"Why?" 04/08/2011
 "Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all." -Ayn Rand It is December 2009. I am on the train with a friend, packed in the weekend sardine crowd heading to town. "So I just found out about this race in the Sahara Desert. You carry everything you need and you get to climb sand dunes. It's a week long and 250km!" "It's a week long?" "Yep." "In the desert." "Yep." "You have to carry everything?" "Yep." "And when you say 'race' you mean you do this on foot." "Yep." "Jane... how much are you running these days on average?" "Fine. I don't. But I used to! A bit, at least. Anyway, that's not the point. It sounds like a great challenge and I am going to make it happen." That, my dear friends, was yours truly bluffing her heart out. When I declared to my friend that I was going to "make it happen" in what I had hoped to be an offhanded manner, a part of me was terrified at the prospect of actually preparing for the race. Terrified. I knew next to nothing about the science and art of running, to say nothing about desert survival. All that I knew about sand came from my childhood days of experimental sand castle-building. My friend probably had a point. But you know what's the wonderful thing about people? We can accommodate both fear and hope; the two can co-exist. Even as we're standing at the cliff's edge and terrified at the prospect of falling, there is a spark within us that hopes that when we take the leap into the great unknown, we will not fall, but fly. My Sahara Race journey started in the most ordinary of places: back at home one unassuming Saturday, while reading the weekend edition of the local newspaper over breakfast. The article about a man who had just finished the 2009 Sahara Race sparked something in me. I let the spark stew over breakfast, took the spark onto the train and blabbed about the spark to my friend. Let the record stand that said friend was wise enough to not comment too skeptically about my newfound aspiration. Not that it mattered; if he did, I would have just channeled Bruce Lee and thumbed my nose at him. From that spark came the idea of doing the race for a cause. After some research, I got in touch with World Vision. Then came the idea of getting sponsorship. After all, if we're about to do something crazy and fun and potentially life-changing for myself and others, might as well string the whole town along and make a proper splash of it, eh? After that everything else started to come together. There was training, fundraising, interviews, research, blogging, and work going on all at once. The schedule looked insane but I was fast discovering that there was a lot you could fit into the span of a day if you were willing to work at it. And you know what? I had never felt so alive before in my life. One of the most common questions I get about the race is "why would you want to do something like that"; it is always some variation of "why". I know from virtually all angles it sounds irrational. What on earth could possibly possess any sane human being to sign up for a race of this nature? No shower, no bed, no TV, no plumbing, no proper food and just a ton of sand to navigate through in oppressive heat for a week - where's the sense in signing up for something like that? Beyond the easy answer of "pushing the limits", let's consider for a minute the state of our world. A UN Progress of Nations report noted that in 1998 alone:
And if something you do in the span of one week could make the suffering a little less painful, the question is not "why would you do this" but "how could you not?"  No child should ever have to eat scraps off the ground to feed themselves. The Sahara Race began for me as a personal challenge, a daredevil adventure of sorts. But by the time I was done with it, it had turned into something so much more. In the depths of the 7-day journey, when getting to the finish line seemed all but impossible, I drew strength from the VisionFund cause. After all, whatever we were going through out there in the desert was a shadow of the realities that many have to face. After one week, we can all return to the comforts of our air-conditioned rooms and ergonomic pillows. For some, the hardship is real and will last for a lifetime if no one does a thing about it. There are certain truths about life that one simply cannot glean by sitting at a computer at home. You have to don your shoes, strap your laces, and head out in full sprint and just embrace everything that comes your way. However you came to be reading this blog, as always, thank you for reading this far, for going on this amazing journey with me. If you forget everything that I've talked about so far, remember at least this: The world is a large and endless treasure trove waiting to be discovered at every turn. Whatever you aspire to achieve in this lifetime - be it to complete a desert race, to pick up a new skill, or to visit a remote dream destination - know that no matter how bad the odds appear, that dream you aspire to is a lot closer to reality than you think. It exists, it is real, it is possible, and it is yours for the taking. If you want it bad enough, you will find a way to make it happen. The starting point of my journey was that with enough heart and enough discipline, there is nothing in this world that we cannot accomplish. And for all the life-changing moments I've had the luck to experience in the last year, this central tenet of life remains unchallenged. I will simply leave you now to ponder over the immortal words of Mark Twain: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbour, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." Until our next Grand Adventure, Jane  Add Comment  We maaaade it!!! We're walking on sunhine, woh-oh...!!! So they said the race will end at the Great Pyramids. Thanks to my hyper-active imagination, I had this vision of a surging 100+ man contingent charging towards the Pyramids from afar, raising dust from the horizon like Lawrence of Arabia on his horse. Oh, it would be a very grand affair indeed. That was the dream. Now the reality: we decamp, get on a bus and go on a bumpy ride for three hours. We are dropped at the Pyramid entrance, we go through security check like cattle, then we get to