I got in the car, turned the key in the ignition, and flipped on the windshield wipers. In the rhythmic scrape and whine of those rubber blades, I felt my addict slink back into the foul bunker where he lived. I knew he wasn’t gone forever. He would sit quietly, waiting for me to stumble. He was patient. He had all the time in the world.
- - - -
Several weeks later, Scott Williams called. He still had Charles Schwab sponsor money and was putting together a four-man team for the Southern Traverse, a world-class 450-kilometer adventure race on New Zealand’s South Island. Did I want in? I talked to Pam about it and she encouraged me to go. With a race on the calendar, my mood instantly improved.
In May, my team, which included two veteran racers, Chris Haggerty and Rob Jardeleza, arrived in Nelson, New Zealand. Chris, a US Navy SEAL and our chief navigator, told us at a meeting the night before the start that he required one thing from us: trust. If he wanted our opinions, he would ask for them. Otherwise, he said, our job was to keep us moving forward.
I loved his forthrightness. Launching a kayak under a milky morning sky into the calm waters off Pohara Beach, I had a feeling this experience would be very different from Ecuador. I was right. Chris was a skilled navigator and inspiring leader. When tactical mistakes were made—we climbed the wrong mountain and had to spend the night anchored to the side of a steep cliff—no one launched arrows of blame. I felt privileged to be out there in that spectacular wilderness with these guys, working together to get through the difficult stretches, picking up the slack for whoever of us was struggling at that moment. Our cohesiveness paid off; we came in tenth overall and were the top American finishers.
The team got along so well that we decided to stay together, with the addition of Nancy Bristow, for the upcoming Raid Gauloises through Tibet and Nepal. On April 29, 2000, I was with them at fourteen thousand feet on the high Tibetan plateau looking up at a fortress-topped mountain, waiting for the race to begin. I felt confident that this team was destined for at least a top-ten finish.
The first leg, a short, steep trek up the mountain, took us directly through a thirteenth-century monastery. Children smiled and shouted as we passed them; the monks in their garnet robes looked on unperturbed from a prayer-flag-draped courtyard. I felt silly rushing by them in our high-tech gear; our urgency suggested we were doing something important. I wished I could stop for a minute, to try to tell them that the Buddhist philosophies that are so much a part of addiction recovery—the idea that suffering and cravings can be overcome through mindfulness, compassion, and wise actions—had saved my life. Instead, breathing hard and drenched with sweat, I muttered a few sheepish Namastes and hurried past them.
By the time we reached the ruins of ancient walls near the peak, the altitude had slowed our pace to a plod. Step by step, we worked our way to the transition point, where we would switch to mountain bikes. From the top, we could see the white summits of Everest and Cho Oyu floating above rolling dun-colored hills to the south. Nancy, Chris, Scott, and I paused to take in the view. Rob was bent over with his hands on his knees.
We started out on the bikes, but the strong headwind and soft sand track made pedaling almost impossible. Several times, we had to get off and walk. The only consolation was that the teams ahead of us were doing the same thing. In the thin air, I was rubber legged and light-headed, but Rob seemed to be in real trouble. He simply stopped pedaling and tipped over. Chris convinced him to let him carry his pack for a while.
“He says he can’t see,” Chris said to Nancy, Scott, and me when Rob was out of earshot. “Everything is blurry. I don’t know—maybe he just has sand in his eyes.”
As the hours went by, we could all see that it was much more serious than that. By the time we dropped off the bikes and started a long trekking leg, Rob was disoriented and having trouble walking a straight line. We knew we had to go back for help.
We backtracked to the previous checkpoint, and the race medics tested Rob’s oxygen saturation levels. Their faces told us what they discovered; his readings were shockingly low. He was suffering from severe pulmonary edema. Rob was quickly placed into a portable hyperbaric chamber. I felt sick seeing him lying in that coffinlike contraption; Rob was one of the toughest guys I’d ever known. After about an hour, his condition improved, and he was told he had to descend immediately to thicker air. He would ride a donkey and be accompanied by a local Sherpa guide. We watched him ride down the trail.
