Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  The Independent newspaper was clearly wary of our challenge. They quoted a Loughborough University sports science professor: ‘RF and MS are risking permanent damage and even death by trying to complete their challenge. They could suffer potentially fatal kidney failure because their bodies will have no time to recover between each of their 26 mile runs. They are really punishing their bodies, possibly even to the point of death. We could never get approval from an ethics committee to conduct an experiment on people like this.’

  Bruce Tulloch, another racing legend, led the way. We passed by Eton College, where groups of boys in tailcoats cheered us on. I glanced up at the high dome of School Hall and remembered the long ago thrill of night-climbing. Mike, who should have been recovering in a hospital bed, somehow ran for two and a half hours before having to walk intermittently. Friends and relations from all over the UK greeted our arrival at White City before Land Rovers rushed us to Heathrow for our flight to Cairo. Mike had lost a torn toe nail and was hobbling, but somehow he had completed the twenty-six miles ten minutes faster than I had finished in Singapore the previous day.

  The wife of President Mubarak of Egypt was hosting our African run and using it to raise funds for one of her charities, Women for Peace. She had organised a press conference at Giza immediately below the floodlit Pyramids, so I answered the press queries in Omani-accented Arabic, which is perfectly understood in Egypt. We set out at midnight, passing the Sphinx and running alongside some sixty local runners through clamorous crowds of residents busy feasting after their Ramadan daytime fasting. There was an atmosphere everywhere of carnival and chaos, but we ran behind a hooting phalanx of police vans and two ambulances. ‘One each,’ Mike shouted at me.

  The roadside crowds cheered and cat-called as we passed, and the route was flat tarmac all the way to the airport. We recorded our speediest time since our first Patagonian run, which completely mystified Mike from a medical point of view. We had just run, after all, two complete marathons in a single day. Circadian rhythm, Mike pondered, might be involved.

  We had, by the time we finished in Cairo, chased the sun three-quarters of the way around the globe, creating about eighteen hours of jet lag. In general, Mike knew, the body can recover about one hour a day so, on our sixth day, we were twelve hours out of phase. He theorised that our time-confused bodies, during the London run, must have thought it was midnight when all hormone support is at a low ebb, whereas in Cairo we had woken up and our systems were firing on all cylinders.

  We arrived at JFK Airport, New York, on time on 2 November and, with the help of a British Airways special assistant, passed rapidly through immigration and customs. My German friend, Mike Kobold, and Steven Seaton had organised things with great efficiency and we joined some 35,000 other runners at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge for the start of the New York Marathon, a far cry from our first run six and a half long, long days ago in Tierra del Fuego. There, the only other runners in sight had been the odd group of rhea.

  Knowing that we would, if still going by New York, be physical wrecks, we had taken the precaution of assigning two strong helpers to each of us for this the last of our seven runs. Mike Kobold would stay with Mike, and so would my American nephew, my late sister Celia’s son, who was a doctor and extremely fit. Steven Seaton and a runner friend of his would, if necessary, physically push me for the twenty-six miles through the streets of the Bronx, the concrete canyons of Manhattan, and finally the green acres of Central Park. The excitement of the great human pack surging forward to the boom of a cannon at the start momentarily made us both forget our delicate states of health, but not for long. My own main memories of the day are of fighting off the desire to stop running, bad but not as bad as in Singapore, and Steven was always there with his depth of endurance knowledge and calm encouragement.

  I knew that Mike was suffering mental torture to keep going in his physical state, but I remembered many, many days on the ice at both ends of the world and over many years when he had been in dire straits and yet kept going. I felt certain he would make this last run within the rapidly dwindling time reservoir of our seven-day limit, and I was determined that this time we should cross the final line together. So I started running back to find him which other runners must have thought quite mad.

  Mike wrote:

  Ran was still forging ahead but he soon hit a generous (if painful for him) solution. Unlike previously, he had determined we should cross the line together. Every few hundred yards he would turn round and drift slowly back towards me. Other participants, spotting this figure moving in the wrong direction, must have questioned his sanity. Had they known that this was now his seventh marathon in seven days, he might have been committed.

