“I need to sit in the car,” I said. “I don’t feel well.”
I didn’t know if it was in the rules or not, but I didn’t care. I needed to cool down immediately.
I yanked on the rear door and threw myself and my bag down onto the backseat. The AC was on full blast, and it was like stepping into a refrigerator. It was beautiful. I closed my eyes and let the cool air get to work.
When I opened them again, I had to blink and rub my eyes to check that I had read the dash properly. “Does that really say 132 degrees?” I said.
“Yeah,” said the guy behind the wheel. He and the other volunteer didn’t say anything else, but I could see him watching me closely in the rear-view mirror.
“Can I have the water?” I asked, pointing at a bottle that had a frozen cylinder of ice inside. I was convinced that it was the best drink I’d ever had in my entire life.
I pulled a gel from the pouch around my front. It was hard to get my hands to work properly, and some of the sticky substance ended up on my chin, chest, and the car seats. I figured I’d wait the ten minutes it usually takes for a gel to kick in, then be off. But as the time passed, I felt steadily worse.
My head was drifting, and I was finding it almost impossible to keep my eyes fixed on any one thing for more than a few seconds. The band around my chest wound tighter with each breath, and I could feel my lungs grow heavy within me.
“Come on,” I said to myself, long after the gel should have worked. I was trying to summon the energy to pick up my bag and move, trying to command myself to get out and keep going, but nothing happened.
The cold air wasn’t working as I hoped it would, but the thought of opening the door and stepping back out into that heat once more made me scared. Even if I could get my body to obey me and haul myself out of the car, could I even make it to the next checkpoint, let alone the finish?
It was at that point when my chest exploded. My heart started racing, and I was panting, desperate to pull in any air I could.
I glanced up and caught the driver looking back at me in the mirror. In his eyes I saw fear. Fear and panic.
It set off a second explosion within me. Only this time it wasn’t my heart that started racing; it was my mind. For the first time ever in my life, I was genuinely scared for my safety. For the first time ever, I wondered if I was about to die.
9
Come on! Now, Dion, now!
It was no use. No matter how tightly I closed my eyes or gritted my teeth, I couldn’t make myself move from the back of the car. All I could do was breathe in the cold air and hope that something would change.
Minutes slipped by. I tried another gel. I tried stretching to relieve the pressure in my chest. I tried to remember my race plan. Nothing worked.
I wondered what had happened to Tommy. I hoped the car had reached him in time and the volunteers had been able to get him the help he needed. My best guess was that his race was over.
I had been looking out of the car for a few minutes when it hit me that I’d not seen any other runners for a long, long time. I thought about the gap I needed to make up.
“How did Zeng look when he came past?”
“Not great. He was struggling a lot and just walking.”
That was all I needed to hear. I’d wasted fifteen minutes in the car, so I now needed to make up thirty-five. If he was still having a hard time, there was a chance I could do it. And if I did, I’d be in the overall lead.
I got out of the car with some trepidation but anxious to make up for the time I’d lost. I could feel the heat, and it took me a while to catch my breath and steady my feet. But eventually I was running again. Not fast, but steady.
That pace didn’t last very long. I had enough energy to run only a few hundred feet, but after that I was walking again. At least my heart had stopped its wild beating, and I was able to think more clearly. I managed to run the flags for the remaining miles, stumbling ahead, looking at nothing but the pink markers before me, and thinking about nothing other than placing one foot in front of the other.
Eventually I was confronted by a series of tall, wind-formed cliffs. I crested a sand dune that ran through the middle and saw the finish line up ahead.
Just like the day before, Gobi was waiting for me in the shade. She ran out to join me for the last two hundred feet, but as soon as we crossed the line, she ran, panting, back to the shade, where she collapsed in a heap.
“Any news on Tommy?” I asked one of the volunteers.
He smiled and arched his eyebrows. “It’s amazing,” he said. “They got him cooled down, and eventually he started walking again. Filippo’s with him, and they’re doing okay.”
I knew Filippo Rossi, a Swiss runner who was having a good day. I was delighted and relieved in equal measure to hear that he and Tommy were together.
The two other finishers—Brett and Zeng—had clearly been home for a while, and when I saw that the gap between Zeng and me was forty minutes, I knew he’d nailed it. We had the one stage left to run, and since it was only a handful of miles, I would never be able to make up that time in so short a distance.
When Tommy finally crossed the line with Filippo at his side, the whole camp was buzzing. Everyone knew what had happened by then, and Tommy’s remarkable recovery and resilience were given all the praise they deserved. Nobody seemed to know anything about me helping him in the first place, but I didn’t mind so much. What meant more was the hug Tommy gave me when he first saw me. He was in tears, and I was welling up. There was no need to say anything at all.
I waited in my tent as I had done every afternoon, drifting in and out of sleep with Gobi curled up at my side. I hoped none of the other runners still out on the course had come as close as Tommy had to being in serious trouble, and I wondered how Richard, Mike, Allen, and the Macau boys were. Despite the less-than-perfect start, I’d come to like the Macau boys. They genuinely cared for one another and had spent every evening giving one another massages. They were good guys, and, in a way, I was going to miss them.