James, a friendly, athletic-looking guy about my age, offered me a seat. Then I launched in. The Sahara. Four thousand miles. Three friends. Top runners. Do the impossible. Dunes. Tuareg nomads. Land mines. Two marathons a day. Camels. Heat. Mirages. Sand. Oases. Pyramids. The Red Sea. Never been done. Because it’s there! Our North Pole! Our Everest! I took a breath. Sweat trickled down from my temples. James gave me a close-lipped smile and nodded while he waggled a pen between his thumb and index finger. Then he stood up. The meeting seemed to be over, so I stood up, too.
He extended his hand. “Okay. I’ll do it.”
“You’ll . . . do it?”
“Yeah. If you do this, I’m there with cameras. Let me make some calls and set up meetings with production companies. I’ll get back to you.”
I walked to my car in a daze. An Oscar-winning director had just told me he wanted to make a movie about Kevin, Ray, and me running across the Sahara Desert. Which meant that—holy shit—we actually had to run across the Sahara Desert.
I called my mother to tell her about the meeting.
“That’s wonderful, Charlie. Follow your dreams.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“You really are going to see the whole world, aren’t you? I love your passion, even though you are a little crazy.”
“Well, I get that from you.” I laughed.
“Me? No,” she said quietly. “I . . . just . . .”
There was a long silence.
“Mom?”
Nothing.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Today I . . .”
“What?”
“Today I got lost on my way home from the grocery store.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve always had a lousy sense of direction.”
“No. This was different. I didn’t know where I was. Nothing looked familiar, and it’s the same route I’ve been taking for years.”
My throat tightened. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—had suffered from Alzheimer’s for years before her death. “I’m sure it’s nothing, Mom.”
“Where did you say you were going?”
“The Sahara. I’m going to run across the desert.”
“Good for you, Charlie. Follow your dreams.”
- - - -
A little more than a week after our meeting, James called and said the production company LivePlanet was interested in partnering with him on our project. They loved the enormity of the physical and mental challenge—and the potential the film had to shine a light on the difficulties faced by the people living in the North African desert.
“Matt Damon and Ben Affleck own the company,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Matt wants to produce and narrate the film—if that’s okay with you?”
“Matt Damon wants to narrate.” I nearly choked. “Well, I was hoping for someone better. . . .”
James laughed.
Armed with the Matt Damon news, I decided it was a good time to call my father. I hadn’t mentioned the Sahara idea to him yet.
“What?” he said. “What about your job?”
“This is an incredible opportunity, Dad.”
“How are you going to make a living?”
“I’ll figure it out. This could lead to some amazing things for me.”
“Shit, Charlie. When are you going to stop this nonsense?”
“Never, I hope,” I snapped.
I did have to quit my job at Extreme Makeover: Home Edition—planning the expedition required my full attention—but I had money in the bank thanks to some real estate investments I’d made with profits from the hail business. I’d started in the mid-1990s with two vacant lots and a small house, which I renovated, at Sunset Beach in North Carolina. When their values started to climb, I sold them. I had great credit and enough money to keep rolling into the next property. When Mom moved to Cape Charles, Virginia, a small Eastern Shore town that seemed about to boom thanks to a big golf resort that was being developed, I bought two properties there. I figured I could sell one or both if I had to.
Marc Joubert, one of the LivePlanet producers, called and invited me to New York. Matt Damon, I was excited to hear, wanted to go for a run with me. I met them both on a street corner in lower Manhattan.
Matt looked like any other fit guy in a baseball hat and running clothes until he shook my hand and flashed his movie-star smile. “Take it easy on me.”
I smiled back. “Don’t worry, I promised I would return you unharmed.”
I had no intention of running Matt Damon into the ground. We ran at a casual pace through the streets of SoHo. It was fun to watch people’s reactions as we went by. Some lit up with recognition and elbowed each other. Some shouted, “Hey, Matt!” or “Jason Bourne!” We covered a little over ten miles, and after we finished, we stood and talked for a while. Matt said he had never been to Africa, but hoped to get there soon. He asked me if I had any races coming up. I told him I was doing Badwater again in July.
“Badwater?”
“One hundred and thirty-five miles across Death Valley. It’s usually about 130 degrees. One of my favorite races.”
“I don’t understand how you do that.” He laughed. “I can’t run more than twelve miles. After that, my body starts breaking down.”
“No, it doesn’t. You could go farther. You just have to reconfigure your relationship to pain.”
- - - -
I got busy meeting with potential sponsors and investors, building a support team and mapping out the daunting logistics. I was also training hard for Badwater, not wanting a repeat of the miserable race I had in 2003. This time I paced myself well, had a great crew, and finished third, an improvement of more than ten hours from my first try. I was getting the hang of this.
In October, I enlisted my friend Donovan Webster, a National Geographic writer, to accompany me on a scouting trip to Africa. With his professorial wire-rimmed glasses, close-cropped hair, and safari shorts, he was a kind of thinking man’s Indiana Jones. Unlike me, Don had traveled in the Sahara and knew many people who could help us, including Mohamed Ixa, a prominent Tuareg leader and head of a top desert-guide company.
