 What’s the deal with the black & white saddle shoes?  Click here for the story of our farm in Greene County, Iowa. Here's looking at life at Simple Serenity Farm  Carla’s sister & brother-in-law Chris and Tony Woods, of Des Moines, were at the farm on Sunday, August 22, helping Carla do the lawn mowing and other yard work that we’ve struggled to keep up with lately, with all our medical appointments. The Woodses brought along their 18-month-old granddaughter Ari, who was a delight watching all the action from the porch with Chuck, catching up on her reading and then getting a moment on the lawn tractor seat! Click here for larger format Earlier photos in this series Iowa Hall of Pride netINS, Inc. Butler House on Grand B&B Sam's Barber Shop Douglas T. Bates III, Attorney KMA Radio's ''Chuck & Don Show'' Barack Obama story & coloring book The Monks of New Melleray Abbey RELATED LINKS About Offenburger.com Biographies Want to Reprint? Want Updates? ARCHIVES Chuck Offenburger's columns Christie Vilsack's columns Carla Offenburger's columns Carla's book reviews Jared Strong's columns Guest Columns The Simple Serenity Farm columns Farm Photos, 2006 - 2008 Our Iowa News Digest Along Our Way 
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 Iowa’s adventurer & ambassador Charlie Wittmack is ready to start a whopper of a challenge! By CHUCK OFFENBURGER June 3, 2010 DES MOINES, IOWA UPDATE: On Tuesday, June 29, Charlie Wittmack was given an enthusiastic sendoff by about 150 people at the Iowa Hall of Pride in Des Moines. He flew out of Iowa that afternoon for London, where his World Triathlon will start on Thursday, July 1. You can get full background in the story that follows.  On July 1, Wittmack plans to walk into the Thames River in London and begin a 4-week, 240-mile swim east down the river, around part of the coast of Great Britain, then across the English Channel. In early August, from the beach in Calais, France, he will start a 3 ½-month, 11,248-mile bicycle ride that will have him crossing France, Belgium, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Russian, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, part of China, Tibet and into Nepal. On February 1, he will begin a 450-mile run through Nepal that will ultimately take him to a very familiar place, the base of Mount Everest. Next May, he will begin a climb of the 29,035-foot mountain, and he projects that the “weather window” will have him reaching the summit on May 25. He wants to be straight with us. “I guess I don’t think about this being fearful, but there is a lot of uncertainty, that’s for sure,” he told me. “The reality is that the odds are heavily against me completing this, when you think of all the things that could go wrong. But on the other hand, I’m the kind of guy who just never quits.” I am often asked about Charlie Wittmack. Why? Fifteen years ago this spring, he came into our living room as a red-headed, freckle-faced 18-year-old wearing sneakers, shorts and a T-shirt. We’d never met him before, but I knew his father Art was a construction company executive, his mother Dee was an artist and editor, and his grandfather Norman Erbe, of Boone, had been governor of Iowa in the early 1960s. We said we’d listen to Charlie make his case why my wife Carla and I should hire him as the mechanic for a summer-long trans-USA bicycle tour of more than 300 cyclists with some very high-end, expensive bikes. Our initial thought: It’d be a very risky hire. He explained that he had graduated at mid-year from Des Moines Roosevelt High School. He had just returned home from a 2 ½-month outdoor leadership school. He and four other students had been in the African country of Kenya for an immersion experience in environmental and cultural science. That included some rigorous physical adventures that tested his small, wiry frame. And yes, he knew some about fixing bicycles, after having worked part-time at Barr Bike & Fitness shop in Clive in recent years. It was clear young Wittmack had a full measure of enthusiasm, confidence and good humor. There was something else about the kid – hard to say what it really was – that made Carla and me believe he could get it done. We hired him. We had to reassure some chirping participants on our bike tour, who were persnickety about their bicycles, that young Wittmack – and we Offenburgers – knew what we were doing. Then away we all went on what turned into the 5,048-mile “Iowa 150 Bike Ride/A Sesquicentennial Expedition.” We were like Iowa ambassadors, inviting everybody we met across the nation to come visit our state the next year during the celebration of 150 years of statehood. Let me quote part of a story I wrote for the Des Moines Register from Arco, Idaho, early in that summer of 1995: “In his first two days working with us back in California, our chief bicycle mechanic, Charlie Wittmack, got an earring and took a dive from a 220-foot ‘Mega-Bungee’ tower over Long Beach Harbor. That quickly established the young Des Moines man as one of the genuine characters on our bike expedition. ‘I like to think of myself as a flaming intellectual,’ he said, and it’s of note here that he usually listens to classical music and public radio while he is working with us this summer. ‘But really, I’m probably just another freak of a bicycle mechanic.’ ”  He had planned to ride his bike on the tour in addition to service as mechanic, but we learned quickly he’d be too busy with repairs. So he traveled in a support van, making on-the-road repairs during the day, then setting up his “shop” in our campgrounds and working late into the night. Eventually he “cannibalized” his own bicycle for its parts, to help fix other bikes. But he missed being able to pedal around the overnight towns, so he had his 7-foot-tall unicycle shipped to him from Des Moines. He rode it around wearing his trademark broad-brimmed straw hat, sometimes juggling while he rode. All of us on the bike tour came to call him “Wrench” Wittmack, befitting a good mechanic, and he indeed was good enough to get us all across America. Later that summer, during a stop in Winchester, Kentucky, I wrote this about him: “Wittmack said the trip ‘has been really good for me emotionally. Some days out there have been so hard. But you learn how to overcome the obstacles.’ He said the experience has taught him ‘to be accepting of other people as they are and to love the differences. We’ve got a diverse group here, people from all over Iowa and from all over the nation and a couple of other countries.’ ” While we Offenburgers certainly didn’t give Wittmack his wanderlust, we probably contributed to it. “I’ve always thought Charlie must get some of this from my dad,” said Dee Wittmack, whose father was Governor Erbe. “Charlie is like Dad in being a nut for travel and loving to meet new people. And just like Dad, he walks up to someone, shakes hands, starts talking and 20 minutes later it’s like they’re friends for life.” After that summer of ’95, all of us who’d been on the bike tour cheered Wittmack through his undergraduate years at the University of Iowa. We were intrigued but not surprised when, during his student years, he took up mountain climbing and stared traveling the country to climb different peaks. It was then he began talking of pursuing a dream he’d had since boyhood – climbing Mount Everest.  Before Everest, though, as he was ending his undergraduate studies at the U of I, he was thinking he wanted to go to law school eventually. So to test that idea, he landed a job as a paralegal at a law firm in Washington, D.C., beginning in the summer of 2001. After graduation but before starting the job, he celebrated by “going to Yosemite National Park, climbing for four weeks and living in my car the whole time.” At the end of that adventure, he drove straight through to Washington, arriving just in time to book an apartment, “head to a Brooks Brothers store and buy a couple of suits” and report for work on a Monday morning there. On his first day at work, he met another paralegal, Cate Scharf, a native of Charlotte, N.C., and a recent graduate in English from Villanova University. “When I first met Catie, I was this well-tanned, physically-fit young guy looking like a potential lawyer in my Brooks Brothers suit,” Wittmack said. “She didn’t know until later that I’d been living in my car for four weeks.” They started dating, and the stories of the past Wittmack adventures started spilling out. “As we were getting more serious, we went to lunch one day on Capitol Hill,” he said. “I was telling her about some climb or trip, and she all of a sudden said, ‘You’re not going to keep doing these things, are you?’ I said, ‘Well, of course – that’s the purpose of my life!’ ” Luckily for Charlie, Catie got used to the idea, and even grew to like it. She’d had her own childhood dreams – one of them was someday being a writer for National Geographic magazine – and while she hasn’t landed that kind of job yet, she’s soon going to be living that kind life. They were dating through Wittmack’s Everest climb in 2003, got engaged soon afterward, Charlie started law school, and they married in August of 2004. He graduated in 2006 and joined the Davis Brown Law Firm in Des Moines. Charlie and Cate now have a son James, 27 months old. “James is the greatest kid you can imagine,” Charlie said. “He’s got so many interests, and lots of energy, and he gets into a lot of trouble. He drives his mom crazy, just like I do.”  Eight months after James was born, Cate was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, underwent treatment and is now cancer-free. That jolting news, rather than discouraging the Wittmacks about doing the global expedition, convinced them to make it happen as soon as possible – after their reminder that you never know what the future holds. “Building up to these adventures, I always stress out a lot more than Charlie does,” Cate said. “I worry about details – what if it doesn’t work this time? How are this and that going to happen? But I’ve also been with him long enough that I know it always works out and turns into great fun. So once the journey gets started, I love it and really enjoy the experiences.” The on-the-road team for much of the World Tri will include the three Wittmacks, writer Brian Triplett and filmmaker Andy Stoll, traveling in a 4-by-4 off-road Toyota pick-up. Triplett and Stoll are recent University of Iowa graduates who have been on round-the-world adventures themselves. Besides their reports during the expedition, they will be working on a follow-up book and movie. With help from Rotary International, the Wittmack team will spend most nights camping or in home-stays.
