Sand Marathon 5

Sand Marathon

The Long Haul

We’re now into our longest day: 80km non-stop through the desert. In a poignant attempt to wage psychological warfare with myself, I size up the sand dunes and try to convince myself that they are not as tall as they seem. The CSO fires his gun and we’re off again. The landscapes change dramatically and seem especially alien and foreboding today.

The day is hotter than usual. The desert burns its way up through my shoes to my feet. At each checkpoint, I see casualties. Something tells me that this stage won’t be easy. Surprisingly, I’m feeling OK so far and have a good pace going. “Now the real fun begins” I say to myself as I race across a dry salt lake bed to the 40km mark.

But just as I’m feeling smug about being in the top 50 runners, I feel a devastating nausea take over my body. I must be dehydrated, but the nausea is so bad that I can’t get myself to drink water. I realize that if I don’t drink, I’ll completely dehydrate within minutes and be out of the race. So I pour water into the cap of the bottle and sip, pause, sip, pause, sip. I try to hydrate myself back up 1 cc at a time. But to no avail. I can’t run. I can hardly even walk. There is no shade and no mercy. I’m toast.

Somehow I stumble through the desert, with runners overtaking me on all sides, until evening falls. The desert cools off and my nausea starts to recede. I realize that I took too many salt tablets in the morning and my blood salt was way too high. These are the types of small technical mistakes that can ruin a race.

Slowly my body gathers strength as I breathe in the cool night air of the desert. We navigate from stick light to stick light placed on poles in the desert. Distance is meaningless; only time matters. But time goes by far too slowly. My kidneys hurt. My entire being hurts. I want nothing more than to lie down and rest. But I keep bumbling along. At two in the morning, I cross the finish line and collapse into my sleeping bag. More than half the participants are still behind me, I think before passing out. “Good God,” I say to myself, “they must be hating life right now.”

So far so good, right before dehydrating.

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