At last, I reached the switchbacks, and finally, thirty-eight hours after I had started, I crossed the finish line. Somehow, I had come in eighth place. I was met with a smattering of applause and a few cheers. I think someone called out my name. My crew hugged me and helped me sit down. I read their faces; I must have looked like death. But I had done it. With their help, I’d finished Badwater.
Next time—and I was certain there would be a next time—I would be smarter. I would remember that going out too fast always cost at least double any time you had gained. I would deal with problems as soon as they came up. I had felt small blisters developing on the soles of my feet early in the race, but I ignored them because I didn’t want to stop to treat them. By the time I looked at them, they were the size of coasters and the pain was almost unbearable. I’d keep my crew closer to me and drink more fluids. And I would train hard for the downhills, not just the uphills. I had to prepare my body for the punishment of the descents. The pounding had done me in. I wouldn’t let that happen again.
- - - -
Two months later, I checked my backpack one last time before the start of the Gobi March. I had packed all the required gear, including the minimum fourteen thousand calories, which I had satisfied with about seven pounds of freeze-dried meals, PowerBars, oatmeal laced with Ensure protein powder, Oreo cookies, Snickers bars, and baggies full of smashed Fritos and potato chips. The pack seemed to grow heavier the closer we got to start time.
Spectators had been arriving all morning on donkeys, camels, bicycles, and motorbikes, and now they lined the top of the weathered remnants of the Great Wall of China and stood along the ropes that marked the first fifty yards of the course. I looked out at the terrain we were about to cross. I had expected the desolate flats, but not what lay beyond them—high peaks forming a forbidding-looking wall. We were going to have to go through those mountains.
“So, remind me when the Sherpas come for our packs?” I said to a cluster of lean, fast-looking racers.
No laughs. Not even a polite smile.
The countdown began. I got in a ready position and looked at my feet. Three—two—one. I and the forty-one other racers took off. Almost instantly, I was engulfed in a suffocating cloud of brown silt the consistency of powdered sugar. It was in my eyes, my mouth, and my nose. I couldn’t see or breathe. I stumbled and regained my footing, then fought to get out of the middle of the pack so I wouldn’t be in the front guys’ dust. I knew I was going out too fast, but I had to get to clear air. I chased down the lead group, my backpack thudding on my shoulders. I was going at a full sprint—not at all how I had planned to start out. My chest burned and I felt my quads start to seize. I thought I might puke. I was only minutes into a six-day race and I was in the grips of an anaerobic emergency.
I knew I needed to calm down. I’d been in this situation before: the all-out effort, the pain, then the rising of a wild, fluttering panic, like a bird flushed from a thicket. The only way out was to relax. Let your body do its job. Breathe. I started to feel a little better as I settled into a rhythm that I could maintain. At last, I was in clear air. Running shoulder to shoulder with the lead group, I waited to see what they would do. When they sped up, I hit the gas. When they slowed down, I eased off. We were testing each other, looking for that sweet-spot pace that would allow us to survive while keeping us out front.
I looked ahead, seeking out the small flags that we were told would mark the route. In the distance, I noticed a small dust cloud. It wasn’t big enough to be kicked up by a support vehicle. An animal, maybe? I watched the puff move steadily forward.
“What’s that?” I said to the guy on my right.
“What?” He matched me stride for stride.
“Out there. The dust. Something’s kicking it up. See it?”
“Yeah. Got to be Kevin. Sub-two-thirty marathon. Guy’s a rocket.”
Kevin Lin, a five-foot-four-inch, twenty-six-year-old Taiwanese grad student, crushed me and everyone else on that first day. He also won Stage Two, a thirty-five kilometer canyon trek that included ten river crossings. Stage Three required some orienteering and I was able to make up time as Kevin got lost for a while. That seemed to scare him enough to make him dial back his pace. As he slowed, I sped up, and by the end of the day I had closed the gap on him to about thirty minutes.
Stage Four was forty-three kilometers across high plains. Kevin and I ran together for the first ten miles. His English wasn’t great, so we ran mostly in silence. When we arrived together at a calm emerald lake at about fourteen thousand feet, we stopped to check it out. I dipped my hand into the frigid water and brought my fingers to my mouth. It was salty and bitter.
“Charlie,” Kevin said. I looked up and he was smiling and holding over his head a set of yak horns he had found. I laughed and took a picture of him. Then he pointed at me and I handed him the camera, took the horns from him, and swiped on the ground with one foot like an angry bull.
After we had skirted the lake’s edge, we started down a rocky slope and I saw a chance to make a move. After my experience with the downhill portion of Badwater, I’d put in months of training trying to get better at descents. Some of it was about foot placement and technique, but mostly it was about attitude, finding that happy medium between being on the brakes and being out of control. I knew if I was out of Kevin’s sight, I would be harder to catch. And I knew I had better navigating skills than him. I pushed as hard as I could, rounding corners and scrambling over ledges. I imagined I was a mountain goat, sure-footed and fleet. It was one my best running days ever. By the end of that stage, I had taken the overall lead.