  Even with intermittent walking, I began to wonder if I could finish. My legs at times were literally buckling beneath me and this led to an intermittent sudden stagger. Worse, when I did so, I could not help but yelp with pain.

  Central Park was a scene of wonder. Each side of the road was lined with tens of thousands of well-wishers and although we had ended up going slowly there were still thousands of other runners around us. For me, its gentle hills were still utmost tests of resolution, but now there was a difference. From the moment I entered the park gates, I knew for sure that it was all over. Even if I had to crawl, I would cover those final two miles in the two hours that were still left before our clock hit seven full days. I had not done as well as I had wished, for I had not run every single step. But at the outset I did not really think that I would make it at all. Now I was about to complete the undertaking.

  And then there was Ran. He had never stopped running, not even for a single step, in any one of the seven marathons. As I saw him waiting, trotting on the spot, a few hundred yards from the finish, I was so grateful. When we finally crossed that seventh line together, it was a moment to cherish. I cannot thank him enough.

  We finished 28,362nd out of 35,000 runners. Mike went on to make a very important point:

  When, following our success, many experts in both the USA and Britain expressed disbelief at what we had achieved, they did not realise that they could have done it too. The difference is only one of perception. Whereas most people look at very big challenges, whatever the field or their walk of life, and start from the position ‘I can’t’, Ran and I make a simple word substitution and say ‘Why can’t I?’ ‘I can’t run seven marathons’ easily transforms into the question, ‘Why can’t I run seven marathons?’ Once it was asked, we felt obliged to find the answer.

  The Times editorial the following day said: ‘Both men are supposed to be too old to be running so far and so often. Both ignored medical scares and both kept going not by coddling or psychological bonding but by the abrasive competitive spirit that has marked their friendship and rivalry. Their triumph against all odds is not only a magnificent publicity boost for the charities that they are supporting, it is also an inspiration for every runner, every ordinary person, tempted to give up in the face of the impossible.’

  17

  Ginny

  The day we returned to England, a press conference was held by the British Heart Foundation. I said goodbye to Mike and his family and was given a lift back to Exmoor by a friend. On reaching Exford village, just over a mile from home, I saw a big banner flying high over the road by the village green, and, below it, a crowd of people. We stopped as local folk, many of whom I knew well, surrounded the car and cheered and clapped. The banner was a ‘Welcome Home, Ran’ sign. I looked around for Ginny and spotted her with our two dogs. She wore her lovely warm smile of welcome, but looked both tired and thin. Later that evening, sitting by the log fire at Greenlands as we had so often done over the past twenty years, she told me her news and my stomach churned with dread. She might have stomach cancer.

  The days, weeks and months that followed were the worst of my life. I cancelled everything in the diary except a handful of contracted conference lectures, and I called their organisers with the warning that, should my
wife’s condition deteriorate, I might not be there. Because we had both paid for private health care insurance for over thirty years, I drove Ginny to the top cancer-care hospital in London the following day, having booked her into a room there and requested an urgent appointment with a relevant specialist.

  Ginny had, over many years, had sudden stomach pains at no particular time and for no known or obvious reason. We had both put this down to twisted Fallopian tubes, or some other birth-connected condition. We had seen our doctor and specialists about the pain intermittently after especially bad attacks, but these were thankfully rare, to the point that sometimes a year would pass without one. Or so I assumed. Maybe Ginny did not always tell me when it happened. The doctors never found anything specifically wrong with her. Ginny had suffered two especially bad pains in the lower stomach area whilst I was away on the seven marathons and she had been driven to Taunton Hospital, an hour from home, for a check-up and pain-killers.

  Now, at a major London hospital, a place rich in millionaire patients from many countries, with doctors and nurses of similar ethnic diversity buzzing around the plush corridors like white or blue-coated flies, we could find nobody able to deal with the sudden attack of stomach pains that convulsed Ginny in the waiting room. There was no warning. One moment we were quietly chatting; the next she was in agony, clawing at her bowels and moaning aloud, a sound which wrenched at my heart. I rushed into the corridor and approached the first nurse I could find.