“Stay out of the bars,” Chris yelled after him.
Rob raised one hand without looking back.
“Now what?” I asked when Rob had disappeared from view. We knew we were out of the race since we had lost a team member, but as in Ecuador, we were allowed to continue for the experience.
“I’m going to go down, too,” Chris said. “Make sure Rob is okay.”
I understood his desire to be with his friend. But Chris’s departure meant that what was left of our team no longer had a navigator. The three of us had to decide if we should go on. I was exhausted, and I could see from the strain on Nancy’s and Scott’s faces that they were, too. I could have said, “We’ve worked so hard to get here. Let’s keep going.” I could have volunteered to take over the navigation. I could have tried to convince Scott and Nancy that we should not let the opportunity to see this magical place slip away. They could have said the same to me. Instead, we kicked the dirt and shrugged and loaded our packs into the Raid SAG wagon for the long drive to the finish area.
I have never regretted a decision more. Every time we passed teams who were still out there, giving their all, I slid down in my seat to avoid being seen. Bumping along in that bus of shame, I vowed to myself that I would never quit a race again.
CHAPTER 7
We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way,
begin no day where we have ended another day;
and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us.
Even while the earth sleeps, we travel.
We are the seeds of the tenacious . . .
we are given to the wind and are scattered.
—KHALIL GIBRAN, The Prophet
By the start of 2003, I had added three Eco-Challenges (Borneo, New Zealand, and Fiji), another Raid Gauloises (Vietnam), the Discovery Channel World Championships (Switzerland), and a handful of other events to my adventure-racing résumé. I’d been chased by pissed-off crocodiles, chewed up by leeches, and showered with bat shit. I’d fallen asleep on a bicycle, woken up with a tarantula in my sleeping bag, capsized in Class V rapids, and hung off a cliff tangled in climbing ropes. I had contracted leptospirosis from swimming in a river tainted with pig urine; had my oozing, macerated feet mistakenly plunged into an acid bath by a race crew nurse; and developed several raging cases of an excruciating diaper-rash-like affliction called monkey butt. But I never quit another adventure race.
That’s not to say the results had always been stellar. In fact, in about half of the events, my team finished with the “unofficial” designation because we’d lost one of our teammates to ailment or injury along the way. Adventure racing was cruel like that: bad things just happened—no matter how prepared or determined you were. I had yet to get a team disqualified, but I knew, if I kept racing, my turn would come.
By 2003, I was also, to my great surprise, being occasionally recognized in airports and restaurants, thanks to my appearance in a CBS 48 Hours segment about the Borneo Eco-Challenge. Producers had asked me to shoot video for them while I raced, and even though they said they’d probably use less than a minute of what I gave them, I was excited enough about it that I didn’t mind adding the weight of a camcorder and batteries to my gear. Plus, race director Mark Burnett had told the CBS guys no one could finish an Eco-Challenge while carrying a video camera, and I wanted to prove him wrong.
I spilled my guts to that lens; not just about my physical and mental struggles in the jungle, w
hich were many, but also about my addiction and my sobriety. It was cathartic for me to have to put into words what I was doing and why I was doing it—to explain my belief that this kind of suffering led to enlightenment and personal growth. CBS ended up using about eleven minutes of my stuff and even brought me to New York to watch the premiere. When I walked into the editing booth, the guys who had sorted through my twenty-five hours of raw footage gave me a standing ovation. It was my first inkling that you didn’t have to win a race to be considered interesting—and that I might have a talent for documenting my adventures.
After the show aired, reporters started contacting me for interviews. I also began receiving daily calls and letters from people who had been moved by my story. Some were athletes who had also gotten sober, but more often they were addicts or alcoholics searching for a way out of the hell they were living in.
It tore me up to hear their stories, but I had no foolproof answers for them. I could only tell them what addiction had been like for me, what had happened to me, and what life was like for me now.
