The Man Walking Toward It

I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Jason Cronen not knowing quite what to expect. What I got was southern charm and a lightness about life that’s hard to find these days, what the French would call ‘laissez-faire.’ Not careless. Unbothered. The kind of ease you only earn the hard way.

Which is strange, because the hard way is exactly where Cronen is right now. For the second time.

There’s a New Orleans postmark on this whole operation. His campaign mail goes to St. Charles Avenue. It’s tempting to wonder if that laissez-faire came from somewhere. New Orleans has always worn its French bones close to the surface. Maybe it’s just coincidence.

Most people, facing cancer for a second time, would go quiet. Retreat. Let the world shrink to appointments and waiting rooms.

Jason Cronen is walking 540 kilometers.

He was first diagnosed in 2004, a college student at the College of Charleston. Cancer went into remission, then returned in April 2024, after years’ living and working in Asia. He’s currently undergoing treatment. This August, in the middle of it, he sets out on the Lycian Way, one of the oldest trading routes on earth, tracing the southern coast of Türkiye.

He’s calling the effort the Lycian Way Challenge. It is not a comeback story. It is not tidy. Cronen says it himself: cancer doesn’t hand your life back neatly. There’s no clean restart. You just keep moving through the uncertainty.

So, he’ll be moving. One step at a time, across ancient paths worn smooth by centuries of traders, shepherds, and pilgrims. Every step, he says, will be for the people rebuilding their lives after cancer.

But this isn’t just about him.

The hike is raising money and attention for “Movember,” the moustache-growing men’s health movement that’s funneled over a billion dollars into research and support since 2003. Cronen’s specific target is narrower and more urgent: low-cost, rural cancer screening. The kind of access that doesn’t exist if you live far from a city, far from a hospital, far from anyone who might catch it early.

The plan is to launch pilot programs across the US, Europe, and Asia in 2027, connecting at-risk men in isolated communities to regional diagnostic networks. Cronen’s team wants to handle the unglamorous parts: the paperwork, the transport, the clinical logistics. The stuff that stops a man from getting screened even when he wants to be.

There’s a quieter ambition too. Translating trail materials into 15 languages, so the message, you are not walking alone, reaches men who might otherwise never hear it in their own words.

I think about the men who don’t get a Jason Cronen moment. No trail, no fundraising page, no friends posting support from Saigon and Vancouver and Melbourne. Just a diagnosis, and silence, because that’s what men are trained to do with hard news.

Cronen’s answer will be 540 kilometers of ancient coastline, walked by a man in the middle of fighting this for the second time. That’s the whole point. He’s not waiting to see how it turns out. He’s doing something with the time he has.

You can follow the trail, or back it, at lycianwaychallenge

Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder

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