“Cairo?” I shouted to some construction workers sitting under a tree. I pointed east. “Cairo? This way?” They lifted their hands in a puzzled salute.
Our general plan was to run about twelve hours a day, heading out before dawn, then taking a break in the midday heat, and starting again in the afternoon. Our team would drive roughly five kilometers ahead of us and be ready with drinks, food, and first aid when we reached them. The goal was to get us in and out quickly, like a crew at a NASCAR pit stop. When we quit for the night, they would have camp waiting.
James and the full production team would be with us shooting for the first ten days, then they would rejoin us in the middle of the expedition somewhere around Agadez, Niger—and again at what we all hoped would be the triumphant end on the shore of the Red Sea. At least one cameraman would be with us the entire way—and I would supplement their footage with my own video camera.
We ran about twenty-two miles and reached a reservoir and cement tower that marked the border between Senegal and Mauritania. Thanks to our humanitarian goals, we had gotten the support of the United Nations before we left. We hoped that would ease our way across borders, but apparently these guards hadn’t gotten the memo. The sight of the twenty of us—three runners and a half dozen support people, two camera crews and trucks loaded with gear—must have been overwhelming to them.
“What’s going on?” I asked Don after he had conferred with the guards.
“Most of Mohamed’s guys only carry their local ID cards. They’re nomads who consider the entire Sahara their home and see no need for passports.”
The Mauritanian government did not agree. We sat in the hot sun and swatted mosquitoes while Don and Mohamed made phone calls and talked to officials. Hours went by.
“This is torture,” I said, as we watched other travelers being allowed over the border. We were already behind schedule.
It was dark when a Mauritanian guard lifted the red-and-white metal gate and allowed us to run through.
“Merci!” Ray said.
On our second day, with the ground temperature at a withering 140 degrees, Kevin, the smallest of us, showed signs of severe dehydration. We had to stop several times so Doc could hook him up to an IV. When Kevin felt better, we ran again. Then Ray cramped up and felt nauseated, and he, too, needed intravenous fluids. We got in thirty-five miles before we quit for the day.
Months before we stepped foot in the desert, I warned James and everyone on the expedition team that the runners would likely appear to be on death’s door, especially in the first days of the expedition. That was the way it went with long runs: you had to tumble into the pit of ruin before you could claw your way out. But when you got out, you would be stronger in every way. That was what endurance was all about. They said they understood, but now that we were in the middle of the breakdown phase, they were spooked.
- - - -
To be honest, I had some serious concerns about Kevin and Ray, too. They were both exceptional runners. I had seen their toughness and determination in the Amazon and elsewhere. I didn’t understand why they seemed so beaten down after just four days. We had talked for hours about what it would be like. We knew it would be beyond anything else we had ever experienced—and that was one big reason it was worth doing. It seemed as if they weren’t feeling what I was feeling: the exhilaration of being on the precipice, the rush of being pushed to the breaking point. I knew they could do this, but I wasn’t sure they knew it.
On day five, when things should have been turning around for us, Kevin and Ray both felt worse.
During our lunch break, Doc pulled me aside. “You can’t keep pushing them like this!”
“We have to keep moving. I’m already getting flack from LivePlanet about being behind schedule.”
“I don’t care about your production!” Doc barked. “You’ll be running alone if you keep this up.” I understood that it was difficult for him, as a doctor, to see us in pain. His instinct was to do everything he could to ease suffering.
“Look, I know this goes against your training, but this is what we all signed up for,” I said firmly. “You have to adjust your standards.”
We both took a deep breath and settled on a compromise. Doc asked me to at least alter the plan—run at night and sleep during the day. I agreed to try it for a few days, but we found it impossible to sleep in the savage afternoon heat. Harassed by mosquitoes and flies and scarab beetles, Kevin, Ray, and I sweated more lying on our thin foam mats in our tents than we did when we were running. Now we were dehydrated and sleep deprived.
