The Woman Who Knew What She Wanted (27 page)

On that day, I clambered down the pathway and onto the flat ledges. They were slick and wet from the rain. In the indent where we had once sat kissing by the fire, there was a pool of brackish water. The rock was still there. It was virgin, not a mark to be seen.

It was from this spot that Cally had asked for her ashes to be scattered. Just as she would have insisted, I stood right at the very edge of the ledges. The waves were licking at my feet, and yet as I stood at the brink, I had never felt so absolutely rooted and secure, as if Cally's firm hand was even then holding me tight by the scruff of my neck.

In my mind's eye, I can see the top being eased from the urn and then with a full swing she is cast to the winds. I watch as she flies high and free, her ashes soaring into the air before they are swept over the waves and out to the open sea.

The next romance in Kim's love life is
The Woman Who Was The Desert Dream,
due to be published by Thames River Press in October 2013. The story is based on the events of the 2012 Marathon des Sables, which is widely held to be the toughest foot race on earth. This is the first chapter.

This is a story of love and desire and mid-life crises. And blisters and warm bottled water and dehydrated pap. Sandstorms, thunderstorms and hailstorms so vicious they left your skin bloody and bruised. It's the story of what it's like to run in the desert, as you trudge up mountains of stone and slip-slide down the dunes.

It is the story of heat.

You'll know all about thirty-degree heat. It is Centre Court at Wimbledon when the sun is blazing. It is the hottest day of the year in Cornwall when the ice creams are melting even before the first lick. It is a scorcher on the motorway, stuck on the hard shoulder as the radiator bubbles over.

Fifty-two degrees is different. When you're running at noon with the sun high overhead and the shadows small upon the ground. When you're running in the afternoon, as the sand and the rocks have started to fry. When there's a sixteen-kilo rucksack strapped to your back.

I will tell you the meaning of fifty-two-degree heat.

It's drinking eleven litres of water – and never once needing to stop for a pee. It's taking twenty salt tablets a day so that you don't start to cramp up. It's losing water as fast as you can pour it in.

On your face, the sweat dries instantly, leaving tidelines of white salt scum; on your back, your shirt is constantly saturated, and the sweat soaks through to the inside of your rucksack; and on your feet… yes, that is the big problem that faces all of the runners in the Marathon of the Sands. Until you've started the race, you have no idea how hard it's going to hit you.

Runners take all the precautions they can to prevent sand from getting into their shoes and their socks. They have their silk gaiters sewn into the soles of their running shoes and they tie the tops of their gaiters tight around their calves. But whatever you do, however snug the gaiters, you can never totally stop the fine sand from working its way into the shoes and into the socks and then next to the skin. And what happens next – not always, but sometimes – is that the sand mixes with the sweat in the socks and then it quickly turns into sand paper. If you are not taking care, and if your feet are already numb from all those Ibuprofen tablets that you have been chugging, the first you will know of it is when you get back to your tent. You tug off your shoes and your gaiters and from the burn of the sharp hot spots on your feet you know it's going to be bad. Like all the other runners, you are wearing the very latest Ininji socks, special toe gloves. They look faintly reptilian. You tug off the first starchy sock and all the plasters come of with it in a fine mist of sand and blood. It's only then that you realise that you are in for a whole world of pain. The sand has combined with the sweat in your sock, and the skin on the bottom of your foot has been sanded clean off. Your foot has been ‘delaminated'. I was almost sick the first time I saw it.

On the second day, the heat was the least of my problems.

Like a lot of the other runners, I had contracted the most severe diarrhoea. It was a combination of the heat and the exercise and the disgusting dehydrated food and the salt and all the powdered electrolytes that I'd been cramming into myself to stay alive. Your body can't take it, and goes into immediate spasming revolt, as if to say ‘get this muck out of me'.

And normally, if you were at home, you would take some Imodium and perhaps take the day off work. You would sip coffee, read the papers and lounge around near a lavatory as your stomach slowly sort itself out.

That isn't an option in the Marathon des Sables. It doesn't matter how bad your injuries, how severe your stomach cramps. For come 8.30 in the morning, there you have to be on the start line, ready for another twenty-four miles through the desert.

