This Penn State student lost his fiancée. Now he’ll take on a 3,500-mile triathlon for her
The months after her death were the hardest.
Every time he turned a corner in his apartment, he expected her to be there. Every text he received, his heart would jump at seeing a name starting with “L” — until he’d realize a moment later it wasn’t his fiancée Lovisa. It never would be.
“It took me maybe a few months to actually realize what death meant,” Matthew Hollingham, 25, said on a recent afternoon in his State College apartment. “Like, you don’t think, ‘Oh, that’s it. Today it’s over. I will never see her again.’ You don’t think that. It takes so long for your brain to catch up.”
It’s now been more than two years since Lovisa Arnesson-Cronhamre’s death, more than 32 months after he began panicking when Lovisa was an hour late from a jog around Penn State’s campus. Some 139 weeks since he tracked her smartphone to the 200 block of East Park Avenue, where police cars swarmed and where he worried maybe she had broken an arm or injured her leg.
Lovisa, an international Penn State doctoral student just like Matthew, was the victim of a hit-and-run driver. She died six hours afterward at UPMC Altoona at the age of 25. The driver was later convicted and faced deportation.
What followed were months of mourning, weekly counseling sessions and daily battles with depression. Matthew could have returned home to Wheathampstead, England, but he stayed, buoyed by support from the community.
The strength to continue every day evolved into a resolve to make a difference. Existing wasn’t enough. The Ph.D. candidate who hiked Mount Nittany 49 times over 35 hours for charity wanted to push himself to his limit — maybe even past it. He wished to take part in an endurance event attention-grabbing enough to raise even more money for charities close to his and Lovisa’s heart.
After spending nights browsing different areas on Google Maps, the rock climber and Tough Mudder alum settled on the ultimate endurance route before taking it public. He would embark on a more than 3,500-mile triathlon from the Arctic Circle to Africa over 61 days without a single day off.
He would endure a 2.4-mile swim in the frigid Arctic, 970 miles of running and 2,580 miles of cycling. In other words, he would run the equivalent of 37 consecutive marathons and follow it up with a race longer than the Tour de France — documenting his efforts and raising a goal of $250,000 for nonprofits Save the Children and Centre County Youth Services.
His journey starts May 31. For Lovisa.
Crazy? Or insane?
Sitting in his cozy apartment off South Allen Street, surrounded by memories of Lovisa, Matthew swallowed a small laugh when asked about his friends’ and family’s initial reactions to his plan.
His mother expressed concern. But mostly, he said, he was half-jokingly told he was crazy or insane.
He doesn’t altogether disagree.
“This sounds really stupid,” he admitted.
But that’s part of the point. Charity runs or triathlons need to be extreme and sound unique to raise money, and Matthew understood that. He began his endurance race career at age 15 by approaching his secondary schoolteachers about Spartan Race, a well-known obstacle course race, and raising a few dollars at a time.
He eventually graduated to more challenging events. At the University of Glasgow in Scotland, where he met Lovisa, he jogged 450 miles in 17 days from Glasgow to London. Later, he earned $800 for charity by hiking the 73-mile length of Hadrian’s Wall — a historic structure that separates Scotland from England — in about 31 hours.
“When I did Hadrian’s Wall, everyone — even my parents — were just like, ‘This is crazy,’” Matthew recalled. “And [Lovisa] was the only one who would just very quietly and supportively say, ‘You can do this.’ She was obviously concerned, but she would never show that.
“You always felt, like, she’s really on my side. She really thinks I can do this deep down.”
Lovisa’s mother once called her “living sunshine.” Matthew said she brightened every room she walked into, always wearing a smile or working to make someone feel wanted. If the woman seeking a Ph.D. in physics found herself in the midst of solving a complex equation, she wouldn’t hesitate to drop everything to tend to a friend who stubbed a toe or faced some minor inconvenience.
She was sweet and kind, patient and determined — and the kind of person whom Matthew wanted to spend his forever with.
“If you spoke to her or met her, she would come across like, ‘Oh, she’s been picking flowers all day and she’s made a cake’ or something,” Matthew said, adding she would wake up early to power-lift twice her bodyweight. “You wouldn’t realize she woke up at 4 in the morning to do the most insane physical activity and then work like an absolute crazed person. She was so well put together and kind to everyone around her.”
She died Sept. 13, 2023. More than 100 people attended her vigil a day later.
Why do this?
Two small paintings hang in the narrow hallway of Matthew’s apartment, relics of a past date night. Lovisa’s depicts a warm, sun-drenched sky. It’s lovingly centered with a golden frame.
