News Detail
02/09/2021
Some years ago, Cole Crosby M ’15 traveled to Cortland from Oklahoma with his future wife, Ashlee Prewitt-Crosby ’14, a love or running and a desire to help others.
At SUNY Cortland, Crosby volunteered to help Coach Steve Patrick coach cross-country and track.
Meanwhile, Prewitt-Crosby, as president of SUNY Cortland’s Non-Traditional Student Organization (NTSO), organized Cortland’s first Big Event, which brought hundreds of students out for the Cortland Downtown Partnership’s annual community clean-up. The Big Event continues annually, most recently organized by the Student Government Association club called Actively Involved in the Community.
This January, the community-service-minded couple successfully conquered something new. New Jersey, to be exact.
Crosby, an ultra-marathoner living in South Brunswick, New Jersey, ran the almost 200-mile length of his state during one weekend, with Prewitt-Crosby following her husband in their Honda CRV and friends serving as his support crew. He ran from High Point Monument to Cape May and finished the 197-mile run in 44 hours, 42 minutes and 21 seconds, a pace of 13 minutes and 36 seconds per mile.
To their astonishment, the successful run raised $7,000 for the Road Runners Club of America (RRCA), the oldest and largest national association of runners and running organizations dedicated to growing the sport of running.
“The club had really suffered in all the COVID-19 fallout,” Prewitt-Crosby said. “Their program, all road races, got cancelled. Cole was going to run the state of N.J. no matter what, but if we could pick up something anyway for another group, we would. So, we’re really happy it turned out as well as it did.”
“All of it was a surreal experience,” said Crosby, who began by selling race-logoed winter hats to family, friends and clients through the Roxitius Country Club in Mendham, New Jersey. As the club’s golf shop manager, he handles buying, merchandizing and overall sales and profitability. Always interested in the retail side of outdoor fun, he had earned a master’s degree in recreation administration at SUNY Cortland.
“I know how hard it is to do fundraising and get everyone on board but also how rewarding it is to give back to the community,” Crosby added.
“He loves running and that’s a big part of his life but if he can use that for good, I really support that,” Prewitt-Crosby said.
“We were just doing this to make friends,” said Crosby. “I never expected to see the overabundance of support. People went about things in the right way and it was just really cool.”
After they had collected donations in exchange for the memorabilia, a country club member astonished them with a check for $1,000, bringing them in at a little over $2,000.
“That was really special because we weren’t expecting that,” Prewitt-Crosby said. Once the couple’s Go Fund Me page was started, more gifts also rolled in from friends as well as people they had never met.
“Originally, with these big runs, I was wanting to have more and more to do with philanthropy,” Crosby said. “Ashlee with her work with the Big Event (at SUNY Cortland) and her background, that kind of interest has really rubbed off on me.”
At the University of Oklahoma, the Big Event had been a regular feature. The couple came to Cortland so Cole could pursue his master’s degree in recreation administration. Ashlee had transferred into Tompkins Cortland Community College (TC3) and then to SUNY Cortland, where she received a bachelor’s degree in political science.
“Sports is an identity for people and brings people together in ways you can’t imagine,” said Prewitt-Crosby, who since 2019 has worked as a grants/finance manager at Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. She is pursuing a master’s degree in accounting at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“That’s what I really got out of this experience,” said Prewitt-Crosby, an admitted non-serious runner. “Everyone who ran and didn’t run, everyone felt they had something to offer. It wasn’t Cole’s race. It was New Jersey’s race, and a race for all those people along the way.”
Having never previously run more than 90 miles consecutively, it was by far the longest race of Crosby’s lifetime. He reached his lighthouse destination just after 10:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 10, completing a 197-mile journey from the outer reaches of Sussex County. Crosby began his journey from the High Point Monument at 1:58 a.m. Saturday and reached the lighthouse just after 10:30 p.m. Sunday, about 4.5 hours later than he had expected.
It’s not an official race route, so Crosby isn’t aware if anyone has beat his time and only knows one person who’s tried it before.
“I slept two hours and Cole slept one hour 20 minutes in the whole race,” Prewitt-Crosby said. “That was one of the challenges. I’ve never been more sleep-deprived in my whole entire life.”
Crosby likes to energize himself as he runs: with olives, Gummi Bears and avocado slices.
But the last thing he expected to see was those unusual treats held out to him along the route by complete strangers.
As he pounded the pavement, an intermittent string of well-wishers — who apparently had visited his race Go Fund Me page dedicated to help youth runners — yelled encouragement from impromptu refreshment stands that also featured pizza and Dr. Pepper, his race support team’s favorites. Some of Crosby’s fans even laced up and accompanied him for a few miles. His race experience was anything but lonely.
“We got into a kind of Forrest Gump situation, where he was running and people were just showing up all along the course to run with him or give me food for him,” Prewitt-Crosby said. “Most of them we didn’t know, except for the people at the finish line.”
Seeing him off was at the start was Crosby’s old friend, triathlete Thomas Eickelberg M ’15 of New Paltz, N.Y.
“I said, ‘Oh, my god, I can’t believe he showed up,’” Crosby said.
“In a couple miles, some vans showed up full of people, and three of them jumped out and ran down the road with Cole for a couple of miles,” added Prewitt-Crosby. “There were people popping up all along the way. In the middle of the run, we had people actually setting up refreshment stations for us. They were serving us things like pizza.”
“I told them, ‘If you want to help, here are things me and my crew really like, Dr. Pepper and Cinnabon rolls,’” Crosby explained. “People really took it the whole way and brought us our favorite things. They brought all of them, especially jars of olives and Gummi Bears.”
The couple had met at the University of Oklahoma, where Prewitt-Crosby began her baccalaureate studies and met her future husband.
“I’m from Oklahoma,” Prewitt-Crosby said. “Cole was the crazy guy from New Jersey who moved to Oklahoma to go to a university.”
“The rest is history,” Crosby said.
In 2010, they tied the knot at Thunderbird Chapel, near the beautiful Thunder Lake where the couple had hung out to stargaze countless times and Crosby had racked up more than 1,000 miles on its huge network of trails.
“It’s always running,” Prewitt-Crosby said. “Our whole life revolves around Cole running.”
Only now Crosby’s running for charity.