For the first time that day, I was smiling.
It had been the hottest day yet, and the sun was dangerously intense. The camp was near an old sheep station, and I tried to rest up in one of the barns, but the metal sides had turned it into a furnace. I settled for the tent, where the air was stale and the temperature was above 110 degrees. With Gobi curled up at my side, I drifted in and out of sleep. Part of me was looking forward to the chance to lie back and recover, but these times in the tent were the moments when I missed Lucja most of all.
Even before I came to China, I knew racing was going to be hard without her there. Work commitments meant she couldn’t join me, but this was only the second race we hadn’t entered together. And even though we hadn’t run side by side since that first marathon in France, where I’d dressed as a pig—with her as a bumblebee—I relied on her in so many ways, especially at the end of each day. She’d be the one who would get out of the tent and be sociable with the other runners, and whenever I became frustrated or was bothered by something, she’d always help take the sting out of it. In more than one race, she’d talked me out of quitting entirely. I needed her, especially when unexpected problems came up as they did with Tommy.
But today had taught me something else. I missed Gobi. She was a great distraction from the boredom of hour after hour of running across an unchanging landscape. The way she ran—determined, consistent, committed—inspired me too. She was a fighter who refused to give up. She didn’t let hunger or thirst or fatigue slow her down. She just kept going.
It was a bittersweet moment, for I knew what was coming tomorrow.
Day five was the long stage. Almost fifty miles in even hotter temperatures. I’d already made arrangements for Gobi to be looked after by the organizers again, and I knew they’d take good care of her.
Long days have always been my speciality, even more so when the heat is cranked up. But after only two days of running with Gobi at my side, something had changed. I was beginning to enjoy running with her, watching her little legs power through the day. I knew I’d miss her again.
I didn’t get much sleep that night. The air was too hot and still to get comfortable, and after four days of running without having a shower or even changing my clothes, my skin was coated in a thick layer of dried sweat and dirt. Gobi couldn’t settle either. She got up a few times, trotting out of the tent to go and bark at the sheep. I didn’t mind, and nobody else in the tent complained. I guess we were all too busy trying to get our heads ready for what was coming next.
8
I might have grown up in Australia, but I still have to train for the heat. Living in Edinburgh means going months without the temperature rising above 60 degrees, and if I didn’t take matters into my own hands, I’d not be able to cope out in the desert.
The solution was to turn the spare bedroom at home into a mini heat chamber. I bought two industrial heaters—the kind you’d expect to see drying out a house that’s been flooded—as well as two small portables. I bought a heavy blind for the window and discovered that if it’s just me in there, the thermometer will top out at 100 degrees. If I can persuade Lucja to join me, it’ll rise a little higher.
The sessions are brutal. I wear winter running tights, a hat, and gloves, and set the incline on the treadmill as high as it will go. The humidity is intense, and even when I don’t wear a backpack loaded with six or seven kilos (thirteen to fifteen pounds) of sugar or rice, I still struggle as I get into the second and third hour.
I’d put in more of these sessions in my training for the Gobi Desert event than I had for any other race. And when I wanted to change things up and run in some scorching dry heat, I’d pay a hundred pounds for an hour-long session in the heat chamber at the local university. Lucja said she’d never seen me so determined and focused, and I knew I had no other option. I’d run the Marathon des Sables twice already, where the heat even topped 130 degrees from time to time, but I’d never felt much pressure to perform back then. At Gobi, I knew it would be different. The guys on the podium would be the ones who coped with the heat.
Day five started an hour earlier, at seven o’clock, and as I stood on the start line, I went through my race plan for the hundredth time. Go quick through the road section at the start, take the desert section steady but strong, and then—depending on the heat—drop the hammer and race it home. I was still third overall, but there were just twenty minutes separating number one from number four. I needed a good day. I simply could not afford to mess up anything.
From the beginning of the day, I ran the way I wanted. I was out front, leading the pack at times and then dropping back to let someone else carry the burden for a while. I was concentrating hard on my stride and missed the markers at one point. I led the pack the wrong way for a minute until someone called us back. We tracked back, still in formation, to where the runner was waiting for us to resume the lead. There was no need for anyone to try and get an unfair advantage. The course and the heat were enough of a challenge by themselves.
The terrain was less helpful. The first six miles were through thick tufts of camel grass occasionally interrupted by brief sections of uneven asphalt. After that, we moved onto the “Black Gobi” sand. It was still early, but already it felt like the temperature was more than a hundred. It was obvious that the heat was going to be cruel, and I let myself ease up a little on the pace. A couple of people overtook me, but I didn’t mind. I had a plan to stick to and guessed that in a few hours, as the sun really started to attack, I’d be overtaking anyone who had pushed himself too hard in this middle section.
I let my mind drift to Gobi, wondering what she was doing while I was running. I also made a point of noticing the scenery around us, knowing that I was unlikely to see it ever again, and hoping to keep my mind from slipping into boredom. As soon as we had hit the black sand, all signs of human life fell away. On previous days we had run through remote villages where curious locals stood and watched in the shade of their single-storey houses. At other times the route had taken us along dried-up riverbeds as wide as a football field where people stopped and stared, and across wide-open plains where the ground was the colour of fire. But as we pushed deeper into the Gobi Desert, there were no signs of human life. Nobody could make a life for himself in terrain so brutal.