By the time I arrived at the restaurant, I was kind of missing Gobi already, even though it had been only a few hours. Besides, I’d only ever seen her out in the open or in a tent. How would she cope being in a town, with roads and traffic, restaurants and hotels?
I realized that there was so much I didn’t know about her. Where had she been living before she joined the race? Had she ever even been inside a house before? How would she react to being shut inside from time to time? How old was she? Perhaps most important of all, did she like cats?
So much had happened the week of the race, but months, maybe even years, of Gobi’s life before the race would forever be a mystery to me. I’d watched her playing when she thought I wasn’t looking, and I was pretty sure that she was less than a year or two old. As for what had happened to her beforehand, I was at a total loss. If she had been mistreated, she didn’t have any scars and certainly wasn’t carrying any injuries that had stopped her from running well over seventy-seven miles in total. So why had she run away? Had she got lost? Was there an owner somewhere out near the sand dune on the edge of the Gobi Desert currently fretting about his little dog who had gone missing?
Everyone I had spoken to thought this was unlikely. Gobi wasn’t the only dog I’d seen on the run, and even the few hours I’d spent in Urumqi and Hami told me there must have been thousands of dogs roaming the streets in both places. Stray dogs were everywhere, and all the Chinese I had spoken to told me that Gobi must have been one of them.
At the restaurant I looked for Nurali and Gobi, but there was no sign of either of them. None of her team was there either, only the race organizers. I found one of them and asked about Nurali.
“I thought she was supposed to be coming here and bringing Gobi with her,” I said.
She looked confused. “No, Nurali was never going to be coming here. She’s got too much to do back at the finish line.”
“Is she coming here at all before we leave tomorrow?”
“I can’t think why she would.”
I walked away, deflated.
It bothered me that I wasn’t going to get to see Gobi to say goodbye properly. And it bothered me that the plan we’d sketched out wasn’t being followed. Had something been lost in translation? Had something gone wrong already? Was Gobi still okay?
The thing that bothered me most was the fact that I could feel myself starting to stress about it. Part of me wanted to do what I normally did after a race and switch off from everything for a few weeks—from dieting, from running, from having to force myself to become so laser-focused on the one goal ahead of me. I wanted to relax and not care.
But that wasn’t even an option. I did care. Feeling protective of Gobi wasn’t a switch I could simply flick off.
I was distracted throughout much of the awards night, but I listened hard as Brett got up to receive his third-place medal and gave a powerful but brief speech. “What I’d like to say is that for everyone who has sacrificed their race to help other people, I take my hat off to you. It shows what great human beings are in this world.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself. I’d been able to do something to help Tommy, but I was far from the only one. Filippo had stopped too, and there had been so many other examples of people’s putting themselves second and choosing to put someone else first. From the way the Macau boys looked out for one another to the ways people who had been total strangers at the start of the week gave constant encouragement to one another. One of the things I love most about these events is that as you push yourself to the absolute limits of physical endurance, you make some of the deepest friendships of your life.
Of course, I didn’t know any of that when I signed up for my first multi-stage ultra. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I’d make it to the start line, let alone finish the whole thing.
Our ultra-marathon journey began around Christmas 2012. Lucja’s birthday is on 23 December, and in the months beforehand she’d been talking about wanting to move up from marathons and take on something tougher. So I’d bought her a beautiful coffee-table book called The World’s Toughest Endurance Challenges. I’d looked through it before wrapping it, astounded by events such as the Marathon des Sables, the Yukon Arctic Ultra, and the Yak Attack in Nepal, billed as the highest (and, I guessed, the most dangerous) bike race in the world.
This was before I’d taken part in the half marathon where I ran myself into the ground to win a free meal from my friend, so I was utterly convinced that every single one of the events in the book was beyond me. Still, I thought it might be kind of fun to dream about doing one of them one day a decade or more down the road. And in the festive atmosphere, with a bottle of champagne open beside us, I was feeling pretty good about life as I watched Lucja open the book, so I said these fateful words: “Whatever page you open to, that’s the one we’re going to do together.”
I sat back, took a drink, and watched Lucja’s eyes grow wide as she saw the cover.
“Wow,” she said, looking at it front and back, “this is amazing.”
She closed her eyes, opened the book to a random page, and stared.
Silence. I watched her scan the page, absorbing every detail.
“Well, Dion, it looks like we’re doing the Ka-la-har-ree Extreme Marathon.”
“What the hell’s that?” I asked.
She didn’t look up but carried on, staring at the page, calling out the brutal facts: “Northwest of South Africa, near the Namibian border … you run 155 miles … six stages over seven days … temperature is in the 120s … carry your own food … only get water at certain times … and it’s in the desert.”
I thought hard about my response. This was her birthday after all, and I wanted the gift to be a nice thing.
“No chance.”
“What?” she said, looking up at me. “I reckon it sounds pretty good.”
“Listen, Lucja, there’s no way we could do that. What if something happens to one of us? And what do you mean you have to carry your own food? They don’t give you anything at all? How is that even possible?”
She looked back at the book, flipped a couple of pages, and then slid it over to me and pulled out her iPad. I stared at the pages, a feeling of dread starting to grow within my guts.
“There’s a whole bunch of blogs from last summer’s race up here on the site,” Lucja said. “And there’s a Facebook page … and a contact form.”
I stopped her. “Lucja, it says it’s a couple of thousand pounds each. And that’s without flights.”
“So?”
“So we could just have a nice holiday in the sun somewhere. Why would we want to do something stupid like running across a desert?”
Lucja looked hard at me. It was the same look she’d given me as I lay on the couch in New Zealand and she challenged me to the run. I knew that this was one of those pivotal moments in our lives.
“You said we’re doing it, Dion. So we’re doing it.”