The World’s Unlikeliest Record-Breaker

Three years ago he was a cigar-smoking alcoholic with out-of-control diabetes who had never jogged a mile in his life. This fall, Doug Masiuk ran across the United States.

Photos by Rebecca Stumpf

He passed out in the grocery store. The clerk found him on his back, as if he’d slid right down the wall, his feet beneath him on the yellow floor. He was slumped against the rows of sodas, his eyes open wide. A customer spotted him first, stopping her cart mid-aisle and running to alert the checkout clerk.

When the ambulance arrived, the emergency medical technician was able to make out a few garbled words between his violent twitches. Doug Masiuk, thirty-three, was in diabetic shock, and the only way to keep him alive was to get sugar into his bloodstream as fast as possible. The technician saw the packets of needles in Masiuk’s pockets and recognized that he was diabetic. He reached for a package of cookies on the shelf, unwrapping them and holding them up to Masiuk’s mouth. Masiuk chewed them one by one, crumbs tumbling down his oxford shirt and tie.

This time, he would live. The emergency medical technician helped revive him, and as the sugar coursed through…