Kevin went out hard the next day, but I stayed with him. We seemed to have an understanding. We would run this stage together. We even waited for each other to pee or get a rock out of a shoe. Ed Poynton, a strong American runner living in Hong Kong, ran with us, too.
The final 10K stage began with a climb up and over a steep six-hundred-foot dune. Kevin was ahead of me as we struggled in the soft sand. When we finally crested the dune and made it down to a paved road, he sped out of view, as I knew he would. Even if he won that stage, though, I was pretty sure I had a big enough time cushion that he couldn’t overtake me in the standings.
I chased Kevin past old beacon towers and through the streets of Dunhuang. Children in white shirts with red bandannas cheered and waved. Gongs sounded when I made the final turn into a courtyard of an ancient Ming Dynasty hotel. Kevin was waiting for me when I crossed the finish line. We high-fived and hugged. A Buddhist monk presented me with a medal. I had won the Gobi March. I had told my dad before I left for China that he could follow the race online. I wondered if he had checked to see how I was doing.
The following July, in another distant desert, Kevin and I went head-to-head again. This time we were in northern Chile for the 250K Atacama Crossing, a seven-day race that included a fifty-mile stage across the Valley of the Moon—terrain so desolate that NASA used it to test its Mars Rover vehicles. Stage One started out above the tree line at 13,500 feet in a tiny, abandoned village of clay-red houses. Kevin and I quickly put distance between ourselves and the rest of the pack. He was in superb shape and had kidded me about getting revenge for Gobi. I could feel him testing me, surging, then slowing down, then surging again to see if I would fold. I hung in there with him until he turned on the jets with a few miles to go. He beat me that first day by about forty-five seconds.
The second stage was across baked salt flats, a portion of which had a strange breakable crust. Kevin was fifty pounds lighter than me and seemed to dance across the fragile surface; I sank in with every step. When I finally got through the worst of it, I looked up and was surprised to see a figure in the distance. I got closer and saw that it was Kevin, standing there with his arms crossed.
“Why take so long?” he said, smiling.
We ran side by side again. There were no extended mountain passes o
r tricky technical downhills where I could use my expedition experience; all I could do was try to hang on. Nearing the end of the fifty-mile stage, Kevin surged ahead again. We both knew the only way he would lose the overall race was if he overslept or broke a leg. I could do nothing but enjoy the experience, shoulder to shoulder with my friend. We ran through cold slot canyons and past shallow lakes dotted with pale-pink Andean flamingos. We adopted a stray dog, who followed us out of a village one day despite our efforts to shoo him back. At night, when we stopped to camp, we gave him water and freeze-dried beans. “Arturo” stayed with us for the entire race.
On the final day, Kevin and I arrived together at the finish in the sunbaked town square of San Pedro de Atacama. He had beaten me by a little more than three minutes—but we both knew that he could have won by whatever margin he wanted. I was happy for him. A mutual friend had told me that the Gobi defeat had been difficult: Kevin was a superstar in Taiwan, sponsored by the state and under enormous pressure to perform. I understood how much this victory would mean to him back home.
We met again a few months later in the Jungle Marathon, a 220K stage race through the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. The race began poorly for me. I had planned to fly with Lisa Trexler, the woman I was dating, from North Carolina to Manaus. Lisa was attractive, with long chestnut-brown hair. She’d married at eighteen, had three children, and was divorced by thirty-one. Lisa hadn’t traveled much, but she had an adventurous streak and was excited to be coming with me to the Amazon as a volunteer race worker.
Unfortunately, we missed our connecting flight in DC, which meant that we would also miss the steamboat that was ferrying racers and crew ten hours up the Tapajós River to base camp. I figured our Jungle Marathon was over before it began. I had already adjusted my thinking about the weekend—instead of wading with piranhas, I was going to be hanging out with Lisa and plowing through some pints of Ben & Jerry’s and rented DVDs. Then the phone rang. It was Shirley Thompson, the race organizer, calling to say that if we could book another flight to Brazil, she’d find a way to get me to the starting line. Several hours later, Lisa and I were on a Manaus-bound plane.
Ten minutes before the race was scheduled to begin, the helicopter Shirley had arranged for us swooped low over the broad Amazon tributary and landed in a swirl of sand and debris on the riverbank beach. The only way I could have looked like more of a jackass was to have had “Ride of the Valkyries” playing as I stepped out of the chopper.
I spotted Kevin among the racers wiping sand from their eyes. He greeted me with a big hug. I said hello to a few runners I knew and introduced myself to some I didn’t. One was Ray Zahab, a Canadian runner who was relatively new to the adventure-running world. He would tell me later, when we had gotten to be close friends, that on that first day when he shook my hand he thought, Wow, this guy is a tool. I didn’t blame him. I would probably have said worse than that.
I adjusted my backpack shoulder straps and lined up with seventy-four other competitors under a starting-line banner. After that entrance, I felt pressure to have a strong showing. Kevin, Ray, and I surged to the front of the pack, along with several local runners who were fast even though they were either barefoot or in sandals, and carrying their race gear slung over their shoulders in plastic trash bags. I was embarrassed to be in my slick formfitting tank top and shorts and my expensive running shoes.