We tried another approach: take a longer break in the middle of each day.
Both Kevin and Ray had developed tendinitis in their lower legs, and my right knee was hurting. (I’d had surgery on it earlier in the year, but I’d kept quiet about it. I didn’t want anyone worrying about my ability to complete this expedition.) I was sure that most of our issues were because we weren’t taking in enough fluids. To accommodate our injuries, we adjusted our gaits, which slowed our pace. By day six, we had run just 136 miles—less than half of what we should have logged.
We had reached the paved Trans-Mauritanian Highway, a straight road that shot across the baked plains and disappeared in a shimmering mirage on the horizon. Trucks and cars barreled past at a hundred miles per hour, blinding us in swirls of sand and choking exhaust. The Mauritanian government had built a few wells in this area, and the water attracted nomads and their livestock. Fast cars and big animals were not a good combination. Every hundred yards or so, we came upon the stinking corpse of a dead donkey, goat, sheep, cow, dog, or camel. Vultures perched on the carcasses, or on the mangled and burned-out cars that hadn’t survived the collisions, and eyed us as we went by.
“He thinks we look like lunch,” I said about one massive buzzard that seemed to have drawn a bead on us.
“Not yet, buddy,” Ray said. “Check in with us in an hour.”
By day seven, Kevin was in such bad shape it seemed he might have to quit running. I felt terrible for him, but I had made it clear before the expedition began that we wouldn’t be able to wait for anyone for more than a few hours if he was having serious issues. We had to keep moving. The LivePlanet execs implied they would pull the plug if we got too far behind schedule. I didn’t think they would—not at this early stage anyway—but I was aware they were spending more than $3 million on the film. We had to suck it up and get in the miles.
- - - -
And then, after ten torturous days, we all started to feel better. It was as if our bodies said, “Okay, I get it, you’re trying to kill me. Time to make some adjustments.”
On day eleven, we all ran well. Nobody vomited, nobody needed IVs, nobody looked as if he wanted to die—or strangle me.
“It’s like a whole new expedition!” Don said with happy wonder during our midday break. “If we keep it up, we might actually be able to do this.”
It was good to hear that. I needed his full support—and I needed him to project confidence to Mohamed and his crew. If they started to think we weren’t going to make it, they might bail on us. If that happened, we were done. I also needed Don to assure the producers that we were making good progress. More than anything, I wanted him and the others to trust me. I believed we could run across the Sahara Desert—if we just stuck to the plan. I needed everyone else to believe it, too.
One afternoon, after a solid morning run, we stopped to tour a United Nations Development Programme water project being built to supply a thousand people with water for drinking and farming. In Mauritania and other sub-Saharan countries, decades of severe drought and overgrazing had led to the desertification of what had once been arable land. Herders were forced to abandon their livestock and settle in cities, where they almost always fell into extreme poverty. With water projects such as this, which we learned cost about $10,000 each, the nomadic people had a shot at survival.
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Through a translator, I asked a man how much he was being paid to work in the fields.
He looked puzzled. The translator asked him again. He smiled. “No pay.”
“Then, why are you working so hard?” I asked.
“He says it is to create a better life for his children,” the translator said. “If the village grows enough crops, they can sell the excess and earn money to build a school.”
I was humbled by the simplicity of his dreams. This man wanted a better life for his kids, same as me. But he wasn’t hoping to buy them a bike or a video game; he wanted them to get an education—and water was the key to that. He gave a face to our mission and made me even more determined to help.
After we visited the wells, the locals threw us a little party in a Berber-style tent. We feasted on spicy couscous stew and olives and fresh-baked flat bread slathered in camel butter. Colorfully dressed women danced, and singers ululated for us. I was coerced onto a camel and bumped around in a circle to the howling delight of the crowd.
