I’ve spent a couple of days running like that in Morocco, and I’ve been fortunate enough to compete in a heap of other races too. Every time I’m one of the front runners, whether there are choppers overhead or nothing but damp-looking volunteers sheltering from the Scottish weather, the high stays with me for days afterward.
In fact, I don’t even have to be in first place to get my winjunkie fix. I’m also a realist, and I know that I’m never going to win a race like the Marathon des Sables. Those top-ten slots are the preserve of the most gifted endurance runners on the planet. I’m just a hobby runner who came to the sport late in life after a decade of life as a fat bloke stuck on the couch. Against professional athletes who have spent their lives running, the odds are never in my favour.
That means I must set my goals carefully. At an event where the best in the world are running, winning, for me, is a top-twenty finish. The buzz I’d get from finishing that high up the table at Marathon des Sables would be every bit as sweet as an Atacama gold spot.
I’m thankful that in the few years I’ve been running, I’ve become well acquainted with the highs of my sport. I also know the lows, and there’s nothing I hate more than being unable to compete. Being injured to the point where I can’t move as quickly as I think I should really kills me. Being overtaken by people I know I’m faster than hurts like a knife in my heart. Being so down on myself that I choose to stop and bail on a race entirely, as I did on my very first ultra, is about as bad as it gets.
Those experiences can leave me feeling drained and depressed. I get angry with myself and frustrated to the point of wanting to throw it all away. In those times I’m not much fun to be around.
Searching for Gobi on the hot summer streets of Urumqi, I could feel the crash coming. I could tell it was going to be a big one.
I’d been on a high since finishing second in the Gobi Desert race. Part of that was the success of the run, part was the continued success in my training, and a whole lot of it was thanks to the excitement about bringing Gobi home. As soon as she went missing, I kicked into action mode—first working out how to find her, then how to tell the supporters, then how to get myself out to Urumqi to join in the search. Life had been frantically busy right from the moment of that dreaded phone call, and I’d not had a chance to stop.
All that changed once I arrived in Urumqi. When I woke up for the first time in the hotel, the reality of the situation finally caught up with me. I was convinced all was lost.
I knew I needed to put on a brave face for the rest of the search team, so when Lu Xin came to collect me soon after breakfast, I put on my sunglasses and my biggest smile and tried to pretend that everything was fine.
We spent the morning resuming our poster campaign, working systematically along the streets and putting a poster on the windscreen of every parked car that we could see. More often than not, if we returned to the street an hour or two later, we’d find all the posters removed and piled up in a rubbish bin.
We had a couple of arguments with the guys whose job it was to keep the streets clean. The first time it happened, the old man wouldn’t listen to Lu Xin’s attempts at an explanation. The second time it was the doctor who stepped up. She faced off with another old guy, and this one was putting his heart and soul into the shouting. Flecks of spit were flying from his mouth as he ripped up a handful of the posters that he’d swiped from the first few cars. The doctor got up in his face, shouting just as loud. They were both speaking so fast that I didn’t bother asking Lil to translate, but I could tell the doctor was refusing to back down.
Eventually she won. The old man took a good hard look at me, put up his hands, and backed away. The doctor’s performance was as much of a surprise to the others as it was to me, and we all stood, staring in awe when she turned back towards us.
That was about the only good moment of the day. The rest of the time I spent trying not to let my thoughts spiral away from me. It was almost impossible. All it would take would be a glimpse of the mountains in the distance, and I would worry that Gobi had tried to head back to the kind of terrain with which she was familiar.
Midway through the afternoon there was another flurry of activity as news of a possible sighting came in. Someone had sent a picture this time, and it was clear to me that the dog looked nothing like Gobi. I was all for giving it a miss, but the rest of the team wanted to check it out. After the previous day’s letdown, I was surprised the team was still so positive.
The dog wasn’t anything like Gobi, of course, and I went back and sat in the car as soon as I could. I probably looked as though I was desperate to keep going, and, in a way, I was. But all I really wanted was just a moment’s rest. Wearing the fake smile was killing me.
By the time Lu Xin returned me to the hotel, it was late at night. We’d got rid of thousands of posters along miles and miles of parked cars. We’d argued with street cleaners, begged with shopkeepers, and seen countless drivers return to their cars and throw the posters to the ground without even looking at them. I had not eaten since breakfast, was still jet-lagged, and was told that the hotel restaurant had already shut down for the night.
I ordered some room service, took a drink from the minibar, and tried calling Lucja. No reply. So I waited some more and took another drink. Then another.
When Lucja called back, a great surge of sadness flowed out of me, like water down a drain after the plug is pulled after a bath. I couldn’t talk for a minute or more. All I could do was cry.
When I finally caught my breath and wiped my face, Lucja had some news for me. She’d been e-mailing Kiki since I left Edinburgh, and they’d both agreed that with me in Urumqi now, we needed to do all we could to get the local media to cover the story. She had spent a lot of the day getting in touch with outlets, and after a lot of communication difficulties, she had arranged for one of them to come and interview me the next day.
“It’s just a local TV show,” she said. “It’s not much, but it’s a start. Maybe it’ll kick things off, like the Daily Mirror article did.”
“I hope so,” I said. We both knew my heart wasn’t in it.
“Hey,” she added. “Someone on Facebook said that you need to make sure those posters aren’t just in Chinese but are also in whatever language the Uighur read. You’ve done that, haven’t you?”
“No,” I sighed, eyeing another drink. “Lucja, this whole thing’s impossible. If she went farther into the city, there’s traffic everywhere and great packs of stray dogs that would probably rip her to pieces. If Gobi went out to the mountains, she could be a hundred miles away by now, and even if we could somehow know what direction she went in, there are no roads to follow. All we’ve done is hand out posters, and now we find out that none of the locals can read them. We’re finished even before we’ve begun.”
Lucja knows me well enough to let me rant a while longer. Only when I’d run out of words did she speak again. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”