlier.

But then came the accident that abruptly ended his run. For the first five months after, Ashill had a series of surgeries at the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center, and in that time he had to learn to walk again.

“There were so many injuries and so much work to do, it was a process,” says JD Johnston, DPT, a physical therapist who began working with Ashill within days of the accident.

After two months, Ashill reached a milestone: He could stand up. The next goal was walking. Ashill walked first by holding parallel bars, then with a walker, then crutches, then with a cane, then nothing but his arms and newly reconstructed legs. It took about three months for him to get to that point.

“I think the pace of his progress was the biggest challenge and having patience through that process,” Dr. Johnston says. “But the overarching positivity he had is part of the reason he’s been so successful.” In late December 2017, five months after the accident, Ashill was able to fly home. He returned in 2018 to the Ohio State Wexner Medical Center and then again in 2019 for additional surgeries.

“I’m amazed he’s not in a wheelchair,” says Roman Skoracki, MD, a clinical professor of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in the Ohio State College of Medicine who performed three of the 11 reconstructive surgeries Ashill had while at Ohio State. “The fact that he’s alive is a complete miracle.”