do a 2km victory lap to complete the final leg of the 250km. There's nothing particularly wrong with this picture, except by the time we make it to this point in the race, everyone is extensively dirty/ mangly/ sunburnt/ injured/ banged up in their knees/ thighs/ back, etc. such that we no longer bear much resemblance to human beings, much less the venerable Lawrence. The trekking poles have been demoted from being Desert Lightsaber to this-is-the-only-reason-I'm-still-standing crutches. The feet are also sufficiently blistered and bandaged for us to look like a bunch of stiff zombie mummies limping back to our pyramid tombs. Man, it was not pretty. But we did get to the final finish line somehow, plus or minus a few ounces of dignity. I will be the first to admit that the end was a tad anticlimactic (to be fair, it's hard for a 2km leg to eclipse the end of a 94km odyssey just the day before.) But!! There were pizza and drinks and family waiting for us at the end. And they gave out finisher medals the size of pancakes. What's not to like? I will do this all over again in a heartbeat.  Priceless grins from the whole of Tent 14. Between the nine of us, we've covered 2,250km in the last 7 days. Maghnus, Trish, Ed, Sam G., Ryan, Malcolm, Sam W., Dave - thanks for the fantabulous memories.  And the best hat award goes to...  Team Singapore and Hong Kong!  The precious doctors/ guardian angels of the race.  At the final finish line with the one and only Papa D. Click to set custom HTML Stage 5 Part 4: Day of Rest 03/06/2011
 I did it! At the finish line of the 94km leg. People often ask how it had felt in that moment of reaching the 94km finish line. Was I overjoyed, was I relieved, was I emotional? The truth is, I was none of those things. The wonders and rigours of the last 20-odd hours had drained every ounce of energy such that the actual crossing of the finish line hardly caused a ripple in the mind. The early moments of crossing the line are a haze. I recall Vanessa waiting at the end as the drums called me home; I remember getting a spontaneous and blissful neck and shoulder massage (a pampering of the highest order after such a trek); I recall asking for a chair or something to sit on, because I feared that if I laid on the ground I may never get up from that spot again. On this sixth date of our desert adventure, the sun rose high and fierce against the skies, as if determined to give us a proper desert send-off on our last day in the wild. The air smoldered like a furnace and as I took the slow, leaden steps towards my tent, each granule of sand beneath my feet burned with the might of a miniscule sun. Tent 14 resembled the abandoned battleground of a recent desert war - bottles of water knocked askew, backpacks spilling their bowels of bandages and needles onto sandy ground, and bodies sprawled over a confusion of bric-a-bracs, snoozing away with a towel draped over their face. A flurry of flies swarmed over the motionless bodies, picking at the dirt and sweat of skin. The scene would've been grotesque under most circumstances. But the desert had taught me in the last few days that comfort was just a relative concept. I dumped my bag to one side and joined the others in their death-like repose. The rest of the day churned by reluctantly, the snail-like pace magnified by the oppressive heat. Even the normally breezy tents became an unbearable oven. The only refuge were the lee of the tents where the sun had cast a shadow. So we all snuck into the narrow slivers of shade and waited for evening to come. With our biggest task of the journey out of the way, conversation flowed like wine, punctuated only by the occasional drum beat heralding the arrival of a competitor at the finish line. I quietly sipped the tranquility of the moment, contented. Riding on my streak of embarrassingly healthy appetite, I scampered about camp for spare food and managed to get some oatmeal off Anders for dinner. (I am not picky, given the circumstances.) Speaking of which, a huge WOOT! to the crazy running machine who signed up less than a month before the race and did both Denmark and Singapore proud.  At around 3:30pm in the afternoon, the camp roused in a wave from its afternoon stupor. Something was coming towards us across the horizon. As one, we got to our feet and left our shades to gather around the finish line. For the final time in Sahara Race 2010, the pounding of the drums rose above the sand. The last competitor was about to arrive, 33 hours since the start of Stage 5. It was Dong, a Korean pastor in his fifties. The sweeper camels came in with him. Slowly, ever so slowly, he made his way through the meandering course, and his effort to reach the finish line was evident to all. We cheered him on as one. When he crossed the finish line, there were no theatrics to the manner of his arrival. Two steps past the finish banner, despite being clearly exhausted, he paused to take a long, deep bow which conveyed everything that needed to be conveyed about our journey in the past week - the pain, the struggle, the exhaustion... the doubts, the fear, the defiance of all that ran counter to our intention to complete... and above all, the gratitude for the chance to grow mentally and physically against one of nature's most dramatic settings.  Sweeper camel being completely blasé about crossing 248km over 6 days. The Egyptians helping the race organisers promptly formed a conga line of sorts and led us through the dancing and singing for the rest of the afternoon.  Two 100-watt smiles and the infamous latrines (in black). Before we knew it, nightfall was upon us and the stars that had shied away at the first light of daybreak came out to play once more. Temperatures cooled and an easy breeze picked up by the lake. We queued up before the campfire for hot water and, for the last time this race, rehydrated freeze dried delicacies for dinner. I treasured each passing moment, knowing full well that I may not have the luck to do this again in a long time to come.  