I felt like absolute hell. The daily starts to the Marathon des Sables overwhelm the senses. There is pounding rock music and the manic jabbering of the organiser Patrick Bauer. The sun is already blazing and you're crammed into this tight space with all the other runners –
almost every one of whom is, like yourself, just that little bit stark-raving mad.

I was wondering how long I'd last before I needed to relieve myself behind some friendly bush.

The worst of it was that I was parched. There are a lot of things that can put you out of the race, but one of the most certain is dehydration. Over a dozen people had been knocked out on the very first day after messing up with their water.

On the Marathon des Sables, your water is severely rationed. Extra water is, of course, available. The first time you take an extra 1.5 litre bottle, it's thirty minutes added onto your race-time; second time it's an extra hour; and when you take a third bottle… well you don't take a third bottle, because if you take a third bottle, then you're out, and bang goes all your training, bang goes your £3,500 entry fee and bang goes your desert dream.

The previous night, I had watched, horrified, as the water had drained out of me, litre after litre of it; even with the pills, there was no stopping it. Sometimes I'd been so desperate that I couldn't even make it to the camp's makeshift latrines, and would squat in the middle of the desert, staring miserably at the moon. I took more pills and more pills, but nothing seemed to work.

And the next morning, I knew I was bone dry. I had already had my first extra bottle of water. But at that early stage in the race,
I didn't dare take another.

We were assembled exactly where we'd finished the previous afternoon. Each day's finish line is the next day's start, and then you all charge straight through the bivouac, where the tents have all now been stacked onto the lorries and the site returned to what it once was.

Lawson was stretching, touching his toes, palms almost to the sand; his walking poles were forever falling to the ground. He would pick them up, balance them against his legs, stretch, and then the poles would drop back to the ground. He never tired of this routine.

He saw me watching him and grinned. ‘May I offer you a wheelchair?'

‘I didn't know you cared,' I said.

‘Feeling good!' Lawson inspected his stubbled reflection in my sunglasses. ‘Looking good!'

The two Irish medics earnestly talked to each other, as if you could ever have any sort of game plan for running twenty-four miles in the desert. ‘I'm going hard,' Martin said.

‘I'm going out slow, so I am,' said Carlo.

Simon, on his second Marathon des Sables, was edging his way towards the front of the pack, hoping to shave a few seconds off his time so that he could finally find redemption with that elusive top 100 finish.

Kurtz, an ex-Para, was the only one of us who really knew how to handle pain – and he was going to need it too.

I looked round for Kate, but I couldn't see her. I'd have liked to have seen her that morning, if only to wish her luck, for I wasn't at all sure that I was going to make it through the day. I had not seen her for half an hour. She was probably being interviewed by some TV station, or swooned over by a troupe of tanned athletes. I knew that and I was fine with it. Kate was a beauty and beauty is much in demand in the Marathon des Sables. The men are naturally drawn to it. Of the 853 runners on the first day's start line, I guess there were about 100 women. And of these 100 women, I can both subjectively and objectively tell you that Kate was a stand out.

But enough of that. I'd looked around and I still couldn't see her. It's difficult to spot a woman in white and red when you're in the thick of hundreds of bigger, burlier runners, all of whom are wearing near identical shirts and caps. Of all the other runners, I would have liked to have started the day with her; the sight of her damn cheery smile alone was a pick-me-up. But she wasn't there, so I'd just have to tough it out by myself. And I could do that. I wasn't looking forward to it. But I could do it.

At least I was going to give it my best shot.

A huge, craggy face, hewn from scowling stone, peered into my face. He was a few inches away from me, eyes hidden by wrap-around mirrored sunglasses.

‘You look like shit,' he said.

‘At least I'm ill. What's your excuse?'

Del's face continued to linger in front of mine. He was about the same height as me, and of much the same age, though with his wizened skin and receding grey crew-cut, he looked much older.

‘It's not too late to pull out.'

‘Don't you worry about me, Del,' I said. ‘I'm not going for speed.'

‘Like the sunglasses.'

‘Thank you,' I said. ‘They're my wife's.' They did indeed belong to Elise. I'd brought them out as a standby, though after a mix-up in the race shop I'd ended up having to wear them. They were Christian Dior, large, white, very expensive – and very inappropriate for a race like the Marathon des Sables.

‘You haven't done the training. You haven't got the kit. And you've been up all up night with the runs.' Del smiled at me, yellowing gnarled teeth. ‘You are so totally screwed.'

