I trusted that as long as I kept Tommy and this Romanian guy in my sights, I’d be all right. If I was close at the end of stage one, keeping pace but not overcooking, I’d be putting myself in the best possible position for the rest of the week.
Halfway through the day, when the Romanian started to tire and fell back so far behind us that I could no longer hear him, I looked up and saw a sand dune towering up ahead. It was steep and wide, easily three hundred feet high. I’d seen dunes like it in Morocco, but this one seemed different somehow. The sand on the side looked harder and more compact, but the path I had to run up was soft and offered almost no resistance at all.
There’s a key to running up a sand dune, and I learned it the hard way back when I first competed in the Marathon des Sables. I didn’t know that you have to keep your stride as short as you possibly can, ensuring a quick cadence to avoid the sand breaking underneath your feet and slowing you down. I didn’t know that sometimes the longer path is easier than the shorter one. As a result, I tanked and came in so late at the end of the first day that I was seriously considering dropping out altogether.
Tommy attacked the dune ahead of me, but after just a couple of strides it was obvious that sand in the Gobi Desert was not like the Saharan stuff. It must have rained in the area overnight, and the sand was darker, clumpier. It gave way with the slightest pressure, falling away like weak clay, and at times I had to use my hands to gain a little extra grip. We weren’t running up it; we were scrambling.
Once we were finally at the top, I could see the dune more clearly. The only option was to run along the narrow peak that stretched ahead for almost a mile. On both sides, the dune fell away, and if anyone put a foot wrong, he’d end up falling all the way down to the bottom. It would take ages to clamber back up, wasting precious time and precious energy.
Tommy was loving it. “Look at this view!” he shouted. “Isn’t it magnificent?”
I said nothing back. I’m scared of heights and was terrified that I’d fall. I moved ahead as cautiously as I could. More than once my foot slipped, and I threw my arms out in a desperate attempt to regain my balance. At that point I didn’t particularly care how much ground Tommy made on me. All I could do was stare at where my feet were heading and hope that the sand held.
As much as I hated being on top of the dune, when it came time to run down it, I was in heaven. I put a bit of power into my legs and sprinted down as fast as I could. By the time I hit bottom, I overtook Tommy. I felt his surprise and heard him keeping close behind me.
We ran side by side for a while until the Romanian caught up with us, and then the three of us traded the lead from time to time. The course took us through muddy fields and over bridges, alongside a giant reservoir. The vast sands and cruel heat of the Gobi Desert were a couple of days away, and we ran through remote villages that belonged in another century. Tumbledown buildings squatted on the land like an abandoned movie set. Occasionally we’d see locals, standing and staring impassively at us. They never said anything, but they didn’t seem bothered by us either. It wouldn’t have made any difference to me either way. I was flying by this time, full of hope that the race in the Gobi Desert might not be my last race after all.
4
I was born in Sydney, New South Wales, but grew up in an Australian outback town in Queensland called Warwick. It’s a place that barely anyone I meet has visited but one that contains the kind of people everyone can recognize. It’s farming country, with traditional values and a strong emphasis on family. These days it’s changed a lot and become a small, vibrant city, but when I was a teenager, Warwick was the kind of place that would fill up on a Friday night. The pubs would be crammed with hardworking men looking for a good night out involving a few too many beers, a couple of fights, and a trip to the petrol station—which any self-respecting Australian calls the ‘servo’—for a meat pie that had been kept in a warmer all day and was hard as a rock.
They were good people, but it was a cliquish town at the time, and everyone knew everyone else’s business. I knew I didn’t belong among them.
It wasn’t just the scandal of my abnormal childhood and family situation that prompted people to react badly. It was the way I behaved. It was who I had become. I went from being a polite, pleasant little kid to an awkward, pain-in-the-ass loudmouth. By the time I was fourteen, I was the class joker, riling the teachers with my crowd-pleasing comments, getting thrown out of class, and swaggering my way out of the school gates as I walked to the servo for an early afternoon pie while the other fools were still stuck in class.
And when my school year ended and the headmaster greeted each of us with a handshake and a friendly word about our futures at the final assembly, all he could say to me was, “I’ll be seeing you in prison.”
Of course, there was a reason for all this, and it wasn’t just the pain of losing my dad—not just once but twice over.
I was falling apart because everything at home seemed to me to be falling apart.
It seemed the loss of her husband hit my mum hard. Really hard. Her own father had returned from the Second World War traumatized, and like so many men, he turned to alcohol to numb the pain. Mum’s childhood taught her that when parents are struggling, home isn’t always the best place to be.
So when Mum became a widow in her early thirties with two young children, she coped the only way she knew how. She retreated. I remember days would go by and she’d be locked in the bedroom. I cooked meals of eggs on toast or spaghetti out of a can, or else we went to Nan’s, some other neighbour’s house, or, if it was Sunday, church.
From what I could see, Mum would go through phases where she became fixated with keeping the house immaculate. She cleaned relentlessly, and on the odd occasion that she did cook for herself, she’d clean the kitchen frantically for two hours. Neither I nor my little sister, Christie, could do anything right. Kids being kids, if we’d leave crumbs around the place, smear our finger marks on windows, or take showers that lasted longer than three minutes, it might upset her.
Ours was a half-acre, filled with trees and flower beds. While Mum and Dad used to love working in it together, after Dad’s death it was up to me to get out and keep it tidy. If I didn’t do my chores, I felt life wasn’t worth living.
When Mum would start nagging at me, pretty soon she’d be yelling at me and screaming. “You’re useless,” she’d say. I’d scream and yell back, and soon we both would be swearing at each other. Mum never apologized. Nor did I. But we both had said things we’d later regret.