Sunset by the last camp of Sahara Race 2010/ credit: Edward Matts After dinner, a group of us gathered around to idle the night away. Choon Poh was tweaking the settings on Joy's DSLR in our vain attempt to capture the beauty of the Saharan night; Trish and I tried to tell the stars and satellites apart, Eric LaHaie weighed in on life in Hong Kong while Wei Yong, the one-woman standup comedy of our trip, cracked yet another joke that sent us all tumbling. I laid on my stomach, taking in the conversation with the night wind as I slipped a scoop of sand back and forth between my fingers, letting the strains of cool, soft sand fall in my palm as in an hourglass. Above us, the stars slid as one across the sky, never for a moment losing their place in the vast spread of heaven. It struck me then how short this journey had been - how could it be the end already when it seemed only yesterday that we were pitching our tents at Camp 1? There was still so much I wanted to see here, so much more I wanted to learn. I wanted the evening to last forever, but the stars answered with an inexorable march to the west. That night, as I slept, I dreamt of a garden strung with stars.  Good night, stars. May we meet again. Photo credit: RacingThePlanet Stage 5 Part 3 02/08/2011
 Most dreaded sunrise of my life. The darkness of what once seemed to be an endless night was fading fast. It was the 83rd kilometre and circa 5:45am. The air was still stubbornly cold but the sky was blushing pink; it was a matter of time before the sun found its way up the sky and roasted the land again. By now, I was beyond exhausted. You ever tried staring at a word and reciting it over and over again, only to find that as you do so, the word as you know it appears to unravel before your very eyes? Sure, you still recognise the letters that make up the word. But through the act of verbal repetition, the order of the letters loses coherence, and though you've been staring at the word and the letters clearly haven't reorganised themselves under your watchful gaze, you're just not as sure if the word's spelt correctly anymore. It's a disconnect between the word's form and semantics. At this point in the race, I was experiencing that very disconnect between body and mind. My legs were moving as they had been for the last 24 hours or so, but the mind was no longer processing any of this. It was as if the endless repetition of putting one foot in front of the other had stripped all meaning from the act. The mind was detached from the body, just loosely bobbing along like a balloon trapped in the hand of a streaking toddler. It may have almost seemed like a cool out-of-body experience, except I don't think I was compos mentis enough at the time to even have that occur to me. In the home stretch of the Long Stage, it simply felt like I was dragging a corpse-that-may-or-may-not-have-been-myself through the sand. And the distance really does magnify with fatigue. Each step carried the weight of ten, each mile stretched like a hundred. "Where the heck is that checkpoint? Why can't I even see a speck of anything? WHO MOVED THE BLOOMIN' CHECKPOINT?! @$^&$#%#!!" Thankfully, by now I had numb exhaustion to help buffer against whatever frustration was threatening to overwhelm the systems. Besides, it was just no good staring at the spotless horizon every time you turned a corner expecting a checkpoint. The desert will just brazenly stare back, unapologetically checkpoint-less. And one can never out-stare a desert. So on and on and on it went, a battle wrapped in every single step. The sun was climbing mercilessly higher in the sky. The thermometer reading climbed in tandem with it. It was one of those days.  Downhill! Recommended pace: happy gallop. By the time I ran down the mountain pass and hit the lakeshore, the whole world was doing a very good imitation of a witch's cauldron with the stove set to "high". By the way, let the record reflect that the lakeshore stank to high heaven. It was sewage, folks. Look, evolution and life on earth is a miracle and all. I get that. But for being such miracles, the greatest wonder of all may just be our universal propensity to create a stink. But I digress. What I'd meant to say was that I was at the home stretch of the Long Stage. Camp was (FINALLY!) within sight and I was trying to slug out the remainder of the distance in the most humanly dignified manner possible. It was a little distracting seeing that my legs were no longer on speaking terms with me and some body cell was evaporating into thin air with every step I took. On hindsight it's a very good thing we no longer had clarity of mind when we reached camp. Because if we did, we would have realised that we had just run day and night so we could pitch a tent at Sewage Central and hang out with swarms of dung flies. Stage 5 Part 2 01/16/2011
"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will." - Chuck Palahniuk  Checkpoint 2, a.k.a. civilsation and the mirage of a mirage At the 20km mark we entered the much-anticipated Wadi el-Hitan/Valley of the Whales. From a distance, I saw the most curious desert vision I had yet to experience: a row of black triangles, some right-side up and some upside-down, all perfectly aligned besides each other and floating in, what appeared at the time, mid-air. Good grief! It's only Check Point 2 of 9! Am I hallucinating already?! Thankfully, when I got closer it became clear that these were windows carved into adobe huts. Not just any hut, mind you. These huts formed the tourist info centre, souvenir shop and... toilet! Having survived a whole week on the most basic camp latrine (which wholly involves the simple act of squatting and trying not to look at the bucket beneath you), finding modern plumbing, running tap water and a perfectly normal porcelain toilet bowl (made by TOTO, no less) was a miracle. And as a cherry on top, they supplied toilet paper. Remember: this is a race where toilet paper is such a scarcity that it's as prized as gold. (Probably worth more than gold, come to think of it, as you can't wipe your arse with gold.) It was also a sobering moment to realise I was overjoyed at being in... a toilet. This has got to be a new low in life. Anyway, I don't think we came all the way to the Valley of the Whales just so I can gush about the toilets. So, the Valley. Where to begin? Imagine, if you will, a graveyard of mammoth peach pits, some irregular in shape, some humanoid in profile, others rounded and all pockmarked by what appears to have been a heavy spout of acid rain. The rocks are massive - practically boulders, actually. And nestled between boulders are the fossils of still larger marine life that had once swum across this land. The whole thing had a very Gulliver-in-Brobdingnag feel to it.  