  ‘Please come at once. My wife is in extreme pain.’

  ‘I will get someone for you.’ She trotted off.

  ‘Somebody is coming,’ I told Ginny.

  Five hellish minutes later nobody had come.

  Ginny, the bravest of people, wept tears of pain, fear and desperation. I ran again down different corridors. I begged four different nurses to come to the waiting room. Ginny looked at me in confusion, hurt that I was doing nothing to help her in her hour of greatest need. I swore to myself that I would never leave her alone here, however magnificent the decor.

  A doctor arrived some twenty minutes after Ginny’s pains began. He looked impatient at this detour from his programme and gave me a prescription for some form of morphine. I rushed to the basement in-house pharmacy and asked the waiting queue if I could go to the front as my wife was in great pain. A pharmacist took my proffered prescription and returned, after an interminable pause, to tell me that the doctor had not signed the correct spot. She was obdurate when I begged her for the pain-killers. So I rushed upstairs again and luckily found the doctor who, without apology, scribbled another signature on my docket. Back to the pharmacy and, after some forty minutes of hell and suffering by Ginny, eventually found a nurse who administered the tablets.

  Our lifelong friends, William Knight (who had in 1965 been with me at the ‘bombing’ of Castle Combe) and his wife Sylvia, were true friends to us during that nightmare time, and I spent the next week in London, by day at Ginny’s bedside, and by night letting myself into the nearby Regent’s Park home of my literary agent and kind friend, Ed Victor.

  The specialists confirmed that Ginny had a virulent form of stomach cancer which was spreading fast. She must have chemotherapy sessions every week for at least three months and starting at once. In between them we could live at home.

  We spent Christmas on Exmoor with Ginny’s family and many of our best friends visiting from time to time. But mostly we just stayed together. I tried always to be in the same room. When we cooked, we both moved to the kitchen. As Ginny became weaker, we made up two beds downstairs. Ginny spoke often to Neil and Ruth, who looked after the sheep and cattle for her. We went for walks and, when the pain attacks came, our doctor or the local nurses made sure Ginny had sufficient morphine. She did not want her family, apart from her sister Abby, told of her illness until the last moment, to shield them from worry.

  I will never forget that time. I cannot believe that any human has ever loved another as much as I loved and still love Ginny. I could not remember any time in my adult life when she was not the reason for the glow in my heart when we were together, and the longed-for safe haven during my wanderings without her. I was desperate not to lose her and thankful for any tiny spark of hope that our doctor might murmur.

  By the second month, January 2004, Ginny was seldom able to leave the house, other than by ambulance for treatment. We were assigned a doctor in Exeter Hospital who specialised in cancer treatment. But the various chemotherapy treatments did not work and the disease spread. Later that month Ginny moved into an NHS cancer ward shared with some seven other ladies. She made friends quickly with many of them and with many of the nurses. I spent every day at her bedside or wheeling her about in a chair. At night I slept in a spare upstairs room in the hospital. Abby would drive down from Liverpool as often as she could and many friends were frequent visitors, but Ginny’s health diminished inexorably as the disease spread into her key organs. She had emergency operations and I sat outside the theatres startled by every unusual noise from within.

  Three months after her diagnosis, Ginny was moved to the hospice close to the hospital, and I think she took this as a sign that the end could not be far away. I was allowed to sleep in a spare room in the hospice. Our lifelong friends the Bowrings and the Gaults drove from Suffolk and Kent respectively to visit us. Just before writing this book, I received a note from Anton Bowring taken from his diary of those sad times:

