Fact check
We live in a funny old world of fake news. So rather than ask you to take our word for it, here’s our working.
Every story we publish is true — but a good one isn’t only facts. There’s the occasional fair inference, and a little colour in the telling. Below, we’ve gone through A Man & His Dog Walk The World line by line: what we know, where it came from, and the few places we’ve read between the lines.
Primary sources
Wild Ideas Worth Living (REI) — Tom Turcich with Shelby StangerThe World Walk — Tom Turcich’s memoirTom Turcich’s own site and photographyCincinnati MagazineCNNThe GuardianMy Modern MetThe Philadelphia InquirerList of pedestrian circumnavigators
Sourced facts
- Tom Turcich left home in Haddon Township, New Jersey on 2 April 2015, the day before his twenty-sixth birthday, and walked back up his parents’ driveway on 21 May 2022.
- He crossed six continents and thirty-eight countries, and is the tenth person on record to walk around the world. Savannah is the first dog to have done it.
- His friend Ann Marie Lynch died at sixteen in a jet-ski accident off the New Jersey shore in the summer of 2006. A second friend, Shannon, died soon afterwards in a car accident.The Philadelphia InquirerMy Modern MetCNN
- A teacher played the “seize the day” scene from Dead Poets Society in a speech class, and Turcich announced his intention to walk around the world aloud in that same class, in his final year of school.Cincinnati MagazineMy Modern Met
- Eight years passed between the promise and the first step: college, student loans, living at his parents’ house, saving, planning routes and visas, and ending a four-year relationship.
- He did almost no specific training — a stair-stepper and a handful of weekend hikes — and set out carrying a camp table, two folding chairs and a Spanish translation of Harry Potter.Cincinnati MagazineWild Ideas Worth Living
- He walked roughly twenty to twenty-four miles on a walking day and went through forty-five pairs of shoes across the seven years.Wild Ideas Worth LivingCincinnati Magazine
- He adopted Savannah as a puppy from a shelter in Austin, Texas, a few months into the walk.Wild Ideas Worth LivingCincinnati Magazine
- A bacterial infection picked up in Argentina or Uruguay went undiagnosed for the best part of a year. His weight fell from about 165 pounds to 118 on a six-foot-two frame before a doctor in London found the antibiotic that worked, and he spent around seven months at home recovering before returning to the exact place he had stopped.Wild Ideas Worth LivingCincinnati Magazine
- Crossing from Ecuador into Peru is the moment he cites for the conclusion that “people are small” — that a life is shaped more by where it begins than by force of will.
- Ann Marie’s parents were among the crowd waiting for him on the street when he finished.My Modern MetCincinnati Magazine
- The elation held for roughly three months, after which he experienced the first serious depression of his life.CNN
- Savannah died in May 2024, almost two years to the day after they finished, of kidney failure, and spent her last hours lying on his chest.CNNThe Philadelphia Inquirer
Reading between the lines
- “Trying to practise being dead” — the pillow, the fingers in the ears, the mind that would not go quiet. The habit is his own account; the way we render what it felt like from the inside is our writing.Inference
- “Somewhere along the way the word adventure got handed to the ice-climbers and the ultra-runners” — that is our argument, not his, and it belongs to the editor rather than to the reporting.Framing
- The piece closes by setting his depression after the finish against the seventeen-year-old lying in the dark. He has described both; drawing the line between them is our reading of the shape of his story.Our reading
Where sources differed
- Accounts of the total distance vary. His book and Cincinnati Magazine put it close to 28,000 miles; the 2022 podcast interview and several newspaper pieces say over 25,000. We used the higher figure, which comes from his own book.
- His friend’s name is spelled both “Ann Marie” and “Annemarie” across published accounts. We used Ann Marie, the spelling that appears most consistently in the reporting closest to her family.
A note on quotes
Every line in quotation marks is taken word for word from Tom Turcich — either from his own writing and photo captions, or from his conversation with Shelby Stanger on Wild Ideas Worth Living — lightly trimmed without changing its meaning.