How to Make Your Mark

This is not the first time that Irons has encountered surprises along his trek. Despite scrupulous planning, his endeavor is by its very nature chaotic. He starts each day not knowing exactly how many miles he'll go, where he'll sleep that night, or how his route will change in response to traffic or construction. But it is his ability to cope with uncertainty, to commit to a goal without knowing how it will be achieved, that has allowed Irons to make his mark. An idealist to the core, he simply believed that he could do the nearly impossible -- for no better reason than he decided that he would. For Irons, making his mark was about taking a leap of faith.

"When I set out with this goal of helping my dad, I had no idea what it was going to entail," he says. "I just came up with the idea and worried about the rest later. Dreams aren't exactly clear sometimes. But I was just committed to the idea."

That dream first occurred to Irons on a trip home to visit his parents five years ago. As he flew from LA to DC, he looked out the airplane window and wondered what it would be like to swim the Mississippi River. A competitive swimmer in college, he found the idea intriguing. When he arrived home, he saw that his dad was using a cane for the first time to cope with his ms. Irons instinctively wanted to help but felt powerless. The two thoughts collided on his return trip as he began to develop a plan for his first fund-raiser -- swimming more than 1,550 miles of the Mississippi River, from Minneapolis to Baton Rouge. About a year and a half passed before he stepped into the murky waters of the river, watched by a crowd of news reporters and TV cameras. It was a family project: His brother Andy preceded him in an inflatable boat; his mother, Connie, helped arrange for escort boats and press coverage; his brother John had designed a Web site to promote the swim; and his dad called ahead to hotels in small towns along the river to ask for free lodging. Four months after he began the swim, Irons arrived in Baton Rouge on his dad's birthday. Along the way, he'd garnered coverage from CNN, Good Morning America, and People magazine. He'd raised more than $200,000 from corporate sponsors and people he'd met during the trip. None of which surprised his family one bit.

"The idea shocked me, but I never doubted from the moment he told us that he wanted to do the swim that he would do it," says his mother. "He was incredibly determined."

But others did doubt that he'd finish, and that surprised Irons. "There were so many people who told me, 'You'll never finish,' " he says. "Even when I was 50 miles from the end, someone told me that I wasn't going to make it. I'm thinking, Listen, I made it 1,500 miles. Why wouldn't I make the last 50? But the most common question all the way was, 'Are you going to make it?'

"I felt that I wasn't going to start if I wasn't going to finish," he continues. "Of course I was going to make it. If I left the possibility open that I wasn't going to make it, then the first day that my shoulder started hurting, or the first time that we were having problems getting escort boats, it would have been too easy to give up."

The physical test of the swim and the bike ride was not the only obstacle that Irons faced. He also had to deal with the politics that come along with full-time fund-raising and nonprofit work. For the swim, Irons got little support from the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. "When Nick said that he wanted to do something special for people with MS, I thought that was great," says General Mike Dugan, the society's national president and CEO. "Then when he said that he wanted to swim the Mississippi, I smiled and thought, There's no way this guy will make it. But after he did it and came back the next time with the idea for the bike tour, there was no smiling."

After the swim, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society invited Irons to its national conference and was much more helpful with the bike tour in connecting his family to local chapters that were sponsoring biking events. But the society is a loosely organized volunteer organization with a financial structure that discourages chapters from helping "competing" fund-raisers: Each chapter has to raise enough funds to support itself and is also required to give 28% of what it raises to the national headquarters.

The chapters also don't have a convenient way to share information, so Irons often found that when he contacted local chapters for help, they had never heard of him. "It's just inexcusable that no one affiliated with chapters along Nick's route knew what he was doing," says John Guandolo, who rode three legs of the bike trip with Irons and who also does part-time fund-raising for ms. "There isn't a sense of team where when one of us wins, we all win. Everyone is so busy scrapping for survival that the message gets lost."