The days stretch 15, 18, 20 hours and the stops blur in a whirl of doughnuts and hotel ballrooms: California at 6 a.m., New Mexico at noon, wheels down in Boise, Idaho, at midnight.
Listening to -- or giving -- the same stump speech five times a day. Making the same small talk with voters. Scratchy hotel sheets. Scratchier voices. The cold that passes from candidate to staff to reporters and back again. The presidential campaign trail has a culture and a grueling rhythm all its own.
"I like to tell people it's like 'Groundhog Day,' " said Ann Romney, wife of Republican candidate Mitt Romney, referring to the 1993 film in which Bill Murray finds himself living the same day again and again. "Every day you want Groundhog Day to be over."
The compressed primary season -- and especially these frantic days leading up to Super Tuesday -- has magnified all that is exhausting and exhilarating about the trail. In their scramble for votes and money, the candidates must will themselves beyond fatigue, hunger, boredom, frustration.
They choose this life, of course. So do their aides. And (most of) the reporters who cover them.
But even veterans of the trail have been blindsided by the intensity of this season; with no candidate able to secure either party's nomination in early voting, it's gone on and on, a marathon paced at an all-out sprint.
"This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen one that even approaches this level of intensity," said Jay Carson, 30, a press aide to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y).
Carson marks progress by the trail of possessions he has left behind in hotel rooms -- mostly clothes, forgotten in the rush to keep moving.
"I know there's a suit hanging in Concord, N.H.," Carson said. "I'm positive there's a sweater at the Embassy Suites in Des Moines." His favorite shirt, he believes, is in Las Vegas.
Brooke Buchanan, national press secretary for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), tells her own wry tale of the all-consuming trail. In December, Buchanan's landlord called her mother with an urgent query. Buchanan, 27, hadn't been to her apartment for months. The landlord's question: "Is she still alive?"
The trail will do that to you. Swept along in the flashbulb-lit bubble of a campaign, you lose touch with the outside world. You go where the candidate goes, sleep where the candidate sleeps. You eat what's put before you. Way too often, it's pizza.