Gulliver discovers he's no longer in Lillput /Photo credit: RacingThePlanet  40,000,000-year old whale fossils! That is a lot of zeroes. /Photo credit: RacingThePlanet  Finally going through the Valley of the Whales  Sunset on the dune The rest of the 94km is filled with similarly breathless moments: - It is the 30th kilometre. I bust out the iPod as a reward for crossing this milestone. After being cut off from music for almost a week (everyone has been saving their iPod battery for Stage 5) the opening notes to Glee's cover of Defying Gravity gave a burst of unexpected euphoria. I swear, I have never heard music this sweet in my life. The sound of civilisation! I am truly getting closer to home with every step. The notion strikes me from left field and I find myself inexplicably close to tears. - It is the 41st kilometre. We are simmering in the high heat of the day. A checkpoint lies within sight, set halfway up a colossal sand dune. Two competitors ahead are working their way towards it, but something is wrong. They look like they are in the exact same spot on the sand dune as they had been a minute ago. But they are moving, no? Unless... the zig-zagging jeep tracks on the dune confirm it: the dune ahead is steep. The jeep could only go up sideways; driving straight up could have caused it to flip over. Oh, yeah. The dune ahead is hellaciously steep. - It is the 47th kilometre. The sun has just deserted the day, carving the Sahara into a purgatory straddling night and day: it is too dark to see the path ahead, too bright to glimpse the stars above. And the utter isolation of the twilight hour is gutting. It seems incredulous that I had last seen people a mere 7km ago; how could this be when I feel like the last person on this planet now? The desert really does play tricks on the mind. I have never seen the Sahara in this light before. Usually by sunset I am safely back in camp, huddled over a crackling fire with dinner in hand and friendly chatter all around. We never had to confront this side of the desert on our own. Now, with the Sahara plunging into an ever-growing darkness and nothing for company but the faint light from my headlamp, every emotion becomes magnified. I feel puny, exposed, insignificant, perishable. If something were to happen to me in the dead of the night, they will not find the body until dawn and tomorrow will just be another day. You may think it mere paranoia, but the desert night has a way of making your imagination dance. - It is the 52nd kilometre. I am out of water, humour, and energy. Surely I've aged two and a half lifetimes since dusk. The one thing that spurs me on is the faint memory of a promise to never stop moving until I cross the finish line. A tawny glow in the distance hints at a checkpoint. I want so badly to believe this but am beginning to lose faith in my own judgment. After all, I also see two glowsticks defying gravity and jumping about in the air. That can't be right, even in the desert world. Thankfully, it turns out not to be a mirage but just a volunteer waving the sticks about. I tumble into the checkpoint and realise I am shaking. It's probably fatigue, hunger, or fear, or possibly a combination of all three. I eat, I replenish my water, I change into a thermal top for the night ahead. I don't relish the prospect of heading out into the desert darkness alone. Jennie and I team up and together we march into the darkness towards Checkpoint 6. - It is the 59th kilometre. Checkpoint 6 carries with it the promise of hot water and a tent for a nap. We can't possibly be far from our oasis now but the blisters are back with a vengeance. Every step is bloody murder. It's as if I'm walking on water balloons, except the balloons are my feet. But if you keep up the pace you will find that you get used to the pain eventually; your body comes to accept every step of agonising squish of flesh and water as a necessary pain. The trouble comes whenever we stop to take a toilet break or pause to adjust our gear; once you break your strike it is doubly difficult to get going again. I distract myself with the massive piece of cloud floating overhead. Suddenly, I'm reminded of the wisdom of a fellow runner, "In any endurance race first run with your legs, then with your head. Then, when both have deserted you, run with your heart." It's going to be all heart from here on out. - It is the 63rd kilometre. The desert wind picks up just as we reach a bustling Checkpoint 6. It's been almost 15 hours since I had a proper meal but being back amongst familiar faces is rejuvenation in itself. Avi the Angel helps me with the hot water (because anyone in possession of hot water in a cold desert is automatically seen with a halo and gown). Then, Jennie and I clamour into a tent for a nap. The darkness reeks of sweat, socks, and runners who also haven't bathed for days. But at this point, does it really matter? You're freezing, you're swaying in fatigue and in pain all over. Just lying on flat ground is a luxury. The desert really does teach by taking away. - It is still the 63rd kilometre. I wake from a deep but short slumber. The first thing you register is how toasty your sleeping bag is. The second thing you register is dread: is it really necessary to get out of the comfy oven of a bag and head back into the freezer again? In the twilight of your conscience, a little voice asks why you signed up for this in the first place. - It is the 70th kilometre. We talk anything and everything that can help us keep vigil through the night. We talk about life back home and about unlikely cravings that we'll need to see to once we get back to civilisation ("a big, fat burger from the depths of the worst fast food joint. The burger will be greasy. The greasier the better.") Above us, the colossal piece of cloud is still hovering steadily, its tips stretching from end to end of the wide desert horizon. I wonder at its refusal to disperse, at its familiarity from previous