  Many years ago, soon after we finished the Transglobe Expedition, I went to hospital with a suspect lump in my throat. I was sitting in bed in the lung cancer ward awaiting surgery the next day and surrounded by very ill people when Ginny arrived out of the blue and announced she was taking me out to supper. We had a wonderful evening and I completely forgot all my woes. Later my lump was found to be benign, but I never forgot Ginny’s warmth and thoughtfulness. Nearly twenty years later, Jill and I arrived at the Exeter hospice knowing full well we might not see your Ginny again. The four of us had supper in nearby Topsham, Ginny in a wheelchair, but otherwise just as though we were on holiday at your home or ours. She was so alive and full of her usual fun that it was hard to believe anything was wrong. I remember she had a morphine drip in a floral pattern bag around her neck which alone showed what she was going through. We talked that evening of all the wonderful times we had had together, of Namibia, France, Scotland, and we planned new outings too. We played cards by the fire there and we were together.

  The excitement of our outing was maybe too much and Ginny could not see us the next day, so Jill and I bought bird feeders which we hung in the hospice garden outside Ginny’s room. You told us then that the specialist had said Ginny’s chances were very slim.

  The next day, our last down south, we drove Ginny to Teignmouth and you pushed her chair about the crowded town until we found a pub overlooking a small boat harbour at low water. We sat outside and watched the seagulls. After a lovely day we returned to Exeter and said our goodbyes, believing we’d meet up again before long. That was the Sunday evening. The following Friday you phoned us in the evening and told me that dear Ginny had died just fifteen minutes earlier and that she was still in your arms. It makes me tearful, even now, just remembering that moment.

  Many friends and Ginny’s family came on her last day alive to show their love for her. But her pain became ever worse, and towards evening the nurses had to increase her morphine drip above the previous levels. Abby and my niece Beelie were with me as Ginny faded slowly. I could not control my misery. She died and escaped further pain.

  Over the previous week we had sometimes prayed together with the friendly and sincere hospice chaplain. Once Ginny held me tightly and thanked me for our life together, using wonderful words that I will never forget.

  Anton and Abby came back to Greenlands and stayed with me. Together we planned Ginny’s funeral, memorial service and, months later, a gathering of her friends, over 700 people, at a celebration of her life at the Royal Geographical Society, the place where she
had spent many long hours in the dusty archives with maps and books researching for our expeditions. Three of the Black Dogs Ginny had bred were there and a film of her life was shown, put together by her old friend Alex Leger, the long-time producer of television’s Blue Peter who had, in the 1970s and eighties, often featured Ginny and her Jack Russell, Bothie, on the programme.

  Abby was ten years younger than Ginny. She later wrote of her inner thoughts.

  What wasn’t easy was watching my sister die, too fast and too slowly, of an aggressive cancer that gave her months of excruciating pain. She was fifty-six, fit, strong, tough, and it was Ran who’d had a major heart attack less than a year before. He was the one at risk, not Ginny.

  I’d known she wasn’t well, but we all thought she needed a hysterectomy, nothing more. Then she phoned me when I was walking into a restaurant one evening in October 2003. She never phoned my mobile; so I knew before she spoke that it was bad news.

  I didn’t realise she was in hospital till New Year 2004, because she hadn’t wanted to worry me. In the end Ran rang, because Ginny couldn’t. Her body was packing up and she was in constant pain.

  I shot down to Exeter hospital. Ginny was thin and pale, but undiminished: still my big sister. The days I spent with her from then until her death will be some of the most prized of my life. And the hardest. In those few weeks the patina of sibling squabbles was scrubbed away and all that was left was love. In February, after three days at home, I got back to find she’d been moved to the hospice. I got there at 2 a.m., and Ran was asleep in the camp bed, gripping his beloved wife’s hand. He didn’t wake, but Ginny opened her eyes. Her smile terrified me because it was a really lovely, joyful welcome and there was no worry or pain on her face. I just hope she couldn’t see the shock on mine. This was the first time I’d been so close to someone who was going to die very soon, and this was the person I loved most in the world. There were black circles round her eyes and her lips were shrivelled in gaunt, waxy cheeks. This change from my big sister, ill but alive, to this shadow creature on the fraying hem of life undid something in me which hasn’t been repaired.