The runners were handed the ball Thursday night at a pep rally at West Point, during which cadets set fire to a large sailboat that had been dressed up to lampoon a Navy vessel. They arrived at the stadium in Philadelphia around 3:40 p.m. on Friday, and would return Saturday to present it at the 50-yard line before the 2:30 p.m. kickoff, in front of a crowd that would include nearly all of the 4,400 West Point cadets, all wearing their dress grays.  Runners from the Naval Academy, meanwhile, have a similar tradition, carrying their own game ball up from Annapolis.  To ride along overnight with the Army runners, on local roads through three states, was to witness a combination of military discipline and eccentric tradition, with lots of college-kid mishaps, including a few wrong turns in the wee hours in northern New Jersey.  The running conditions were less than ideal. There was the dark, the potholes, the curbside trash cans, the debris-laden sides of the road, the passing trucks and the blinding lights of the police escorts. Then there was the road kill: a raccoon on 9W near Tompkins Cove, N.Y., and a huge dead deer on Route 202 outside Flemington, N.J.  The second runner, Jake Chaput, had his iPod freeze after only two AC/DC songs. Matt Ryan, captain of the men’s team, collapsed in the van after his shift and said, “I can’t feel my face.”  Pit stops were taken at all-night gas stations or in roadside woods, as cadets in the van chuckled.  Encouragement along the route came from car honks and spontaneous cheering sections of smokers huddled outside Hansil’s Bar and Grill in Oakland, N.J. Then, all the way through South Jersey, there was the sweet older man in a military windbreaker who would speed ahead, then stop and stand on the roadside, waving.  Many of the runners will see combat in Afghanistan after graduation. “No one wants to go to war, but you want to do what you’ve been trained for,” said Kyle Cobb, a senior, and the van grew quiet for a moment.  The Army runs date to at least 1987, organized by some faculty members from the math department. Several years later, the marathon team took it over. Members of this year’s team have qualified for the Boston Marathon by finishing 26.2 miles in under 3 hours and 10 minutes, according to the men’s coach, Maj. Tom Tolman.  For this quest, the 20 runners split into three vans, each handling a third of the course. The second group took the handoff at 2:30 a.m. Friday in Parsippany, N.J., and its first runner was Colin Chapman, the fleetest of Army’s marathoners with a personal best of 2:42.  The next switch came at 9 a.m. in Hunterdon County, N.J., where the whole group stopped at Reagent Chemical, a company that has been passing snacks and water to the runners for years, and now invites them in for an elaborate brunch buffet.  Approaching the New Jersey-Pennsylvania line late Friday morning, Ben Karn, 20, a sophomore, or “yearling,” advised another runner to clutch the ball tighter: “You got to cradle it like a baby.”  The annual Army-Navy football game is one of the most storied rivalries in sports, dating to 1890. It is such a part of a West Point cadet’s consciousness that the expression “Beat Navy” is a phrase of proper address between upper and lower classmen. The game is usually the last of the regular season, with bragging rights on the line for the ensuing year, and is usually played in Philadelphia, roughly equidistant from the two campuses.  Navy leads the series with 54 wins to Army’s 49; there have been seven ties. Navy has won the last eight meetings, including last year’s 17-3 victory. This year, both teams have winning records: Army is 6-5, Navy is 8-3.  The cadets fueled up for the run Thursday evening with a meal in West Point’s mess hall, surrounded by 4,000 classmates in fatigues. As the football players exited, the students pounded their plates with their forks and stood on chairs and cheered, then poured out onto a grassy field outside for the pep rally.  A football team captain handed the Army ball to Mr. Ryan, 20, the marathon team captain, and the runners knifed through the crowd, running the two miles to the academy gates as a group. There, they met a New York state trooper, climbed into the vans, and headed south down 9W along the Hudson River.  In Suffern, N.Y., a pair of New Jersey troopers took over as escorts, and the runners tossed the New York trooper an Army football shirt. The small caravan snaked down empty, darkened roads into New Jersey, past strip malls and little towns.  On busier stretches, the van snarled traffic. After a bathroom break in Pennsylvania, Maj. Shoshannah Jenni, an officer in charge of the women’s team who has flown Kiowa Warrior helicopters during two tours in Iraq, maneuvered the van like a laser through the traffic-clogged road.  Once in Philadelphia, the runners and van traveled down a crowded Broad Street to the field, where West Point’s superintendent, Lt. Gen. David H. Huntoon, presented each runner with the superintendent’s coin. All 20 then ran out onto the field, for fun and rehearsal, with the ball.  “Next year the Army-Navy game is in Washington, D.C., and we’re going to run all the way there,” said Col. Thomas Kastner, the officer in charge of the marathon team. “Shouldn’t be a problem.”  A version of this article appears in print on December 11, 2010, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: For Big Rivalry, Carrying the Ball 315,000 Yards. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Twenty West Pointers ran a football from the campus to Philadelphia, a display of discipline and tradition before the Army-Navy game.