‘I wish I could be like you, Del – you're a running machine.'

He took a swig from his water bottle. There was still a lot of water left in the bottle. He let the water cascade over his cheeks before pouring it down the back of his neck.

Nearby, Patrick Bauer was standing on top of a white Land Rover next to his pretty translator. A few years earlier, she had had a spat with Patrick and quit midway through the race, though he had charmed her back.

Patrick first started the race in 1986 as a way of introducing the world to the spiritual, cleansing heat of the desert. And even twenty-seven years later, and with some forty-eight nationalities now in the race, he hardly knew a single word of English.

He was a bluff bull of a man, tufty white hair on his tanned head. He loved the sound of his own voice. At the start of each day, as we all itched to get going, he would chunter on for a good quarter of an hour. But he also had passion and joy. He was living the dream: he had brought the desert to the world. I liked him.

We spared a few thoughts for the fifteen runners who'd given up the previous day. Some of them had been shipped back to their hotels in Ouarzazate, but a hardy few had decided to continue the week with their tent-mates. I don't know if I'd have been able to do that – still part of the Marathon des Sables, but no longer in it.

It was getting hotter and hotter. It wasn't even nine o'clock, and already we were way past a summer's day in England. I licked my sun-blocked lips and sipped some water from one of my water bottles. Almost all of the runners had two 750 ml water bottles attached to the shoulder straps of their rucksacks. Turn your head slightly and you could take a sip. In eight miles' time, at the first check point, we'd be given the next 1.5 litre bottle of warm water which would keep us going until the next checkpoint… and so it would continue for mile after mile and checkpoint after checkpoint until after 150 miles of it we were finally done.

My tent-mates looked the part. I did not feel a part of it. Maybe it was just my bowels making me feel so cheerless.

Ahead of us was a thin range of mountains, though in the shimmering heat it was impossible to tell how far away they were. Could have been five miles, could have been thirty. You can't tell distances in the desert. But you don't want to know distances in the desert. You don't want to know how far it is to the next checkpoint, or how many more hours you've got left. You're not thinking about that palm tree in the distance, or that hill that you might eventually reach by the end of the day. No, when you're stomach is gyppy and you're parched and you don't even know whether you'll make one mile let alone twenty-four, then the only thing is to be in the moment and to focus on that next step. And after that, you think about the next step, and you string all those thousands of steps together, and with luck you've made a checkpoint before you've been timed out; and with even more luck you've beaten the camels to the finish line, and congratulations, son, you are now allowed to do it all over again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and the day after that too.

But it didn't do to think about the future, because all these preliminary stages were a just a mere taster before the main course. Though it wasn't so much a main course as an absolute monster: a double marathon, right through the day and into the night.

You always knew the monster was on the horizon. It was out there, waiting for you. But it was way, way off in the future. What was the point in fretting over a double marathon, when I might not even make the start line in two days' time?

Patrick was winding down and the music had started again. It was the birthday of two of the runners; a fully orchestrated version of ‘Happy Birthday', very cheesy, was being pumped out through the speakers. The birthday boys waved to the French cameramen. The first time we'd heard it, we had crooned along. Not now though.

After all the pre-amble and all the hype, we were ready for the off, when the mad cacophony ended and we would be left only with the silent sound of the desert. Patrick gave a wave and we were surrounded by the blare of the Marathon des Sables signature tune: ACDC, ‘Highway to Hell'. I've never particularly liked the song, but it has become such a part of the fabric of my life that, for better or for worse, it will have to number among my eight Desert Island discs.

Screaming, shouting, helicopters thundering overhead, blasting us with the downdraft. Runners waving for the cameras, Patrick bellowing out his countdown and ACDC drilling right through to the core of my brain.

And we're away and the mad ones tear off into the desert at a flat-out sprint, and the joggers amble out at a more sedate trot, and after them are the brisk walkers, striding along with their poles, and then, right at the back, are the walking wounded, the people like myself, who are wondering just what on earth possessed us to sign up for this insane race.

There are a lot of reasons why people enter the Marathon des Sables. We do it for the challenge and we do it avert our impending mid-life crisis and we do it because it's called the toughest foot race on earth. It's a rite of passage and a test of manhood, so that, in small part, we can have a taste of what our grandfathers went through in the wars.