Frank Fumich was walking his dogs in late 2020 when he spotted a delivery driver juggling six bags of groceries, jogging up the sidewalk with his arms full. The man was hustling.
That’s the kind of employee I want, thought Fumich, whose McLean-based company, Express Catering, provides logistical support and delivers supplies for the airline industry. On a whim, he turned around and caught up with the man before he drove away.
“I literally knocked on his window,” Fumich says, and asked if he was looking for a job.
The man, named Bobo, clearly already had a job, but they exchanged numbers. Soon after, Bobo was on the Express Catering payroll. “He immediately became my best employee,” Fumich says. “He’s always on time. He offers to work extra hours when someone else calls in sick.”
Originally from Cameroon, Bobo (last name withheld for privacy) never planned on coming to the U.S. In the early 2000s, he was arrested and imprisoned in his home country for peacefully protesting student conditions at his university.
“He was tortured and beaten,” Fumich says. “He ended up getting out of jail, but then he got word that they were going to come back for him. He and his wife decided the best course of action was for him to escape.”
After fleeing to Equatorial Guinea, Bobo entered the U.S. on a travel visa and applied for asylum, leaving his wife and young daughter behind. By the time he met Fumich, he had not seen his family in seven years.
“Maybe I can try to help you,” Fumich said.
In the months that followed, Fumich hired an immigration attorney, created a GoFundMe campaign and posted on Facebook, asking friends to help his employee. Within 48 hours of that post, he had raised $30,000. In November, Bobo was reunited with his wife and daughter when they were granted asylum to move here permanently.
“Everybody got so into this,” Fumich says enthusiastically. “It’s like something you’ve never seen before.”
Fumich, 56, is a man driven by altruism and adrenaline. An ultra-endurance athlete, he has run, biked, swum and climbed his way across the globe, often leveraging his physical feats to raise money for others—whether he’s cycling from coast to coast, crossing the world’s hottest deserts on foot or summiting Mount Vinson in Antarctica. To date he has crowdsourced more than $500,000 for various causes.
“I feel a responsibility and keep my eyes open for people who need help,” he says. “Nothing feels better.”
Fumich grew up in Arlington’s Spy Hill neighborhood, about half a mile east of Seven Corners. His father, George Fumich, was a World War II POW who earned the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars. George worked in West Virginia coal mines, putting himself through college and law school before moving with his wife, Marie, to the DMV, where he served as assistant secretary of fossil fuels at the Department of Energy during the Carter administration.
Today, Fumich owns and rents out his childhood home near Ashlawn Elementary—the school he and his sister, Sheila, attended before moving on to St. Ann Catholic School for middle school and then Bishop O’Connell High School. Both went to college at West Virginia University, where Fumich studied business.
After his college graduation in 1991, he moved home to figure out his next steps. His older half-brother owned a hot dog stand in the old U.S. Airways terminal at Reagan National Airport, which Fumich managed while working part time as a baggage handler. “Just so I could get the free flying benefits,” he says. “I thought it was super cool.”
He liked to chat up the flight crews and push himself by seeing how many bags he could carry at once.
“It was all little commuter planes,” he says, “so when you had a bag that wouldn’t fit [under the] seat, we would take ’em back to the cargo hold. My co-workers would grab one bag. I would grab 10 on each arm until I was almost falling over. I was known as the hardest worker out there.”
Eventually, his aviation pals suggested he combine his two gigs into a full-time job doing catering deliveries for the airline. Prepping a plane for a flight involves a million little logistics, including moving food, beverages and supplies from the warehouse to the aircraft cabin.
Intrigued by the suggestion, Fumich put together a proposal in June of 2000 and landed a contract with U.S. Airways Express. That was the genesis of Express Catering, with Fumich as its sole employee, putting in 18-hour days. When he wasn’t working, he took advantage of the perks of the job, occasionally catching a free flight to the beach for an afternoon.
“I never wanted to be at a desk inside,” he says. “I always wanted to be my own boss. That’s what I like most—that I don’t answer to anybody. I make the decisions; I make my schedule.”
Today Express Catering has more than 100 employees and services some 800 flights per day. The company has contracts with American Airlines at major airports in D.C., Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C.
Though he has always been athletic, Fumich didn’t become an endurance athlete until age 29, when his beloved aunt was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
“We all grew up as a close Catholic family. Everyone was praying for her,” he says. “Toward the end, she was in a lot of pain. I wanted to do something to kind of put myself in an uncomfortable ‘pain’ with her. I told her I was going to run a marathon and dedicate it to her.”
He signed up for the 1997 Marine Corps Marathon, even though he had never run a marathon before.
“I hated almost all of it,” he admits, “because I had trained so little. I actually dropped and was carried off by the Marines at the finish line. Not because I had any medical condition. I just gave it everything and totally collapsed—which kind of typifies my whole endurance career. I just leave it all out there.”
He was nonetheless obsessed. “I was just amazed, when it was all over, that your mind can push your body well past what you thought was possible. I became fascinated by that, wondering, What am I capable of? What are people really capable of? I immediately started kicking it up a notch.”
He signed up for another marathon. Then a 50-mile race. Then an Ironman. Soon he was doing 100-mile races “all over the planet.”
“I wanted to try the hardest event in every discipline imaginable,” he says. “To see if I could do it.”
Fumich was working out at Gold’s Gym in Ballston in the mid-2000s when he met his wife, Chelsea, then a PE teacher. On their first date, they flew to Miami. He proposed in Bora Bora. They eloped at a Catholic Church in Maui on Oct. 3, 2006.
Both share an interest in travel and fitness, Fumich says, although she isn’t driven to extremes like he is. “She thinks it’s all crazy.”