- - - -
Besides, who was I to dispense advice? Like everyone else, I was a work in progress. Pam and I had continued to struggle. We went to counseling, but by 2002 our marriage was over. We were open with the boys about what was happening and did everything we could to keep them feeling secure. After selling the Salinas house, we drove across the country together and set up two adjacent households back in Greensboro, North Carolina, where real estate was more affordable—and Pam would be closer to her family and friends.
Shortly after our move East, I got a serendipitous call from Tom Forman, a former 48 Hours producer I had hit it off with in Borneo. He told me he had a new show in the works called Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in which volunteer construction crews built a house in one week for a deserving family. He wanted to hire me as a freelance cameraman and producer.
“You are completely unqualified for this job,” he said, laughing. “But if you don’t tell anyone that, I’ll bring you on board.”
I’m sure part of what he saw in me was my ability to function on little or no sleep. That served me well when I joined the EMHE crew; the shoots went round the clock for ten manic days. I loved it—and the schedule suited me. Between episodes, I had plenty of time off to be with my kids and to train.
Just what I was training for, though, I wasn’t sure. The adventure-racing world was changing; Mark Burnett had decided to end the Eco-Challenge to focus on Survivor. The Raid had been shortened and streamlined. At the same time, my enthusiasm for team events had waned. I’d had my fill of the complicated logistics, the clashing personalities—and the constant hustle for sponsors, whose support could be jeopardized with one ankle sprain. I was hungry to succeed or fail on my own.
When my friend Mary Gadams called me in early 2003 to tell me about the Gobi March, a new running event she was organizing in northern China’s Gobi Desert, I told her to count me in. The 155-mile race borrowed its format from the Tour de France; the winner would be determined by the cumulative time of six stages, which ranged from about six to fifty miles. But unlike the Tour, I wouldn’t have a domestique to bring me supplies or guide me. Runners in the Gobi March carried all of their own food and gear on their backs and used a map and compass to navigate through some sections of the course.
But the Gobi March wasn’t until September. I needed something else to focus on. I found it in the Badwater Ultramarathon. For years, I’d been hearing tales of this epic nonstop 135-mile race, which started in Death Valley at 280 feet below sea level and finished at 8,300 feet on Mount Whitney in the extreme heat of July. All runners had a support crew to keep them hydrated and fed—and to tend to them if they couldn’t go on. Without their crews, runners would not survive. My teammate in Fiji and Vietnam, Marshall Ulrich, had won the race several times and held me rapt with his stories about it. I knew I wanted to do it someday. Badwater now had a new race director, Chris Kostman, who was actively recruiting athletes for the 2003 event. He invited me to enter. If nothing else, I figured it would be good training for the Gobi March.
A 1907 California newspaper ad suggested that Death Valley “had all the advantages of Hell without the inconvenience.” The same, I was about to find out, could be said of Badwater. At 10:00 a.m., on July 22, 2003, with the temperature at 125 degrees and climbing, and the humidity an atypically high 18 percent, I stood shoulder to shoulder with some of the world’s best ultrarunners including Marshall, Pam Reed, Lisa Smith-Batchen—and up-and-comer Dean Karnazes. In the weeks leading up to the start, I’d barraged Marshall with questions about pacing, foot care, and fluid intake, but now, looking east across the salt flats of the Badwater Basin shimmering in the heat, with a tinny recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” being played over a bullhorn to signal the impending start, I went blank.
We got the go signal, and several runners shot to the front. Marshall hung back a bit and I stayed with him, trying to tamp down my nerves. The heat was beyond anything I had ever experienced; not just the suffocating air, but also the two-hundred-degree blacktop, which radiated like glowing embers through my rubber soles. I’d put in plenty of miles in hot and muggy North Carolina, but the only way I could have trained for this would have been to run on top of a lit stove.
My crew and I had decided that they would leapfrog ahead of me every few miles. But I noticed that most of the experienced runners had support crews with them almost constantly, offering fluids and ice packs and soaking them with big squirt guns. Before I started, I couldn’t comprehend needing so much aid; now I wondered if I had made a mistake sending my team too far ahead.