nights. Then, in a moment of startling clarity, I see it for what it truly is: I am not staring at a large band of cloud, but into the very depths of our Milky Way and the universe itself. The band of white is formed by stars, so numerous that they litter the night sky and glow as one. If you try to count them you would be lost by the first dozen, such is their vastness. It is the greatest shame that, for all the images I have to share of the race, I cannot bring back the one most enduring scene of the entire journey: our world cloaked in the darkness of a moonless night, the undulating horizon of sand dunes and mountains backlit by the blue/yellow glow of civilisation, and a sprawling night sky that starts from the fringe of the horizon in a deep blue hue, then bleeds into perfect blackness in the space overhead until it meets with the dizzying spell of stars piercing through its canvas. At this instance, the spellbinding notes of "Go the Distance" from Disney's Hercules turn up on the iPod as a pair of shooting stars dazzle across the sky ahead. It is the most wonderful thing, to witness first-hand the grandeur of the world around and above us, to realise that there is so much more to the world than our immediate existence, to feel a pang of insignificance but be swept up by a burst of awe and pride in being a part of it all in the first place. In this moment, suspended between rapture and exhaustion, I know in my heart that this scene will live with me until the day I die.  Photo credit: RacingThePlanet You would expect, when the 94km Stage 5 finally dawned on us, that we would all be scrambling around planning the last of our provisions and double and triple-checking our gear. After all, on such a long stage every mistake is magnified and every gram on your back weighs that much more. Yet, as we prepared for our Long March I found myself turning increasingly inward, focused on the mental and spiritual aspects of the race. On the surface, the Sahara Race is a logistically-driven expedition: bring enough food, electrolytes, pack the right gear and you can complete the distance. In other words, do your research, test your gear, train thoroughly, and you will be fine. But the last few days out in the desert had taught me so much about the one component of the race that cannot be acquired with any amount of gold or research: heart. To pick up virtually every other sport on earth, you would first need some instructions. You need a coach or mentor before you can golf, swim, pitch, or ski. Yet running is singular in its intuitiveness. As long as you know how to walk, you know how to run. And while we may have been taught to how walk by our parents, we all began running on our own accord. As toddlers, we had one day walked enough to became confident in picking up our pace. One foot in front of the other, faster, faster, faster - and all of a sudden, we were running. In other words, we run because the body remembers, because the body knows.  Photo credit: RacingThePlanet The Sahara Race began for me as a rebellion against time. Late last year, as a freshly minted graduate, I was thrown into the working world and shocked at how quickly the days flew. Blink and entire weeks would slip by, leaving no trace of their passing except for the faint but disturbing notion that they weren't all that eventful, just like the week before it and the week before that one. Where on earth did all the time go?! Of course, if I wanted to be absolutely honest with myself, I did know where most of the time went. I was pretty adept at slacking, you see. And who wouldn't be? We live in the era of an incredible time crunch. Everything needs to be done pronto - our hyperactive, tech-savvy world demands it. We are surfing the net, checking our mail and listening to music on the iPhone while on the train to work all at once; over lunch we are checking our stock performance, scanning news headlines and planning our weekend with each hasty bite, and when we do work, we work so hard that in the rare morsel of down time on the weekends, it becomes easy to justify our slacking, "I deserve this break. I've been going non-stop all week." It doesn't take a lot of effort to be lazy. Youtube was a particularly convenient avenue for slacking off - and I was a champion at it. I was the sort that could handily spend 3 hours at a stretch watching Youtube clips. A friend could send me a link, and after watching it I would click through other clips, or I'd catch a second wind of, "oh! And now I absolutely have to Youtube this completed unrelated topic too!" Minutes and hours would melt away this way. It wasn't that I particularly enjoyed YouTubing. But I did it for the same reason that others did it - it was so accessible and it was "good enough entertainment". Youtubing required no more commitment than a click of your mouse and TADA!! Instant gratification and the illusion of connecting with the millions of people who have also seen this video. How much easier can it get? And yet, because all that mindless internet surfing asked so little of effort and commitment, the entire experience was also rather shallow. I didn't feel particularly fulfilled because I just watched a cute doggie wag its toosh across a room or seen the popping of the world's biggest zit. In fact, the whole thing had the distinct taste of eating fastfood or flipping through a gossip magazine - indulgent at the time but leaving you sick to the stomach afterwards. Shopping and movies had the same effect. The thrill from accumulating material wealth is so fleeting, so short-lived that the light was hardly worth the candle. And while I love a good movie as much as the next person and would happily re-watch the best ones a dozen times, I still find the concept of "the cinema as a regular venue for social interaction" confounding. Because, you know, spending a few hours facing the same direction in the dark without exchanging a single word and listening to scripted dialogue is such an exemplary way of bonding with friends. It was easy to lose track of time and meaning in a milieu of modern conveniences. 如此虛度光陰可謂一種自我折磨。 為何老是眼睜睜地讓寶貴的時間在眼前化為烏有？明明是有能力去改變自己， 卻因習惰成疾而荒廢了一生。 瞬間，聯想到60歲的自己將是一個一無所成的老婆婆。到時，後悔莫及！ Loosely translated, this kind of slacking was tantamount to a self-inflicted form of torture. In those moments of regretting lost time, I suddenly saw what the future held: a weary 60-year old waking up one day to find herself not quite able to happily answer the question, "did I spend my life well?" Besides, there had to be better ways to spend one's time, right? After all, I was given a brain and a pair of perfectly healthy legs - so was I really just going to lose my days to Youtube, shopping, movies, and more shopping? I wasn't sure what laid ahead but if I had a tombstone at the end of it all, I knew that I did not want it to read, "She swiped a lot of credit cards". But laziness comes naturally to everyone. And once we get used to it, it becomes so hard to extricate yourself from that comfortable stupor. Before you know it, you're a downward spiral where laziness begets laziness. There's a Chinese idiom that succinctly captures the heart of this problem: 逆水行舟, 不進則退. That is, you live life as if you're paddling upstream; if you aren't moving forward, you're losing ground. In those moments, I saw that if I wasn't going to do something about it, life really was just going to pass me by. So I started to run. Because when I ran, the world around me would start to zip by in a blur, and the harder I pushed the faster it flew. Trees would melt into an indistinguishable blur of green and brown, rocks on the ground would rush into vision like a camera on perpetual zoom. It was like discovering the fast forward button on a time machine. The best were the weekend morning runs, when I'd be out the door before 7. By the time I had done two loops of the trail, pumping with endorphins and a runner's high, most of the country was still in bed. It was satisfyingly productive - as if I had managed to steal a piece of time from Chronos when he wasn't looking. And from then on, there was no looking back. I would run and run until the strength of each kick surged through the rest of the body, I would run until every stride felt like a whipping lash singeing the silence of the air. I ran until the ticking seconds seemed to come to a complete standstill, as if the sheer force of that forward momentum would propel me into another dimension... I ran until time and distance lost all meaning. There is no adequate way to explain the euphoria of wholeheartedly pursuing a singular goal, of flirting with the edge of your limits then charging right past them and discovering that you are capable of so much more. I thought of all the training I had been through the past few months, of all the endless rounds of planning and deliberation, of the long journey that led me to Cairo and how, even after all of that, racing through the 5th stage of the Sahara Race today I still wasn't entirely certain I'd be able to complete. But then again, if we only pursued things that offered an assured and certain outcome, we wouldn't have achieved a whole lot in life, would we? Rant: Funky Stage Names 12/16/2010
Apropos of nothing (but I really gotta say this): who comes up with the names for each stage of the race? Imagine, it's the morning of a new stage and you're all fired up to go crunch some serious distance in the desert. You pull out the race itinerary to check the course description and you see... "Stage 4: Gardens of the Castle". Castle? Gardens? ...For real? The name's so grand and whimsical you almost think you've been thrown into some Hayao Miyazaki movie. I half-expect Totoro or some hungry spirit to pop over the next sand dune or something. And if we're lucky, we might get to see some pseudo space ship a la Howl's Moving Castle. For a visual, this is the words "gardens of the castle" conjure to mind:  Miyazaki, Sahara-style: 'Look, Totoro! I see a checkpoint up ahead!' And this is how the so-called "gardens of the castle", a.k.a. Stage 4 of Sahara Race 2010, really looked like:  Oh yeah, no castle and no gardens here. Reality - you always need to ask it for a refund. /End rant. Stage 4: Part 2 12/04/2010
 A brilliant start to Stage 4 (Continued from the previous post) Mammoth table top mountains rose from the desert floor, the layers of sand creeping up the rock face until, perhaps, one day they would swallow the mountains whole. In the morning light, the tip of the mountains glowed bone white. Sediment lines ran the length of the mountains, a jarring vision of geometry in a land so liberated from order. At the feet of the mountains, the ubiquitous curves of the Sahara sand snaked up the ridges of dunes in an iridescent play of shadow and light. In the midst of the morning rush, I hardly had the presence of mind to fully appreciate it. Even then, to the distracted mind the Great Desert was so utterly breathtaking.  The desert has an uncanny ability to shrink people and jeeps to mere specks. Click for full view. It has been said that the Sahara has the presence of an unseen ocean. To this day, having been there and back, it remains difficult to place a finger on its allure. For generations people have wandered into the Sahara in search of something - an adventure, a challenge, or simply a passage through which caravans of goods must be delivered. The conditions the desert presents are formidable, and not all who wander in manage to wander out. So why do we go out of our way to cross it? If we wanted to experience adversity and Nature in all its might, there are a whole lot of other places in the world to prove our mettle. Why pick a piece of land where there is effectively nothing but sand, sand, withering heat, and more sand? Would it seem incredulous if I said that I did it in part out of sheer curiosity? I once read that there are so many stars in our universe (not planets. Stars! Like our own sun.) that if every single grain of sand we have were a star, there wouldn't be enough sand on Earth to represent all the stars in our universe. In fact the ratio is approximately one hundred stars for every grain of sand we have - and that's just the conservative estimate. The sheer scale of that comparison blew my mind. So of course I had to go get a better idea of just how much sand there was in the world to fit that concept into digestible terms. And where better to start than the Great Desert of the legends, the Sahara itself?  