Marathon Des Sables 2005 race diary entry
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Oliver Steeds - Marathon Des Sables - Last stage - The Daily Pain ...the end.
Reports of my demise, I’m afraid are grossly premature. The final few days of the race have passed in a joyous state of relaxation and inner calm. I have been skippering a 80ft pleasure boat around the Marianas Islands south of Japan. As the only man with a cross cultural crew of bikini clad nympettes, it was, I’m afraid, my duty to deal with a French stowaway that was found this morning; unfortunately he was forced to walk the plank. Not much else to report from HMSAnthrax. In my absence Colin has agreedto file the report from the remainder of the race:
In amongst the sandstorms that regretfully raged after completing the 76kmstage, rumours spread around the camp of a French official brutally attacked with a cooking stove and ‘ca va?’ scrawled in his own blood across his shirt. He remains in a critical condition and apparently has said only 715 715, 715 to investigators. A feral looking crossbred gorilla/Albanian refugee was seen fleeing the scene manically screaming cheese eating surrender monkeys.
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Anyhow, back to the race. One of the more difficult aspects of living in Hades is dealing with the people who inhabit it. Appropriate to the prison like nature of the conditions, we have become nothing more than numbers. Two numbers to be exact - your race number and your tent number.
The tents: I am number 67, are open black bedu canvas, and can be a sanctuary of hope in a desert of despair or else you just stay in your desert of deluded,depraved, despairing, sandy insanity: my tent is cleft down the middle: on one side I have 2 mid-forty year old Irishmen from the Northern Irish Prison Service. One who goes by the name of Allcock - a name that obviously brings out the highest forms of humour, and on the other side the Brothers English, Godfrey and Roger, who are lost somewhere in their mid-forties midlife crisis who communicate ingeniously through quotes from the Guns of Navarone.
There 3 types of people in this race: (1) the genetically modified human looking cyborgs (thetop 50 racers); (2) the criminall yinsane humans - these are people, like the Irishmen who are running away froms omething, invariably the law; and are a group of deluded sado-masochists who take some strange pleasure out of the pain and tedium of long distance running in unpleasant conditions and then thereare (3) the Mistake makers - people like me and the brothers English who made a terrible mistake and signed up to the wrong holiday at the travel agent.
So back to our camp….. apart from our black (black obviously signally evil within) tents, there are also some white tents beaming in pure brilliant honest white: These tents should not be entered; they are the tents of Doc Trotters: a breed of torturers from the Paris suburbs that hide behind the façade of their white coats and surgical gloves and call themselves doctors: they are not doctors. These tents are abbatoirs and inside you find the skeletal remains of former runners. Their implements are crude as you may expect: instead of popping blisters as any rational pain fearing human would do, these doctors of death take a scapel and cut off all flesh to leave nerve endings exposed and your feet bleeding. And that’s if you’re lucky…
I digress, so back to the race::: there’s nothing more I like after 76km than getting no sleep in a sandstorm and having to chomp down cold sausage and beans then complete another marathon in exceptionally unpleasant conditions. But before the torture begins I am forced to witness another crime::: the speeches. Allcock sadly suffers from a delusional Churchillian complex and feels obliged to deliver a daily fight them on the beaches speech to raiseour spirits. They usually go something like this. In the Pantheon of the Gods we are not just mortals, but heros,Gods amongst Gods, we are life, we are death, we are masters of the universe;When we run into the valley of death dear soldiers, look pain in the eye andfear no evil .. bla bla bla…Allcock is a man who likes to be hated and likes to hate himself and I have found myself growing fond of the blisters that are causing him so much pain. He has lost some of the skin off his feet and is running on raw stubs and for some reason Iam some sick rare joy that at least Allcock is suffering more than I am: More worrying Allcock is enjoying the pain.
I digress again::: I gotta stop doing that, back to the speeches:: at the start line stands a man that has become the focus of my hatred. Patrick, the race organizer, the sadist reasonable for the race, and incidentally a Frenchman with a Castro-complex for attention and long speeches. Like the commanderof a torture chamber he daily delivers a speech to the inmates…. for only one time during the day we are one, all staring into a desert of pre-destined agony. During the brief moments I’ve been able to study Group 2 (the criminallyinsane runners) and have drawn one conclusion: in the joyous state of nature when we were apes living in the trees something happened that changed the evolution of homo sapiens forever. There were two apes: One ape fell out of the tree causing severe neurological damage (these are the pain lovers) and he other seeing what happened to his brother ape, carefully climbed down the tree to follow a process of evolution focused on comfort and avoiding pain. So when the days racing finally begins the brain damaged apes run off leaving the more evolved primates to trudge on slowly behind. As the pain increases so the primates now have to start popping pills, and I heard today of a
neurologically challenged monkey popping a sleeping pill instead of pain killer and quickly evolving into a zombie at the back of the race.
Covering the daily marathon is as tedious as it is painful. I shut down the mind to override the body and think solely in automatic, about making the next step - that’s the only way out of this horrible mistake; when your head is down trucking through the miles, the ground starts to talk to you, slowly divulging the meaning of life: the secret is there is no meaning, no answers, no question, nothing; dust to dust; that’s it. When you realize this everything is hilarious, especially finding new ways to kill French people. Apart from race creator Patrick, I’ve had my target eye on another particular French person, a woman as small as Kylie, and as old as Joan Collins. She jumped the dinner queue in front of me the night before this hell began and when I finally caught up with her on the last day, my walking stick accidentally got stuck between her legs and she unfortunately fell over in the sand. In my defence, I’m not usually this unpleasant and I blame Patrick, the desert,and being British for turing me into this sadistic French hater.
So anyhow, after 160+ miles through conditions fit only for camels; carrying 2 Berber families and theirhousehold utensils, a ripped calf, a negligently small amount of training,seeping back sores, cracked bottom lip, a mouth of sand, a mind of new ways toinflict harm on our cousins across the channel, shoes of blisters I could see the finishing line. Unfortunately between me and a return to normality and out of this state of nature I have been reduced to, stood my nemesis, the cause and inventor of all this suffering – Patrick. I had it all worked down to the final detail of inserting the emergency flare he had kindly given us to carry around the desert into his rear ….. but as I crossed the line he grabbed me, seemingly knowing my plan, kissed me and hung a medal around my neck: he had masterfully constructed the race so that I had no energy left to implement my dastardly plan and he lives to fight another a day. One day when he’s least expecting it, I will get him though.
Many competitors talk of an overriding elation, an enlightened rebirth and forever philosophising about the haunting beauty of the desert. For me it was an incredible sense of relief to have completed something so gruelling and be in a town I could buy some more smokes. The whole thing had been a terrible mistake. There’s a one letter difference between compete and complete and I had completed it. Without the dark humour of Tent 67 and the Guns of Navorone quoting brothers, I probably wouldn’t have made it and to them and the Irish nutters I am eternally grateful; It was not the Marathon DesSables but the Marathon Des Sade and I feel I’ve become the Marquis.
Thanks for that Colin. Should any of you still be considering entering the Marathon Des Sade, may I suggest seeking immediate professional psychiatric help and strong medication. Feel free to join me on HMS Anthrax: We sail for Tahiti tomorrow.