After meeting with Mohamed in Paris, we flew to Dakar, Senegal, and made our way a few hours north to Saint-Louis, a French colonial city at the mouth of the Senegal River. It had a New Orleans feel to it, especially at night: the jazz coming out of the small clubs, the smell of fish and delta mud, the weight of the air. A multi-arched steel bridge spanned the river. Cross it and you were on mainland Africa on the westernmost edge of the Sahara. As soon as I saw it, I had no doubt: our journey would start here.
We moved on to Agadez, Niger, where we got a promise of support from UNICEF, and then flew to Cairo. Without an appointment, we went to the office of Zahi Hawass, the famed archaeologist who was Egypt’s head of antiquities. When his secretary told him Don Webster was here, Hawass invited us in right away. Don seemed to know everyone, everywhere. I was happy I’d asked him to help me direct the expedition—and floored when Hawass said he would allow our film crew access to areas not open to the public.
Throughout the scouting trip, Don and I talked about water. Keeping hydrated would be the runners’ biggest challenge. Thanks to LivePlanet and sponsors, we would have the resources to do that. Gatorade came on board and planned to use Kevin, Ray, and me as test subjects. We laughed about sacrificing ourselves to the Sahara for the sake of science, but for most of the desert people, hydration was a serious concern. The struggle for water defined their daily lives. I learned dirty water and poor sanitation caused 80 percent of illnesses in Africa—and one out of every five deaths of children under the age of five was due to a water-related disease.
I wanted to use the Sahara run to raise money, and I knew n
ow where we could put our fund-raising energy. When I got home, I, along with Matt Damon and LivePlanet, created H2O Africa, the charitable arm of Running the Sahara, with the goal of bringing clean water to some of the communities on our route.
- - - -
How do you prepare to run two marathons a day, mostly on sand, for three straight months, often in hundred-plus heat? We had no training manuals or guides For Dummies to give us tips. Kevin, Ray, and I had to devise our own plans. I did know that we were not training to get faster; we were training to stay healthy under extreme duress. I logged about a hundred miles per week, lifted weights, and did yoga to balance out my fitness. Most of my runs were between ten and thirty miles, but some days I did half a dozen shorter ones so I could get used to starting and stopping and starting again. If I was going to the store, I would run for half an hour before getting in the car. Then, after I got home and unloaded the groceries, I went back out and did a quick ten miles. I came back, made calls, threw a load of laundry in, and went out for another hour. I forced myself to run at all times of day—especially those times when I didn’t feel like running.
Ray, Kevin, and I talked a lot about food: what to eat, when to eat, and how to eat. I had been a vegetarian for years and wasn’t sure what foods would even be available in the desert. Like most runners, we usually waited awhile after a meal before heading out, but in the desert we wouldn’t have that luxury. Nutritionists at Gatorade advised us to take in about ten thousand calories a day; most of those calories would have to be eaten while we ran. To train my body to digest on the fly, I forced as much food into my stomach as possible before I ran. I hated starting out with a full belly, but I knew I had to get used to it.
- - - -
We planned to start the expedition in March 2006. Any later and we would bump into summer heat. I thought Ray, Kevin, and I could handle it, but I worried about our crew and the production team. Then, I got the bad news that some of the financing for the film had fallen through. We had to push the start date back to September, and then again to November, while the producers sought more investors. Even with Matt Damon as the executive producer, financing a film such as this was difficult.
My own financial situation was getting trickier as the weeks and months ticked by. I’d put up the money for the scouting trip and for other travel associated with the expedition, and though I was promised reimbursement by the production company, I was carrying heavy balances on my credit cards. I was also paying several mortgages and sending Pam alimony and child support every month. Plus, a home-renovation business I had invested in was not panning out the way I had hoped it would.
I took a trip up to Cape Charles to visit my mother and to talk to my real estate broker about putting one of my properties on the market. When I came back from my meeting with the broker, I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table, staring straight ahead. A pen and paper were on the table in front of her.
“I forgot how to spell the,” she said before I even said hello.
“What do you mean?”
“I was writing a letter and misspelled the word the. I knew I had spelled it wrong, but then I couldn’t think of how to fix it. Such a simple word.”
“You’re probably just tired. Don’t worry about it.”
But I knew she was worried. We both were.
Not long after my visit, Mom went to Emory University for tests. A doctor told her it was early-onset Alzheimer’s. She was sixty-three years old. I told her I wanted to call off the expedition so I could spend more time with her, but she insisted that I go.
“I’ll be fine. Go on now and don’t worry about me. You’ve made big plans and commitments to people.”
She was right. I had a contract with LivePlanet. We had investors and sponsorships. Ray and Kevin were counting on me. I was too far in to back out now even if I wanted to. My mom would have been pissed if she thought I was canceling the trip on her account. She had always encouraged me to be free and live my own life, and that’s what I was doing, even if my heart was aching to stay close to her.
