The Red Bulletin June 2019 (UK)

Ultra Gobi
“For all its epic views
and endless emptiness,
the Gobi offers no help
to the wayward runner”
“Forward progress was dictated by one’s ability to follow
a thin line on a small digital display,” says Poole. “Flat
batteries or a broken GPS handset would be disastrous.”
As would severe sleep deprivation and the decline in
cognition that comes with it. Britain’s Nathan Montague
followed a broken arrow on his device for several hours,
ending up lost. His error was costly: at one point, he was
chasing second place; he finally crossed the line in sixth.
Carnegie: “More than 100km in and approaching dawn
on day two. Three hours into running through dried
river beds and canyons with James, I discovered how
useless fingers become in this cold. Trying to capture
the mood of utter isolation was challenging. James
went from incoherence amid the cold dark of night to
wildly hallucinating as the horizon turned to gold,
claiming there’d been a dog running alongside me for
hours and that the hills were full of apartments with
people looking down on us. His mind was mush.”
Checkpoints range from tents manned by a lone person
huddled around a fire, to small villages in the middle of
nowhere. Each runner has six drop boxes – meticulously
packed and checked before race start – from which they
can retrieve nutrition, luxuries and changes of clothing
en route. The logistics of calculating what they'll need at
each checkpoint is immense, especially with a minimum
required daily calorie intake of 25,000kcal.
Poole: “The lowest point occurred shortly after
crossing the 4,000m peak at halfway. With little more
than two hours’ sleep in two days, I’d seen gnomes,
imps and goblins hiding in the scrub. Cliff-sides looked
like trains with endless lines of carriages. Shadows in
the dying sunlight resembled dogs’ jaws leaning in to
nip at my ankles. With less than 3km to one of the lifesaving
bases, I was confronted by a frozen lake lined
with boats, pontoons and jetties. Listening out for
any cracks in the ice, I climbed gingerly between the
obstacles. More than an hour later, I staggered into
the checkpoint, hypothermic and in serious difficulty.
Seven hours on, I hobbled out of the tent. To my
surprise, there was no lake. It had all been in my mind.”
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