Harold had ascended through Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, and carried on through Kansas, Colorado, the Dakotas, and Montana, so that now he finds himself traversing Canada: 108,007 kilometers and counting. He is a news item now. Any prospective interviewer has to run with him, because when he stops at night to rest he refuses all questions, insists on being left alone. Speculation abounds as to when he will stop, and various associations squabble over him: sportswriters claim him as the most important ultra-marathon runner in the history of the sport; artists say his practice has nothing to do with sport but is rather the most brilliant renewal of the possibilities of Land Art; ecologists say both are wrong, since he neither aims to break any records nor makes any graphical record of his run—they call it a hymn to zero-emissions transport; Al Qaeda’s ecological arm, for its part, claims to be Harold’s legitimate global representative and is trying to buy his image rights, pointing to the way he has opted out of Western technophilia, how he travels only with what he has on, and that, above all, his frenetic running is clearly borne out of a desire to get away from the great Evil that is the USA. Now, after 3 years of running 40 kilometers a day, he has arrived in Alaska, and soon he will have no choice but to turn around and head south again. From the window of a following TV car he is asked by a local reporter to explain his run, to which he says, I went to pieces after getting divorced, left my job as a doctor, moved to Miami. A few days after I got myself set up, I went to the supermarket and bought a box of cornflakes, the classic kind, and when I got home I saw that the sell-by date was my ex-wife’s birthday. I went back to the supermarket and asked them to bring me all the boxes of cornflakes they had with this sell-by date. They came to the house the next day with half a truckload. I stacked them up in my garage, deciding I was going to have to eat my way through the whole lot before I could dispel my wife’s ghost. If I ate all the boxes that expired on the day of her birth—it was as though only by finishing them could I consider the relationship over—that was the only way I was going to dispel both the melancholy and my attachment to her. Every time I munched those little toasted flakes of corn I was obliterating a caress, a gesture, a fight, everything; acts that in another time would have strengthened the bonds between us. And at the same time I started playing a tennis videogame nonstop, while eating bowls of the cornflakes, until one day, after 3 and a half years, I had finished all the boxes. That was the day I knew I was free.