Just before I left for Senegal, my broker called to say she had an offer on the condo—but it was for roughly $100,000 less than what I had paid for it. I didn’t understand how it could have lost so much value. Maybe the appraisal I’d gotten when I purchased the property had been wrong. Something was off, but I didn’t have time to deal with it. I signed power of attorney over to my accountant, David Johnston, who said he would get answers from the lenders—and try to negotiate a restructured deal in my absence. In the meantime, I made the difficult decision to stop making payments on the properties—not because I didn’t have the money, but because the values of both were plummeting. I felt uneasy; I had never missed a payment or gotten behind on paying for a property since my first house in Monterey. But I believed David would come up with a plan and everything would work out.
CHAPTER 9
When you go far, far beyond, out across the netherlands of the known, the din of human static slowly fades away, over and out.
—ROB SCHULTHEIS, Fool’s Gold: Lives, Loves, and Misadventures in the Four Corners Country
On November 1, 2006—two years after Ray and I had first joked about running across the Sahara, our team gathered at a picnic table at Zebrabar, a campground and rustic resort on the sandy east bank of the Senegal River. It was the first time we were all together: Don, Mohamed, James, Ray, Kevin; Jeffrey “Doc” Peterson, a sports medicine physician, and Chuck Dale, a massage therapist and friend who had crewed for me at Badwater. We had a map unfolded on a table and were going over the plan for the next morning, when we would begin the run. Except for the big green bottles of Gazelle beer on the table and the pervasive smell of dead fish, the scene reminded me of an AA meeting. “One day at a time” would be our mantra, too.
James had once asked me what I thought this film would be about. I said I didn’t know, but I was certain that if three guys ran across the Sahara Desert, some shit would happen. We had laughed about that, but it was the truth. There was no storyboard to follow; no script to consult. We agreed it was best to keep contact between the runners and the production crew to a minimum. We would run. They would follow us in trucks and film.
“If you miss a shot of us running over a dune,” I said. “We aren’t going to do it again.”
James assured me he wouldn’t ask us to do anything that wasn’t organic to the expedition.
That night, I lay sweating under mosquito netting in a tiny, airless bungalow. I could hear big river crabs bumping up against the outside walls, and workers banging pots in the restaurant. After a few more sleepless hours, I heard the film production crew get up. I knew it was time. I sat up in bed, swung my feet down to the sandy floor, and took a deep breath. I rattled off the Serenity Prayer in my head, something I did every morning.
When I was using drugs, people were always telling me I was crazy. I could stay up later and do more drugs than anyone else they knew. Hell yeah, I used to think. Crazy! I loved being crazy. Why would I want to be a run-of-the-mill addict? I wanted to be different, to be extreme. I liked putting that pipe to my lips and watching people’s eyes get big as I inhaled. I got a rush thinking about the risks of the next hit and the next. When I got sober, a part of me worried that my life would be intolerably boring. Where would I get that kind of marrow-deep thrill? I found it first in marathon running, and when marathons became routine, I found it in adventure racing and in ultras. The more “out there” the challenge, the more people told me I was crazy, the happier I felt.
But, sitting there on that low bed, listening to the voices of the people I had convinced to join me in this particular insanity, I felt queasy and anxious. I was a champion salesman, and this was the biggest deal I had ever closed. I had assured Matt Damon—Matt fucking Damon—that three men could run across the Sahara Desert. I’d promised Kevin and Ray that the financing was there and the support crew was p
repared and that James Moll would not make us look like jackasses. But I didn’t know if these things were true.
Plus, one big hole remained in our itinerary. We did not have permission from Libyan officials to enter their country. Don had been working on it for months, but still had no answer. What if we reached the border and couldn’t continue? Or, what if something awful happened en route—one of us was kidnapped—or even killed? Why had I conned these nice people into following me to their doom in the desert?
- - - -
A helicopter hovered overhead while James, wearing a safari hat and vest, shouted directions. Ray, Kevin, and I walked to the water’s edge on a garbage-strewn Saint-Louis beach shared by fishermen and cows and feral cats. We waded knee-deep into the Atlantic and gave each other high fives. After we had posed for snapshots, we dried our feet and put on our running shoes. I pushed the button on my watch as I had done so many times in my life and started to run. Mohamed and Don followed us in a red Toyota 4Runner, hazard lights flashing, as we made our way past honking taxis, horse-drawn carts, market tables piled high with green melons, and groups of women in bright dresses balancing bowls on their heads.
“Can you believe it? Can you believe we’ve actually started?” I shouted to Ray and Kevin as we headed across the long bridge to the mainland.
“Only 6,499 kilometers to go!” Ray said.
One of the production guys ran up to us. “Hey, Charlie. James wants you to run across the bridge again.”
“Shit. Seriously?”
We went back and started again.
- - - -
Eventually, we ran away from the congested city and into the Sahel, the hardscrabble zone between the true desert and the humid grasslands to the south. Acacia trees and clusters of pale adobe houses dotted the brown expanse. Kevin, in dark glasses, ran straight-faced and silent. Ray and I were shoulder to shoulder, giggling like kids, waving and saying to everyone we saw, “Bonjour, bonjour!”
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