“Is this all you’ve got?”
That was me, two years ago, screaming. Not at a person. Or an animal.
But at the Sahara desert.
I was thirty miles into a one hundred-and-fifty-six-mile stage race known as the Marathon des Sables. One marathon was already under my belt but an impossible distance was still left to cover.
Sand blasted my body. Fear made my stomach churn. My legs shook with the pain of running on shifting dunes, my feet aching with blisters and sore spots that were already forming.
But stopping was not an option. If I didn’t reach the next checkpoint, I’d be timed out of the race. All the training, the hours spent on the road, the heat acclimation, the nutrition management – all of it a waste, if I couldn’t continue.
The Sahara wasn’t going to defeat me.
Plus, I knew it was going to make great material for a book.
This wasn’t the first time I’d put my life on the line for a book. To research my first thriller, Breathless, I’d climbed the world’s eighth highest mountain – Manaslu, in Nepal. The inspiration for my second was a perilous trip to Antarctica. And for my third thriller, Runner 13, here I was running a desert ultra-marathon as research for a book about a killer stalking the dunes.
Insane? Probably? Worth it – I sure hoped so.
Soon, I managed to catch up with other runners and – by working together – we made it through the horrendous storm. Over the next five days and hundred-plus miles, I’d witness the whole spectrum of human emotion and capability. Elite runners who ate up miles without seeming to break a sweat. Middle-of-the-pack plodders, who endured immense pain to keep pushing themselves to their limit. The ones bringing up the rear, flirting with the cut-off times, realizing they were capable of more than they ever dreamed. Then there were the ones for whom the desert took its toll – passed out on the side of the route, receiving IV drips from the medical teams or even being air-lifted out of the desert by helicopter to recover in hospital. Over one thousand people started the race; only seven hundred finished. And that was considered a good year.
They told us at the start that Saharan sandstorms could be intense but normally passed within a few minutes. The rule was to remain in place until the storm passed. People had been lost for days if they continued. One man had wandered into Algeria and had to survive on bat blood until he was picked up by a military escort. Others had died.
It’s this extreme mindset that intrigued me. By translating the experience into fiction, I could dive deep into the characters’ motivations but I also got to twist the knife even further. What if it wasn’t just the desert that was out to get our runners?
What if there was true darkness hidden amongst the rolling dunes?
What if under the searing heat of the sun, a serial killer was stalking the runners one-by-one?
Plotting my thriller kept my mind occupied as I chased down the miles. At least I don’t have it as bad as my characters became a kind of mantra.
If they can endure it, so can I.
By the time I stumbled into camp on that second day, it looked like a horde of camels had passed through. Most of the tents had been blown over, runners were huddled together in sweaty clumps. Yet we had survived.
Whether my characters would be so lucky… well, I’d have to write the book to find out.
For more about my adventure, watch The Story Behind Runner 13 on YouTube.
