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For all the high pressure situations Brad Hauter faced as a pro soccer goalkeeper, nothing quite prepared him for careening down the side of a mountain on a rattling, out-of-control riding lawn mower. “I was quickly approaching a sign that we hadn’t seen at the top saying, ‘WARNING: 25MPH TURN,’” Hauter tells me. “I was nearing 60 miles per hour on a vehicle that normally topped out at — and therefore only had the brakes to handle — eight miles per hour. That’s when I realized there weren’t any guardrails.”
The 33-year-old had been driving eight to 10 hours a day for roughly 46 days straight through alleys, parks, yards, backroads and highways. He’d started in Atlanta, Georgia, and had now made it to Blanding, Utah. He was so close to his final destination — the end of a pier in Santa Monica, California — which would culminate in a Guinness World Record-clinching 4,000-mile continuous lawn mower ride. And so, he wasn’t about to let his trusty travel companion go and throw it all away. “But by this time I’m up on two wheels and leaning the other direction. Then it was just… there’s no way, it’s going to flip,” he tells me. “So I jump off, hit the pavement, break my arm and watch the mower go over the edge.”
Had anyone else been driving their lawn mower through the mountains that day, they might’ve called it quits. But not Hauter. In fact, having to be helicopter-ed to New Mexico for emergency surgery only made him more determined to finish the journey that began with a forwarded promotional email from a coworker at St. Mary’s University in Winona, Minnesota. The lawn-care company MTD Products Inc. was looking for someone to ride their Yard-Man riding mower across the country. It was an event they were calling “Mow Across America,” and the act of pure American grit would hopefully raise funds for the Keep America Beautiful organization.
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