At the top of a steep climb with Mie-san, one half of the Japanese couple who chose this trip for their honeymoon. Still, the notion of crossing the desert on foot on a week-long self-supported race was every bit as intimidating, remote, far-fetched and impossible as it would have seemed to any rational mind. Just this February, I couldn't make up my mind whether to sign up for this race or not. Now, I see that there never really was a choice. Curiosity always gets the better of me.  That is a lot of sand/stars in the universe. The desert turned out to be every bit as mesmerising as the legends promised. On this day, Stage 4, I felt the full imposing aura of the Sahara. The truth is, the beauty of this desert is not like anything we're accustomed to. You'd think in a land of such stunning landscape, something ought to move, if only to justify its grandeur. But there is absolutely no drama to the brand of beauty you find here; no rocks to come crashing down in a violent avalanche, no lark to break into song, no trees to mark the passage of time, no swishing waves to fill the silence.  A twisting mountain in our midst Despite its size, the Sahara makes so little fanfare about its own presence that if it were a living organism it might as well be a gnat. That nothing ever seemed to move or change here accorded the land an air of uncompromising immovability. We love to exercise our imagination and call the desert romantic, terrible, hostile, unforgiving, and so on. But in reality the Sahara isn't any of that - because how could a desert set out to be hostile or unforgiving or beautiful? No matter how you want to spin it, the desert simply defies any adjective; the Sahara simply is. Still, in that state of blasé existence lay its true magnetism.  The many shapes of the Sahara - rectangular, pyramidal, arch, bump and squiggly. I thought of the miracles and tragedies that transpired from this land - of travellers who, stranded, drank the radiator water from their cars in a bid to avoid death by dehydration. When that ran out, some drank the gasoline and their own urine; it was the only way to stay off the battery acid. Some won in their bet against nature; others weren't so lucky. I thought of the terrible ordeal that dehydration brings, as chronicled in scientific detail by William Langewiesche in his superb book, Sahara Unveiled. An extract from the chapter on an ill-fated Belgian family: "Thirst is first felt when the body has lost about 0.5% of its weight to dehydration... .. Up to a 5% loss (about a gallon) the symptoms include fatigue, loss of appetite, flushed skin, irritability, increased pulse rate, and mild fever. Beyond that lie dizziness, headache, labored breathing, absence of salivation, circulatory problems, blued skin, and slurred speech. At 10%, a person can no longer walk. The point of no return is 12% (a 3-gallon deficit), when the tongue swells, and the mouth loses all sensation. Because swallowing becomes impossible, a person this dehydrated cannot recover without medical assistance. In the Sahara it may take only half a day to get to such a condition. As the body dehydrates in a hot desert climate, a disproportionate amount of water is drawn from the circulating blood. The blood thickens, and finally can no longer fulfill its functions, one of which is to transport heat generated within the body to the surface. It is this heat that ultimately kills. The end comes with an explosive rise in body temperature, convulsions, and blissful death." I suspect "blissful" is justified when death becomes a release from the earlier tortures. In the Sahara, stories transpire by the simple virtue of one getting lost. I didn't know it then, but our very own journey through the Sahara on this day was going to be a day of stories as well.  She saw seashells in the Sahara. Up ahead, far beyond the reach of the rest of the competition, the front-runners of Sahara Race 2010 were having a show down. Up until this stage of the race, Anders had been in the lead. But today Ryan Bennett, the second leading man, decided it was time to go full throttle and make an assault on the lead. Ryan pushed ahead in what would later be described by Anders as a "brutal pace". The chips of the race had yet to fall. Further back, the rest of the field was busy fighting their private battles. Ian McMullane was struggling to keep his pace even as some monster blisters were developing. A Korean competitor noticed his limp, and at a checkpoint passed Ian his pair of trekking poles. In a desert race, giving up your poles is equivalent to giving up your shoes. It was a gesture of generosity in a race packed with moments of such humanity. And I - I got to meet Father Christmas.  Oldest competitor to complete Sahara Race 2010 is... Father Christmas. /Photo credit: RacingThePlanet Allow me to backtrack a little. There's a 65-year old German competitor on our race who's built like a tank and walks like one. For the race he's chosen an all-black outfit with a turban to match. To paraphrase my hilarious tentmates, "Even when he's just walking around he looks like he's about to take you down." Here's the punchline: he's also got a handsome full beard of silver that only looks even more badass against the black of his turban. Earlier, the highly quotable Sam Wilson walked into our tent asking, "That man in black - you reckon he's Father's Christmas on holiday?" Which made a bit of sense, seeing that the Father Christmas we all know would spend the whole year up in the North Pole preparing presents with a whole town of elves. Imagine it'd be nice to get away from all that and just wander around in a simmering desert for a bit just before the pre-Christmas bustle. So from that point on, German Badass was known to Tent 14 for all intents and purposes as "Father Christmas-otherwise-known-as-the-toughest-man-in-the-race". So here I am busy popping stray blisters at Checkpoint 3 of Stage 4. Out of the blue, Father Christmas who also happens to be there rears up (because he never just "walks over"; he rears) and says, "Are you Jane? I am Volka. I liked your blog very much." He gives me the most bad-ass thumbs up I've ever seen and sets off into the desert. And here I am, left blinking in the wake of his very-dignified presence, with a blistered foot propped up on one knee and a needle in one hand and a sock dangling off a pinky toe, and not quite sure to do with the revelation that Father Christmas reads blogs. You never do know what stories would transpire from the desert, do you?  Father Christmas on holiday /Thanks for the photo, Vanessa Tan! Stage 4: Part 1 11/22/2010
