In the end, it was the running that helped ease my fears. Soon after Gobi’s operation, I was invited by someone I’d met in Urumqi to take part in a single-stage race in a different part of the Gobi Desert. The organizers had gathered fifty of the world’s best sixty-mile specialists for the race in Gansu Province, next to Xinjiang. It’s not a distance I usually run—at least, not as a one-day, point-to-point race—but somehow I was still in pretty good shape from the training I’d managed to put in for the Atacama race I’d skipped.
But now the Gansu race organizers were offering free lodging and free return flights home to Edinburgh in exchange for me taking part in the sixty-mile run and giving them a PR boost by meeting with journalists. I had quite a few requests for interviews and photo shoots, all of them from journalists interested in getting an update on Gobi and capturing me in action. The thought of being able to use the ticket to fly back and see Lucja again was too tempting to resist.
Just four days before the race, I received even better news from the race organizers. They had a few spaces still available and were willing to pay to fly in any other elite runners who might want to compete. I called Lucja right away. It was a crazy idea to come all the way to China and run so far at such short notice, especially as six weeks earlier she’d completed a brutal five-day, 300-mile challenge across Holland. But as well as being a world-class runner, who finished thirteenth among the women in the 2016 Marathon des Sables, Lucja’s a tough lady who loves an adventure. She said yes immediately. Forty-eight hours later she was on a plane heading east.
I was a little worried about Gobi. But Kiki had promised to take good care of her, and I could trust her. Besides, I had the feeling that Gobi wouldn’t mind a few days of serious pampering in Kiki’s recovery pool and grooming parlour.
As soon as I knew Lucja was coming, I was all in. Running has played a special part in our relationship, and the race coincided with our eleventh wedding anniversary. I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate how far we’d come together.
One of my favourite memories of running with Lucja comes from the first Marathon des Sables we competed in together. As with most multi-stage ultras, you get your finisher’s medal at the end of the long stage (usually the penultimate stage of the race). I was surprised how well I was doing, and as the long stage came to a close, I knew I had secured my finisher’s spot just outside the top one hundred. For a first-time runner—who almost quit on day one—among thirteen hundred other runners, it wasn’t too bad a result.
I cleared the final ridge that hid the finish line from view and saw the crowds up ahead, cheering the runners home. And there, a few hundred feet back from the finish, was Lucja. She’d started earlier than me that day, and I hadn’t expected to see her on the course. But there she was, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked back in my direction.
“What are you doing here?” I said when I finally reached her. “I thought you’d have finished an hour ago.”
“I could have,” she said. “But I wanted to finish with you, so I waited.”
We crossed the line hand in hand. She could have finished so much higher up, but she chose to wait for me.
I still think about that when I run today.
It was good to get back to the desert, good to be able to run without traffic or pollution, and most of all, great to see Lucja. We’d been apart for almost six weeks, and I wanted to spend every minute I could with her. So even though I thought I could have placed fairly well, I was far happier to hang back and run the race together with her.
The route led us twice around a thirty-mile loop. It was a hot day, easily in the 110s, and as we completed the first lap, we saw that the medical tent was already doing good business. And a bunch of people had decided to throw in the towel and quit. They had started the race far too quickly, had pushed too hard, had struggled in the conditions, and didn’t want to keep pushing through a second loop. I’ve bailed on more than my fair share of training runs, though never because of the heat. It’s the Scottish mud, wind, and rain that send me back to the car.
We ran the first thirty miles a bit slower than I’d planned, but I figured we still had a good eight hours to get around the rest of the course before the fourteen-hour cut-off.
As we started the second loop, Lucja had second thoughts.
“You go, Dion. I don’t have it in me,” she said.
Lucja and I have run enough races to know when it’s time to throw in the towel and when it’s time to grit it out. I took a long look at her. She was tired, but she was still fighting. This was no time for towels.
“We can do this,” I said. “I’ve got a television crew following me, and the organizers have really looked after us; we owe it to them. I’ll get you round it. Just stick with me.”
She did what she does so well and dug in. We kept going, running from marker to marker, ticking the miles off as we went.
Things got worse, with eighteen miles to go, when a sandstorm struck up. Visibility was cut to less than one hundred feet, and it was getting hard to see the markers. I thought back to the huge sandstorm at the end of the long day when Tommy nearly died. I didn’t have Gobi to look after, but I had Lucja to protect. With no sign of any race officials around us, I started to formulate an emergency plan if the sandstorm got any worse or if Lucja started to tank.
She didn’t, and the storm eventually lifted, but the winds were still strong. They had blown our hats off, and our eyes stung with sand. Debris was flying everywhere. We pushed on, though we were making slow progress between markers, only moving on to the next one if and when we could see it. Lucja tried taking a gel to give her some energy, but every time she did, she threw it back up again.
When we reached the next checkpoint, it was a mess, everything blown away and the volunteers looking shell-shocked. We pressed on, though, despite the fact that we were running slower than ever. I thought it was odd that nobody was passing us, but I put all my effort into encouraging Lucja to block out the pain and keep going.
We passed another half-destroyed checkpoint and kept going, knowing that we had eight miles left to run.
It was dark by now, and when a car approached with its headlights on full, the whole sky lit up. “What are you doing?” the driver asked.
“We’re racing,” I said, too tired to try and be funny.
“But a lot of people have been pulled already because of the sandstorm.”
“Nobody told us at the checkpoint. We’ve only a few miles left, and we’re not stopping now.”
“Okay then,” he said, before driving off.
Those last few miles were some of the hardest I’ve ever seen Lucja complete. Amid tears, shouts, and serious pain, she held on to an unshakable determination to finish.
As we crossed the line, I held her hand.
“Happy anniversary,” I said. “I’m so proud of you.”