Beneath it, Matthew’s unframed painting depicts a gray, world-weary robot from animated sitcom “Rick and Morty” — a being built to pass butter, now wondering why it exists.
Matthew keeps several philosophy books stacked near his bed and has come back often to the idea that life does not hand out meaning like a rule book. He agrees with some of the existentialist authors he’s read: One must create their own meaning.
Sometimes, when he’s four hours in to a six-hour run, he thinks to himself just how “insane” this triathlon is. When he breaks it down, he’s simply bullying his body as a vessel for charity. “Like, to predict humans would be doing this 100 years ago, it’s absurd,” Matthew said.
“But I think there’s beauty in that. It does bring to the front that you have to bring your own meaning to it.”
Matthew wants to test his limits, raise money for charities that were important to Lovisa and honor her memory. Without that meaning, why make such an attempt?
Others, some of whom attended a May 12 send-off party, see something else in Matthew’s triathlon. They’re inspired, some just by the fact he can still roll out of bed in the morning. Others see someone attempting a triathlon bordering on the impossible and think, if Matthew can attempt that, maybe an extra 15 minutes at the gym isn’t such a big ask.
One of Matthew’s best friends at Penn State, Jack Hughes, who will accompany Matthew during the triathlon, said he’s inspired for a different reason.
“The thing that I’ve learned the most from being a part of this is the way that you process grief doesn’t have to be debilitating,” Hughes said. “It can actually be the opposite.”
Local support as journey begins
Matthew isn’t ignorant of the risks or the way his muscles and joints will be screaming throughout much of his 3,500-mile triathlon. He concedes that it does “a little bit terrify me.”
But he’s still looking forward to it.
“A part of me is not really anxious that this is going to absolutely destroy my body,” he said. “But it’s much more simple than my day job. If anything, it’s quite calm. I get to spend two months where I wake up, I run, I go to sleep, and that’s kind of my day, whereas now it’s like a hybrid of that.”
Since the fall, Matthew has dedicated 25 hours a week to training — 15 hours of it running — in addition to balancing the pursuit of a doctorate in architectural engineering. He wakes up at 7 a.m., trains, heads to work and then trains more before it’s lights out at 9 p.m.
He trains harder on the weekends. He might take one day off every three weeks or so — to recover, not relax.
“I’m equal parts inspired and, I mean, it’s a little nuts,” Tracy Langkilde, dean of Penn State’s Eberly College of Science, said with a laugh during Matthew’s send-off party.
She quickly added: “I’m sure he’s going to do it, and I’m looking forward to following his journey.”
Matthew’s trying not to think too far ahead. His mission is to remain thoughtless while running because, if he needs to motivate himself, he believes he’s already lost. That’s why there’ll be no music during the triathlon. Mostly just political podcasts.
Hughes will be there every step of the way for moral support and, he said, to joke with Matthew about his soon-to-be crooked toes. Matthew’s mother and father will also be present at the start, as will Lovisa’s family. Matthew’s triathlon will even take him through Lovisa’s hometown of Örebro, Sweden, on June 26.
His triathlon will go through nine countries, including Sweden, Germany, France and Spain before ending in Morocco. Local tourism agency Happy Valley Adventure Bureau — which learned of the triathlon before Matthew’s parents — was the first to sponsor the Penn Stater and helped organize the send-off party.
“As Matthew runs and cycles across Europe and into Morocco, wearing the Happy Valley logo, he will carry a piece of this community with him,” HVAB acting President/CEO Eric Engelbarts told the crowd at Boal City Brewing. “The world will see something that has meaningfully grown here from an incredibly difficult time.”
When Engelbarts passed Matthew the microphone, he said he wasn’t expecting to make a speech. But, from memory, he recited a passage often credited to American novelist Jack London and typically stylized as a poem.
It was his final public statement, his words to live by, before hopping on a plane to prepare for his journey.
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
How to help, donate
Matthew Hollingham and his friend Jack Hughes will document their 61-day, 3,500-mile journey with daily updates and weekly videos. Those interested can follow along at happyvalley.com/arctic-to-Africa.
Donations for two charities — local nonprofit Centre County Youth Services and international nonprofit Save the Children — are currently being solicited online using the platform JustGiving. To donate to Youth Services, visit JustGiving.com/page/lovisalocal and, to donate to Save the Children, go to JustGiving.com/page/lovisainternational.
Happy Valley Adventure Bureau will also offer additional donation opportunities in the near future. For those who donate more than $1,000, for example, a mile on Matthew’s journey will be dedicated to a person chosen by the donor and will be shown on HVAB’s map.
More information on that, and Matthew’s journey, can be found at the same link: happyvalley.com/arctic-to-Africa.