We came to a wide stream and had to swim. Once we scrambled up the slick riverbank on the other side, we were plunged into hilly, dense jungle. This was not a run; it was more of an obstacle course, with obstacles designed to maim. Trees sported thorns as big as knitting needles. Menacing roots seemed as if they might suddenly coil around your ankles as you tried to pick your way over them. Snakes slithered in the foul swampland ooze, and tarantulas dropped like hairy paratroopers from broad-leafed trees. It was the hardest first day of any ultra I had ever run. Somehow, though, I won the stage.
Day after day, we slogged our way in the saturated, overheated air through the jungle muck. At night, Ray and Kevin and I set up our camouflage hammocks near each other and cursed our fungal feet and the bugs and whatever mutant gene drove us to do these things to ourselves.
“This is really pretty stupid,” I said.
“Yes. Stupid,” Kevin said.
“Very, very stupid,” Ray said.
We all laughed.
- - - -
“Tell me about Atacama,” Ray said one night.
I told him about the baked red hills and the lunar salt flats. “It’s the driest place in the world.”
“Dry,” Ray said. “God, I love dry.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“Dry is good,” Kevin said.
“The sky must be amazing,” Ray said.
“It’s endless,” I said. “One night, some astronomers showed up in our camp with these huge telescopes and let me look through. You can’t really wrap your head around what you’re seeing, you know? You feel so small.”
“I like feeling that way,” Ray said. “Small.”
“It reminds you that you have no control over anything,” I said.
“Atacama. I’ve got to do that one.” Just as I was falling asleep, Ray spoke up again. “What’s Gobi like?”
I described the ruins of the Great Wall and the yurts and the luminous rolling dunes.
“Yes,” Kevin said. “Very nice. Big dunes.”
“I’ve really got to do that one,” Ray said.
“You really do,” I said.
We were quiet again.
“Charlie?” Ray said.
“Yeah?”
“Did I tell you about the Marathon des Sables?”
“Yes, Ray. But you can tell me again.”
Finally, he stopped talking and we lay there listening to the symphony of jungle noises. Some of the other racers were snoring loudly, competing with the bellows of howler monkeys.
After a while I heard Ray say in a comical stage whisper, “You still awake?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I was just thinking,”
“Yeah?”
“I wonder if anyone has ever run across the Sahara Desert?”
“You mean, like, the whole thing?”
“Yeah,” he said, “the whole way.”
“Huh. Probably not.”
“Yeah. Probably not.”
Tomorrow was the longest stage—the one that would likely determine the victor. I had fallen back in the standings, but I thought I could handle the jungle better than anyone else there, and I was pretty sure I could win. I was right about that. But instead of imagining that moment of victory when I closed my eyes, I saw desert: clean bright bands of sky and sand. And I saw the horizon, that horizon that was always pulling you forward, always receding. That would be something, I thought as I felt myself finally dropping into sleep. Really something. To run across the Sahara.
CHAPTER 8
Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.
—JACK LONDON, “Getting into Print: An Essay”
Back home, I did some research and found no evidence that anyone had, in fact, ever run coast-to-coast across the Sahara. That just fanned the fantasy: “firsts” in the adventure world were almost impossible to come by. I spent hours looking at maps, tracing my finger in a meandering diagonal line from Senegal through Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Libya, to Egypt and the Red Sea. The more I studied it, the more I became convinced that it could be done—and that Ray and I were just the nutjobs to do it. The life-altering conversation I had with him went something like this:
“Hey, Ray.”
“Hey, Charlie.”
“So, you wanna run across the Sahara Desert with me?”
“I would love to run across the Sahara Desert with
you.”
And like that, the Running the Sahara 2006 expedition was born. Ray and I wanted a third runner to join us—and we agreed it had to be Kevin. When I reached him in Taiwan, Kevin said yes right away. (Though his English had improved from when we first met, I wondered if he understood exactly what I was asking him to do.) I calculated—and seriously underestimated—the distance we’d have to run to be about four thousand miles. If we aimed to complete it in about three months, which I figured to be the longest amount of time that the runners or support crew could tolerate, we’d need to run about fifty miles a day for eighty days. If things went well, maybe we’d even get some days off.
I told anyone within earshot that my friends and I were going to run across the Sahara Desert. Lisa said she was excited for me, even though we both knew that my going off to Africa for three months was not conducive to a meaningful relationship. We had talked about marriage. Our kids got along great, and even Pam sometimes came over when both families were getting together. But I just wasn’t ready—and I don’t think Lisa was, either. We needed time. Still, we wanted to stay together and made tentative plans for her to visit at Christmastime, when I guessed we would be somewhere in Niger.
- - - -
Several colleagues said they thought the run would make a great film. A buddy of mine knew James Moll, a director who had won an Academy Award for a documentary he’d made with Steven Spielberg about Hungarian Holocaust survivors. He suggested I go talk to James and helped set up a meeting.
As I drove to Warner Bros. Studios, I rehearsed what I planned to say. I hoped James might be intrigued enough to connect me with some scrappy student filmmaker who wanted an adventure. I got lost on the huge back lot, dodged a studio tour tram filled with sightseers who looked disappointed that I was a nobody, and rushed in, late and apologetic.
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