“They’re kidding, right?” Akil asked as he stretched. “We’re supposed to run in this?”
“What the hell did you expect?”
That night they slept in a tent with two competitors from Worcester, England. One of them, who called himself Perks, said he was planning to run the entire six-day race with an ironing board strapped to his back to raise money for a cancer hospice back home. Why he was making the already very difficult race even harder for himself was unclear.
In the morning they lined up for medical checks and registration. Crocker-a veteran of many ultramarathons, including Double and Triple Ironman races and four Raid World Championships-ran into several competitors he knew, including the Moroccan Ahansal brothers, Lahcen and Mohammed, who between them had won the race thirteen out of the twenty-two times it had been staged.
Later, approximately seven hundred runners from all over the world set off into the desert to the sound of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” The atmosphere among the competitors was jovial, bordering on euphoric.
A group of French runners yelled, “Vive la France!”
Some Australians countered with “Stick a ferret up yer clacker!”
Some Brits: “Hail Britannia!”
Ritchie shouted, “USA, baby, all the way!”
The excitement quickly drained out of all of them as they realized there were approximately 150 very difficult miles between them and the finish line.
The first couple of miles were relatively easy. The racers ran the flats and downhills. Most walked the uphills. Then they reached the dunes, a landscape of seemingly endless mountains of rolling sand. They sank down with each step, pushed by the weight of their full backpacks. Crocker told his men to try walking in the footsteps of the man in front to help prevent them from slipping and sliding on the way up.
The afternoon had started with a cool breeze, but as the hours dragged past, the heat grew increasingly intense, moving from the mid-90s up to 124 degrees Fahrenheit. When the wind whipped up, contestants struggled to protect every inch of their skin from the savage stinging sand.
The more difficult conditions became, the more Crocker’s focus narrowed-drink some water, check your compass, concentrate intently on reaching your next checkpoint. The incredible beauty of the landscape made the discomfort bearable. No shadows for miles. Just the subtly shifting colors and undulating shapes of the dunes, interrupted occasionally by a perfectly rounded boulder or ridge of marble protruding from the sand.
He’d learned that if you didn’t push yourself beyond your limits, you never understood what your limits were. Most people yielded to the voices in their heads that told them they were too tired, hungry, thirsty, or old, or that conditions were too dangerous to continue. So they stopped.
Special operators and endurance athletes learned to push past warnings like that and trust that they would pull through. If you urinated blood after a long race, as Crocker had many times, you’d recover. If you passed out, your teammates would revive you.
At the nineteen-kilometer mark they came to a checkpoint, where they filled their water bottles and waited for Akil to catch up. Ten minutes passed before they saw a blurry shape hobbling over a hill.
“What’s wrong?” Crocker asked.
“It’s my feet.”
They’d barely started, and he’d already developed blisters on the sides of the little toes of both feet. This surprised Crocker, since Akil had run many long-distance training runs in the same shoes. He treated the blisters with Super Glue and duct tape. Then they set out again, climbing, running downhill, stopping to rest, refuel, and rehydrate, until the sun started to set. As usually happened at sundown, the temperature dropped and the wind picked up.
They reached another flat stretch of about ten kilometers, which Crocker, Ritchie, and Davis ran together, following blue, yellow, and red glow sticks that marked the route. Crocker felt a strange sense of euphoria; he heard the Doors’ “Spanish Caravan” playing in his head and imagined they were following the footsteps of ancient traders.
Up ahead he saw an outcropping of flags representing the countries of the various competitors and banners championing the causes many were running for that marked the makeshift camp-a circle of tents with no toilets. Men and women were too tired to bother with modesty. They walked around half naked-men in shorts, women in skimpy sport bras and bikini-type bottoms. Thirty or so feet from the tents they squatted or stood and did their business. No big deal.
Crocker, Davis, and Ritchie waited almost twenty minutes there for Akil, Cal, and Mancini to catch up. Akil’s feet were a bloody mess, and Mancini’s right knee was barking-the same one he’d injured when they were climbing in Pakistan.
Crocker was attending to both when an Aussie on his right washing his feet said, “They feel drier than a nun’s nasty.”
“Put some sesame oil on those puppies,” Crocker said, pointing to a bottle that was being passed along the line.
“Much obliged, mate.”
Mancini started complaining. “I thought we agreed we were going to run this together, as a team.”
“My bad,” Crocker answered. “Tomorrow we’ll try to stick together.”
Despite the myriad injuries, ranging from heat cramps, to heat exhaustion and heat stroke, to troubled bowels, twisted knees and ankles, and swollen feet, most contestants were determined to continue. They were doing this for a purpose-raising money for a cause, trying to achieve a personal goal.
About three dozen dropped out. Crocker watched as Berber volunteers loaded them into a truck for the ride back to Ouarzazate.
The mood among the remaining competitors was good. Someone passed a big bar of chocolate. An Aussie whipped up a vat of something called Miracle Beer-a beer made from powder he said he had purchased in the UK. One of the Brits played a harmonica and sang. Others joined in. Verses of “Maggie May,” “Wild Rover,” and “Satisfaction” floated through the dry night air.
Crocker had just fallen asleep when a sandstorm blew in and swept away their tent. He and the others crawled inside their sleeping bags, zipped them up, and tried to sleep through the storm. But sand managed to find its way into everything-teeth, noses, and ears.
When he did fall asleep, he dreamt he was at the controls of a huge jetliner flying over a city at dusk. Barely skimming over telephone poles and the tops of buildings, looking for a runway.
He still had enough liquid in his body to wake up in a sweat.
The morning sun was scorching from the start, which slowed their progress. Up and down, up and down. Monotonous and taxing. The sun seemed to draw every last drop of water out of them, resulting in constant thirst. Reminded Crocker of his days as a young SEAL with ST-1, training at Camp Niland in the California desert. Forty-mile hikes with seventy-pound packs in 114-degree heat. This had to be easy in comparison.
After about twenty kilometers they reached a flat stretch that they welcomed at first. But after a while the featureless terrain and the heaviness of the heat started to wear them down. The soles of their feet felt on fire.
Crocker started dreaming about summers on the beaches of New England as a kid. He and his younger brother catching sand crabs, body surfing, eating ice cream. He could taste it in his mouth-rich, creamy, cold, chocolate, strawberry, pistachio.
Beside him he heard Davis talking to his wife. He spoke as though she were walking beside him, telling her about the roof he was planning to build over their deck and how it was going to shade the back of the house. How he was going to plant fruit trees, too. Davis even started to argue, saying he wanted them to be cherry trees even though he knew she preferred peaches.