- - - -
At night, I looked at pictures of my sons. I had spoken with them a few times on the satellite phone since we’d left Senegal. They sounded good, busy, happy. We talked about how the Tar Heels were looking and what cool things my boys had planned for the weekend. They wanted to know if I had seen any scorpions. (Several had crawled over my feet while I was talking to them on the phone, but when I told them, they didn’t believe me.) I said I loved them. It was important to me to say those words every time I spoke to my kids. I hadn’t heard them from my own father until I was thirty years old.
- - - -
We continued across the barren, heat-blasted flats of Mauritania. The harmattans had come in from the east, the winds strafing the gravel plains and dimming the sun with dust. Though it was ninety-five degrees, we put on long-sleeved shirts, pants, gloves, and ski masks to protect ourselves. My nose started to bleed and wouldn’t stop.
“I haven’t had one of these since I stopped doing blow,” I said with a laugh, my head tipped back, as Doc tried to stop the bleeding. He smiled and rolled his eyes. Everyone there knew my history.
Most of the locals we encountered were friendly. Some waved or turned their palms skyward as if to say, “What are you up to?”
“That’s the Mauritanian version of WTF,” I said to Ray.
“Cairo!” I shouted happily. “Pyramids!”
Sometimes, Ray, who was fluent in French, stopped to talk with villagers. I envied his ability to communicate with them.
“They have no idea where Cairo is,” Ray said after one exchange. “Or what the Pyramids are.” We were truly in one of the most isolated places in the world.
Occasionally, things happened that reminded us we were in a tumultuous region. Pickup trucks filled with armed men sometimes came alongside us and slowed to a menacing crawl. Political caravans rolled by with loudspeakers blaring. Mauritania was about to have its first free election since 1961. One group handed out pink armbands and we put them on, trying to fit in. We realized that was not the best idea when the green party drove past us and pelted us with chicken bones.
On the evening of November 15, we arrived in Kiffa, a city of about thirty thousand. Drifted sand all but obscured the narrow streets. We ran through a market, past carts piled with oranges and bananas. Men holding big butcher knives stood over fresh goat carcasses waiting to hack whatever animal part their customers requested.
We set up our tents under a shelter at an auberge on the far edge of town. I took a shower in a trickle of lukewarm, rusty-smelling water and shaved for the first time since Senegal. Then we all went to bed. It was impossible to sleep. The night was full of city sounds—grinding truck gears, yapping dogs, raised voices. Just before dawn, the call to prayer wailed over loudspeakers at the nearby mosque. I couldn’t wait to get back out into the quiet of the desert.
The days went by in mind-numbing uniformity. Up at 4:00 a.m., coffee, breakfast, run until noon, lunch, rest, run until 7:00 p.m. It was the time after the running that I found most difficult. As expedition leader, I had to deal with logistics and problems that popped up during the day, and there was always something. An argument about whose turn it was to use the satellite phone. Ray needed more running shoes. Someone had gotten to use the computer just as the battery was dying. The constant back-and-forth with our producers in LA about the budget and schedule. By the time I crawled into my sleeping bag, I was wiped out. And I knew that, in just a few hours, I’d get up and do it all over again.
The good news was that Kevin, Ray, and I were getting stronger every day. Some of our injuries had healed as we ran—and some we had accepted would be with us for the duration. Doc treated our blisters and aches each night, but he had stopped thinking he had to make everything right. We were running roughly two marathons a day, every day. He got it: this would hurt.
The bigger challenge was dealing with the tedium of running. Besides several audio books, including biographies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Max Brooks’s World War Z—all of which I listened to at least twice—I had loaded fifteen hundred songs on my iPod, everything from Eminem to Mariah Carey to Linkin Park. I put the music on “shuffle” and commanded myself to never skip a song. I believed the one that came on was the one I was meant to hear at that moment. I would not mess with the iPod DJ gods. Still, the “random” selections were exasperating; songs didn’t seem to play with equal frequency. (When I was home, I checked the playlist statistics and found out that my suspicions were correct. Train’s “Meet Virginia” came up nine times; Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” played forty-three times. No wonder I had that damn song stuck in my head.) Ray had only 250 songs on his iPod, so he had to face even more repeats. He told me one day he had listened to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” twenty-three times in a row. We never knew what Kevin was listening to, but he often put on his headphones at breakfast and kept them on until dinner. I sometimes wondered if he was listening to anything at all or if the headphones were just his way of saying, Leave me alone.
