Dennis Godby walked into Seattle's Pier 62 last month and finished something that took him five years, five separate trips and one open-heart surgery to complete. The 70-year-old naturopathic doctor from West Sacramento had just closed out a roughly 3,450-mile trek across the United States, broken into stages so he could keep treating patients and stay close to his wife of nearly 40 years back home.
Godby finished the walk on September 24 at Pier 62 alongside Rich Saalsaa, who joined him for the final leg, according to the Sacramento Bee. About 20 people walked the final few miles with them, and Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson declared that day Health Equity Day. The final leg covered 760 miles from Bozeman to Seattle.
Five Summers, One Long Walk
Godby split the journey into five sections starting in 2022, limiting each absence to about five weeks at a time so he could remain near his patients and his wife, Wilma, the Bee reports. According to abridged.org, Godby spent roughly a month each summer on portions of the journey. The first four legs ran from Myrtle Beach to Knoxville in 2022, Knoxville to Milwaukee in 2023, Milwaukee to Fargo in 2024 and Fargo to Bozeman in 2025, per Walk USA for Health Equity's own account of the project.
The toll on his body was serious. Godby had open-heart surgery after completing the first three legs, dealing with severe mitral valve regurgitation that he said could eventually have led to congestive heart failure, the Bee reports. Wilma Godby told the paper she is proud of her husband and admires his heart and his desire to make change — a comment that reads differently once you know what he was walking through physically to finish the trip.
What the Walk Was For
The whole effort was built around health equity — the idea, as Godby put it to the Bee, that a person's wellness shouldn't be tied to their skin color or ZIP code. Philomath News described the campaign as an effort to draw attention to how factors like ZIP code, income, education and access to care shape a person's health. The Wisconsin Naturopathic Doctors Association's coverage of the walk also noted it touched on rural poverty, the general inaccessibility of health care services and racial inequities.
Saalsaa, who joined Godby for that last leg, wore out three pairs of shoes and lost a big toenail along the way, the Bee reports. He also lost 150 pounds training for the journey beforehand. Saalsaa is 68 and lives in Philomath, Oregon.
A Third Cross-Country Trip, Decades in the Making
This wasn't Godby's first time crossing the country on foot. In 1978, as an Oregon State exercise physiology student who grew up in Sacramento, he set out to run from Corvallis, Oregon, toward Calgary — about 1,420 miles — and stopped 130 miles short after injuring his Achilles tendon, per the Bee's reporting. That run took around 40 days, during which Godby slept in strangers' homes, a horse barn and nine Catholic church rectories while relying on food and lodging offered along the way. He also had a close encounter with a bear, suffered hypothermia and ended up in a ditch after jumping out of the way of a passing car. The 1978 trip cost him close to $1,000, which the Bee notes is roughly $5,000 in today's dollars, and Runner's World published his account of it in 1981.
Godby crossed the country again in the mid-1980s, running from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. between December 1984 and March 1985 to raise awareness about violence in Central America, timing his finish to attend a rally at Lafayette Park marking five years since Archbishop Oscar Romero's assassination. In 2011 he did it a third time, running from San Francisco to Bridgeport, Connecticut, with his two sons and a nephew to promote naturopathic medicine, running alongside his son Isaiah for that stretch.
The Next Generation Keeps Running
The family's long-distance habit didn't stop with Godby. His sons Isaiah and Jeremiah ran across the country together with their father and a cousin in 2011, and the following year each ran a different direction solo — Isaiah north from the Mexican border, Jeremiah south from the Canadian border — meeting in Davis and running the Yolo Causeway together into Sacramento, pushing their gear in strollers along the way, according to the Bee. In 2014 the brothers logged about 1,675 miles running through 30 of Oregon's 36 counties, and after the 2018 Parkland high school shooting that killed 17 people, they ran and biked from Parkland, Florida, to Washington, D.C. Isaiah now serves as clinic manager at his father's practice, and told the Bee his father is extraordinary in his heart, though not perfect. Jeremiah is now in medical school.
Godby isn't the only one whose story inspired others. Ken Arnett, now 80, told the Bee he was moved by Godby's account to run 500 miles in 19 days back in 1983, from near Peoria, Illinois, to Iron Point in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, partly to raise money for the American Heart Association, since his own son had undergone open-heart surgery as an infant. Arnett's wife, Barb, said she supported the run despite initial reservations and met him at the finish with their children and her parents. Runner Dave McGillivray, who ran across the country in 1978 to raise money to fight childhood cancer, has estimated he's inspired roughly 30 people to attempt the same feat, the Bee reports.
As for Godby, he told the Bee he feels like he could start walking from Seattle back to Sacramento right now if he had to. He's not planning another full cross-country trip, but he is eyeing something shorter: a roughly 74-mile walk around Lake Tahoe next year. Whatever comes next, Godby said his long-distance trips have always been about promoting something bigger than the miles themselves.
