After equipping an old electrician’s van in 2018 and recruiting a team that included Northern Kentucky’s Road ID and Harris Media, Ultrarunner Harvey Lewis attempted to run the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail faster than anyone in history.
Though the documentary “Like Harvey Like Son” highlights Lewis’s time running the trail from Georgia to Maine, the story centers on Lewis’s dynamic with his crew chief—his 78-year-old father, “Jr.” throughout the six-week trek.
“I thought to myself, ‘Who can I kidnap to help me out with this journey?'” Lewis said. “And my dad, I thought he might come out for a couple of weeks because it is a pretty grueling experience being out there, but he was very committed to coming to the whole journey.”
Lewis is known for his adventurous achievements, like winning the Badwater Ultramarathon in 2014, near Death Valley, California. It is known as the world’s toughest foot race due to extremely hot temperatures and elevation changes throughout the course.
Lewis said his father’s adventurous spirit and growing up with him in the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania, hiking, canoeing, and fishing, has led to his love of the outdoors and his desire to experience places like the Appalachian Trail.
Director Rudy Harris, founder of Harris Media Co. in Newport, said the original intent was to go out on the Appalachian trail and make some content.
“We had no idea what we were getting into,” Harris said.
On the first day of filming, Harris said Lewis had just run 60 to 70 miles through a tropical storm. Lewis sat by the van with his father and started talking about life. The moment is captured on the film’s movie poster.
“It was like archaeology,” Harris said. “I was digging up the story, hearing from Jr. mostly because we were waiting for Harvey often. Waiting for him to get to these points on the trail. And so, I learned their history.”
Creative Director for Road ID in Covington, Mike Trimpe, worked as a producer on the documentary and said that once they started following Lewis to create a documentary, they had to work through the logistics of filming on the Appalachian Trail.
“It was crazy, and sometimes it didn’t work,” Trimpe said.
He said they heavily relied on GPS because they often didn’t have cell service. He said they would wait for Lewis on roads across from the trail or pull off and hike a couple of miles until they got to an exciting vantage point.
Trimpe said he spent a lot of time with Lewis’s father in the van, mapping relevant trails so Lewis could get to them to change clothes or eat.
He said it became remote and more challenging to follow on a map once they got into Maine.
“A lot of the roads up there, on Google Maps, you’ll say, ‘Oh hey, here’s a road,’ but when you get there, it’s not really a road; it’s a bridge that crumbled into a river or a road full of rocks that you couldn’t even drive on with an ATV,” Trimpe said.
Lewis said that at the beginning of the journey, he averaged over 50 miles a day, but as he got into parts of Vermont and New Hampshire with harsher climates, his average was 43 miles per day.
“We were covering like the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest every three days,” Lewis said.
He also experienced injuries along the trail he said he was not historically used to. After day 10, he had his first injury. He recalls feeling incredibly “beat up” before hitting the trail’s midpoint.
“I remember being like, ‘Oh man, I don’t know if I can finish this race or this journey,'” Lewis said. “I also thought to myself, ‘Man, it’ll be a lot easier if I just disappeared.'”
He said he had so many people psyched up about him trying to beat the record, and he didn’t want to disappoint anyone.
“My dad absolutely was part of the positive energy,” Lewis said. “Having him there just being encouraging was giant.”
Trimpe said there were moments throughout the trail when they would expect Lewis to show up at 10 p.m., but he would get to the checkpoint at 3 a.m., and Jr. would have a wave of relief wash over his face each time.
Every time someone checked in with Lewis and Jr., Harris said they had both grown a little bit. Though Jr. acted as Lewis’s crew chief, Harris said their dynamic remained one of a father-son relationship.
“I think that no matter what feat, or what tropical storm, or what mountain they are climbing over, I think that it is almost impossible to not still be that father and son,” Harris said. “So, there were still moments of Harvey in the film and outside of the film, just ‘dad come on,’ you know, that embarrassment of ‘my dad said this,’ and then the dad rolls his eyes. It was a father-son thing the whole time.”
Lewis said he wasn’t sure his dad even knew they would be filming a documentary at first, but throughout the whole journey, he never heard his dad say one negative word.
“The thing Mike and I realized early on, on that first night, is there is a bigger story going on than just this incredible feat,” Harris said. “We realize that this had transcended a little bit beyond just the physicality of the trail, that it’s more of a story about family.”
When Lewis was growing up, his parents were divorced, and they would spend months apart. Today, Lewis lives in Cincinnati, and his dad lives in Minnesota. He said they might spend a long weekend or week together, but certainly not the 50 days they spent on the Appalachian Trail together.
“This was a very big coming back together kind of story,” Harris said. “So once that happened, we realized there’s something bigger to this. The reason that someone should go see this, if you’re a son, if you’re a father, if you’re a parent, you can totally understand.”
The film “Like Harvey Like Son” is now available on Amazon Prime.
Editor’s note: Mike Trimpe’s wife, Nicole, is a member of LINK’s sales team.