Still, several miles into it, I was feeling okay—good enough that something inside of me whispered, Why not go faster? I moved past Marshall, lifted my hand, and said, “Good luck.” Later he would tell me that he was worried when I charged past him like that, but he figured I would find out the hard way that pacing at Badwater was everything. I followed the molten asphalt ribbon as it unspooled across the baked sand, drawn forward by the promise of connecting with my crew—with their buckets of ice and cold drinks.
Though my crew did everything they could to keep me hydrated, by the time I connected with them again at mile seventeen, the Furnace Creek checkpoint, I was light-headed and nauseated. I downed drinks and dunked my head in a cooler of ice. I took off again in the savage heat. The wind had kicked up, but instead of offering respite, it created the effect of running into the mouth of a giant blow-dryer. I fought through it and maintained a decent sub-ten-minute-mile pace. When I reached the Stovepipe checkpoint at mile forty-two, I was in fourth place.
The checkpoint had a motel with a pool, and like a lot of racers, I stripped off my shoes and shirt and jumped in. The pool might as well have been a hot tub. When I got out, I told my crew I was doing okay, but in fact, I was pretty sure I was in serious trouble. My legs were tender to the touch—not a good sign. My pee, when I finally had to go, was dark as tea. Be careful, be careful, I repeated to myself as I started the seventeen-mile climb to Townes Pass.
I alternated between running and walking. That’s what I saw others doing. As I climbed, the sun dropped below the horizon and the temperature dropped slightly. After about three hours, I crested the peak in the dark. I had run nearly sixty miles. The next ten miles would all be downhill. This was my chance to push the pace. I stripped down to my briefs and took off my shirt. Then I turned off my headlamp. In the moonlight, I saw the dark silhouetted ridgelines of the distant mountains and the faint glow of the painted white line that marked the side of the road.
I knew my crew was out there waiting for me somewhere. I could see the red taillights of support cars in the distance. I knew runners were ahead of me and behind me. But for now, I was alone under a blizzard of stars. I inhaled the desert brine—so oddly oceanic—and let myself think about the first time I ever saw the desert. I was a kid, maybe ten years old. I had flow
n to California to visit my father during my summer vacation, and he was driving me back East to North Carolina. We were speeding along in his little Triumph Spitfire under the enormous Mojave sky—me with my arm out the open window and my hand rising and falling in the current of warm air, and my dad with a beer between his legs, laughing at something I’d said. We were having an adventure, the two of us. I had never wanted that trip to end.
I heard my feet hitting the pavement. I heard my breaths, each exhalation a small emphatic grunt. It hurt and I wanted it to hurt more, so I pushed harder. I peeled off miles, ignoring the searing pain in my quads and the fire on the soles of my feet.
Suddenly, my legs buckled and I struggled to stay upright. My muscles would no longer do what I asked them to do. I thought I might be having a seizure. I doubled over and vomited. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and willed myself to move forward. Then I vomited again. As if in a dream, I saw my crew approaching me, hands outstretched.
Somehow, with their help, I regained my composure and started moving forward again, using a strange hitching lock-kneed walk. Light leaked into the sky and the sun hit my face. I had fifty miles to go. I was not going to quit. I was going to get to that finish even if I had to crawl up the Whitney Portal Road on all fours.
I passed through Panamint Springs at seventy-two miles, then the Darwin turnoff at ninety miles, then Lone Pine, the tiny outpost town at the base of Mount Whitney, at 122 miles. At dusk, I turned up the Portal Road and saw the runners who had already finished being driven back down the road in support cars. The drivers honked their horns, and the passengers hung out the window and cheered. I tried to stand up straighter and look strong, at least for a few strides. The air was cooler and smelled of pine. When I looked back, I could see dozens of small white lights—the headlamps of racers on the long road behind me. This was my struggle; they had theirs. Everyone ahead of me and everyone behind me—and every member of every crew—would have his own story.
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