Charlie has booked different doctors to make road-calls on him along the way. His training regimen has been amazing. He has already started a year’s leave from the law firm so he could train full-time, which includes “running four to five hours a day, swimming, biking and eating like you can’t believe,” said Wittmack. “I’ve been trying to gain weight, but I’m working out so hard I’ll probably start the World Tri at my normal 148 pounds.” Nutritionist Jenny Weber had him on a diet of about 8,000 calories per day during the spring, and that will increase to 12,000 calories per day during the expedition. “It’s hard to eat that much,” Wittmack said. “It’s five full meals a day. I go to bed every night with a 12-ounce ribeye steak and four eggs.” Before his departure for London late this month, he will especially increase his swimming training. He was planning to spend a weekend in Chicago, spending eight to 10 hours each day swimming in Lake Michigan. In August, 2008, his attempt to swim in the English Channel ended after six hours and 15 miles when he was beginning to freeze in the cold waters. He said he’ll be in a wet suit this time, and will be better prepared, too. Wittmack said the 11,000-mile-plus bicycle ride “may be the toughest part of this whole thing. There are some very long days – up to about 140 miles – and it’s over a crazy mix of terrain through all kinds of weather conditions.” He will ride four different bicycles, all built for different kinds of surfaces and weather, all of them “Specialized” brand. The oddest of them is a “Pugsley” bike, which has 4-inch-wide tires like you might see on a motorcycle. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Wittmack’s World Triathlon is the way he’s connecting others to it. “I’ve quit looking at my expeditions as the adventures themselves,” he said. “I look at them as a tool to make global connections, to help bring together people from different parts of the world so we can learn from each other and understand each other better.” Des Moines University has committed to an associated “Global Health Program” in the country of Nepal, with 20 to 30 students, doctors and faculty members from Des Moines working there between December and June. Dr. Yogesh “Yogi” Shah, who directs global health initiative at the university, said the team – along with medical staff from two other international health agencies – will be launching and implementing a major public education program aimed at enhancing maternal health and birthing. “In the United States, we have eight women of 100,000 die in childbirth,” Dr. Shah said. “In Nepal, 800 women out of 100,000 die in childbirth. Charlie Wittmack’s idea to combine a health program with his athletic event is a great concept. With all the attention on his adventure, we will have the opportunity to reach thousands of Nepali teenagers, women and men with education that can facilitate safer pregnancies and better maternal health.” Meanwhile, thousands of Iowa school students will be following Wittmack all along his route, in Web-based programs that involve individual schools and the Iowa Hall of Pride in Des Moines. With continuous updates from writer Triplett and filmmaker Stoll, the students may even be involved in helping chart the Wittmacks’ travel routes and overnight stays – on the other side of the Earth! Wittmack said the expedition will be rich with learning opportunities in geography, culture, language, technology, engineering and math. About 40 people – including many from Iowa – have signed up for 18-day trips to Nepal next spring to be on the scene when Wittmack is making final preparations and then climbing Mount Everest. As you think about all this, you can imagine what a logistical nightmare it is to arrange such an expedition. Especially critical and difficult is the planning and coordination through China, Tibet and Nepal. That is being handled by Bikal Adhikari, a Nepali who coordinated Wittmack’s 2003 Everest trip and who subsequently moved with his family to become residents of Des Moines. “When I first came here in May 2005, one of the first things Charlie did was to take me to the Des Moines Farmers Market on a Saturday morning,” said Adhikari, who now works in information technology for Wellmark Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Iowa. “In the parking ramp that morning, Charlie said to me, ‘Bikal, we should do a world triathlon.’ I had no idea what he meant, so he quickly told me. I said, ‘Charlie, do people even do things like that?’ He said, ‘Well, nobody has done it yet, so we should.’ “He has always surprised me,” Adhikari continued. “I remember when I first saw him in Nepal, I was so surprised at how little he is. Most Everest climbers are big and strong. He seemed so little-little to me then. Now he seems little-big to me!”  So, how will Charlie Wittmack do on all this? Mike Hlas, the Cedar Rapids Gazette sports columnist asked me that recently, and after some thought, I told him that when Charlie reached the summit of Mount Everest in 2003, under the most difficult conditions, that should have banished any lingering doubts about what this young guy can accomplish. He’ll get it done. And maybe the best thing about Charlie is that “just getting it done” is never enough for him – he wants to share the whole experience with all of us, in real time and afterward, too. Iowans, especially, should not miss this. We should be following him every bit of his way – London to Everest. This isn’t just going to be an expedition for Charlie, it’s going to be an adventure for all of us – not only athletically but culturally, geographically, logistically and every other way. Godspeed to one of the most intriguing Iowa characters ever. You can write the columnist at chuck@Offenburger.com.
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