When we weren’t listening to music, Ray and I talked in circles, cracking ourselves up. We quoted movies, and Ray bored me with talk of how good Canadians were at everything. We talked about what color our poop was that morning and how much we were farting. Ray went on and on about how much he missed his wife, Kathy. Kathy does this and Kathy says that. I had never seen anyone so in love. It drove me insane.
“You owe me a dollar every time you say her name,” I teased him.
“Kathy, Kathy, Kathy, Kathy, Kathy,” Ray taunted, and I sprinted away from him howling.
We also amused ourselves by teaching Kevin English curse words. We started with motherfucker, one of my favorites for its versatility and the way it rolls off the tongue. First, I made sure that Kevin understood that motherfucker was one word, not two, a common mistake made by rookies. Next, we worked on intonation, beginning with the cheerful “Hey there, what’s up, motherfucker?” to the angry “Get your hands off me, motherfucker” to the slow, emphatic “Motherfffucker”—so useful when you missed a flight or dropped your cell phone in the toilet. Kevin caught on quickly.
Some mornings Ray picked out what he called the word of the day—perfect was one—and used it so often that by the end of the day Kevin and I wanted to strangle him. And we told each other jokes, the same ones again and again. One of my standards was something I had heard long ago from an AA sponsor.
“Hey, Ray,” I said. “You know how to eat an elephant?”
“No, Charlie. How do you eat an elephant?”
“One bite at a time.”
One bite at a time. That was the only way to deal with the enormity of what lay ahead. Focus on the present: this footstep and this footstep and this footstep. When the morning miles accumulated, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, I
allowed myself to think about lunch. After lunch and a rest, it would begin again. This step, that step, this step . . . until we had logged our second twenty-five miles and we could stop for the night.
Some days, though, I commanded myself to see, really see, where I was, to not lose myself in music or mind games. To hear the high-pitched wind, feel the sand needling my shins, take in the bigness and the beauty of the Sahara. And, my God, it was beautiful: the crescent dunes in late-day shadow, the silhouette of a camel train led by men in robes; the red rocks that rose like citadel towers out of the dust and haze. Every day, I thanked my higher power for bringing me to this place.
- - - -
On day twenty-seven I could hear Kevin vomiting outside his tent. I looked at my watch: 3:30 a.m. He’d gone to bed saying he didn’t feel well. We had all hoped he’d be better after he got some sleep. I heard him retch violently again.
By 5:00 a.m., everyone, including Kevin, was up. I could tell he didn’t want to run.
“Let’s just try,” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Just see how you feel. Once you are moving.”
We took two hours to cover five miles.
“You’re doing great, Kev,” I lied. But after another hour of watching him shuffling and wincing, I couldn’t take it any longer. I knew he needed a break. We stopped and Doc gave Kevin two full bags of IV fluids. Then we all waited while he slept. At 2:00 p.m., he got up and said he would try again.
“You’re a tough man, Kev,” I said.
While Kevin was an experienced runner, this kind of suffering was new to him. From a young age, he was groomed to be a superstar. Many Taiwanese were surprised by his desire to go beyond marathon running. But I understood it. Kevin, like Ray and like me, had a void that could only be filled by pushing himself beyond his limits. I don’t think Kevin fully recognized this yet, but I knew. I wanted him to dig deep, to see where this suffering would take him. But on that afternoon, he could not make himself go. I saw the pleading in his eyes. It was pointless to keep pushing him.
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