So far, Fumich has climbed the highest mountains on six of the seven continents. The only one left is Everest, which he plans to summit in 2026.
He has skied and trekked across the North and South poles—sustaining such extreme frostbite on a recent excursion to Antarctica that the bone at the tip of his thumb protruded through the skin for months, requiring surgery. He has run through the Sahara Desert, Death Valley and the Arctic Circle.
“You don’t learn anything about yourself by sitting on the couch,” he says. “Doing these crazy hard things and pushing yourself well past what you think you’re capable of [makes you realize] other things in life aren’t that big of a deal. When I’m out doing them and I’m super miserable—like I’m on the side of a mountain, it’s minus 30 degrees—I tell myself, ‘Hey, when you get back to civilization, don’t sweat the small stuff because nothing is as bad as this.’ It really lends a lot of perspective to everyday life.”
After the Boston Marathon bombing in April of 2013, Fumich started using his athleticism to do good for others.
“I was super pissed and angry that these terrorists were trying to disrupt our way of life,” he says. “People were killed. I wanted to help.”
He announced on social media that he planned to run the equivalent of three marathons (78.6 miles) nonstop along the Potomac River. Asking friends and family to sponsor him, he parked at Gravelly Point by the airport, ran 3 miles toward Old Town, Alexandria, then turned around. “I just ran back and forth for 18 hours,” he says.
His goal was to raise $26,200—$1,000 for every mile of a standard marathon—in support of the Richards family, whose 8-year-old son was killed in the Boston blast. He ended up raising so much money that he added a second beneficiary, Jeffrey Bauman, who had lost both his legs in the bombing.
Rather than mailing checks to the recipients, Fumich decided to run from D.C. to Boston to deliver them personally, raising even more money in the process. He was joined by his friend and fellow ultra-marathoner Matt Nelson.
They started at the Pentagon in June 2013 and ran 450 miles north, alternating legs every six hours and stopping only for power naps. On the homestretch, they finished out by running the route of the Boston Marathon to present the checks in person. They raised about $80,000 total.
To their surprise, they weren’t always running alone. People following their journey met up with them and ran beside them along the way.
“Total strangers reached out and met us in the middle of the night,” Fumich recalls. “They would ask, ‘When are you going to be through our town?’ And we would do the calculation. These people would be there at 2 in the morning and run with us. I’m still friends with them. I mean, it was unreal.”
Pushing his body to its limits, Fumich has raised funds for a variety of causes, from Hurricane Sandy victims to children with cancer. He has amassed more than 28,000 Facebook followers with amusing posts and tales of his exploits, which has also proven to be an effective platform for fundraising.
He runs the Marine Corps Marathon every year, serving as a running partner for his friend Aaron Hale, a Navy veteran, entrepreneur and fellow endurance athlete who lost his sight to an IED explosion while serving in Afghanistan, and later lost his hearing after coming down with meningitis.
“Finishing a race feels great—but finishing knowing I’m helping someone while I’m doing it feels way better,” Fumich says.
His energy is contagious. “We’re all made better because of Frank,” says his brother-in-law, Kevin Buckley, who also lives in McLean. “He makes our hearts and our lives bigger and better. I’m moved by his intensity and his drive.”
In 2018, Fumich cycled across the country to raise money for Hopecam, a Reston-based nonprofit that connects kids hospitalized for cancer treatment with their classrooms. He dedicated each day’s ride to a different child, pedaling with their photos affixed to his handlebars.
When he isn’t off conquering the terrain of distant lands, Fumich runs five or six days a week in the DMV. If he’s training for a climb, he’ll carry a 50-pound backpack. Neighbors sometimes see him pulling a tire for 10 miles along the hilly, tree-lined streets of Franklin Park, where he’s lived with his family since 2022. Sometimes he hits the StairMaster for an hour or heads out for a four-hour bike ride.
“Frank is pretty hard-core,” says friend and trainer Lisa Smith-Batchen, who lives in Jackson, Wyoming. She has coached and crewed for Fumich ever since they met at a race in Morocco about 20 years ago.
“He has the most incredible grit, determination, focus,” she says. “He doesn’t sleep enough—I’ll say that. He’s up really early. He gets his workouts done while his kids are sleeping. He’s an incredible family man and really puts his family first. He’s very special. He lives a life of joy and gratitude.”
Wanderlust aside, Fumich is a self-described homebody. “We don’t really go out much,” he says. “We love to sit around with our dogs and be with our kids and enjoy our home.”
The peaceful feeling of being home with loved ones is something he wanted for Bobo, too.
After launching the GoFundMe campaign that initially raised $30,000 for Bobo’s family, Fumich cosigned a lease on an apartment and started an Amazon wish list to furnish it. He asked the interior designer he’d hired to decorate his own home to select the furniture and décor.
On Nov. 11, 2023, he was with Bobo at Dulles International Airport when Bobo’s wife and daughter arrived from West Africa. He presented the family with a check for $50,000 and showed them their new home—a fully furnished apartment with everything from bedding and silverware to “Welcome Gnome” hand towels.
Later that afternoon, during a welcome party at his house in McLean, Fumich smiled as he watched Bobo’s daughter playing with his own twin girls.
“To see his daughter on a trampoline with my daughters, right where this all started on the sidewalk three years ago, just blew my mind,” Fumich says. “We happened to cross paths, and I took a chance. Now here we are today. It’s insane.”
He’s grateful for the outpouring of support for his star employee—and that in this case, all he had to do was ask. “I didn’t even have to kill myself” with an endurance race, he jokes.
“It seems like everybody really wants to help people,” he says. “There’s so much good that’s still in the world. You just have to open your eyes and see it.”
Wendy Kantor is a writer in Northern Virginia.