The Stage 3 marathon had done a number on us. By the time Day 4 rolled around, the drop out rate had already equaled the total drop out rate in past years' races. And the distance was finally taking its toll - either you couldn't keep any food down or you simply burned a lot of calories; whichever path you took you would have acquired a frighteningly gaunt look (Edward Matts, I'm looking at you). The men were also sprouting cavemen beards. So in some ways we just looked like a bunch of refugees stuck in a really badly planned weight loss camp. A star attraction had also blossomed in our neighbor's tent as the abomination that are Emma's feet (if they can be still called that) was rapidly becoming the gold standard for injuries amongst competitors. Honestly, the woman deserves a medal just for her speedwork in developing blisters. By Day 2 the blisters at her heels had grown so big that she looked like she had four heels instead of two. You can only imagine the condition the feet was in by Day 4.  A perfect day to be out in the desert But whatever cards we were dealt, the sun rose over Stage 4 anyway and we were off at a gallop again for our rendezvous with the next campsite. I say it like it's some romantic adventure, but in reality it was a lot more strategically thought out than that. Having survived Stage 3, most of us were already casting our sights on Stage 5, the infamous Long March which was set to be all of 94km this year. Today's 38km stage was effectively a breather, a gulp of air between dives; all strategies deployed today had the sole purpose of getting us to the starting line of Stage 5 in optimum condition. An undercurrent of tension ran through the camp the morning of Stage 4 as we mulled over the implications of this stage. Should I go out strong and finish this leg in good time to get more rest time at camp in preparation for Stage 5? Or should I take it easy and stock up on energy for Stage 5? If the former, there was the risk of going out too strong then blowing up during the Long March; if the latter, then the long stretches spent out in the sun today could wilt you away even before Stage 5 began. It was always a battle of balance. Against the backdrop of such cold, logical deliberations, we witnessed the most romantic start to the race we had yet to glean. (More to come.) Average life expectancy. 11/14/2010
We now interrupt the odyssey of the Sahara with a thoroughly excellent and thought-provoking piece by Adrian Tan, who was the guest-of-honour at a recent university convocation. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008. ----- I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband. My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me. On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable. Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife. And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument. Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you. The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning. You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers. The good news is that they’re wrong. The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy. I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life. You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap. Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom. So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper. Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy. I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy. After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average. Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much. That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste. If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average. What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate. Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows. What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over. Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free. The most important is this: do not work. Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable. Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust. There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful. People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense. Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway. Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself. I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist. So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher. Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working. Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence. In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror. I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross. One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong. The other side of the coin is this: fall in love. I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone. Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable. Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul. Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm. You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart. You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you. Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it. Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone. |  FAQ: "How was the race?"
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"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all." -Ayn Rand It is December 2009. I am on the train with a friend, packed in the weekend sardine crowd heading to town. "So I just found out about this race in the Sahara Desert. You carry everything you need and you get to climb sand dunes. It's a week long and 250km!" "It's a week long?" "Yep." "In the desert." "Yep." "You have to carry everything?" "Yep." "And when you say 'race' you mean you do this on foot." "Yep." "Jane... how much are you running these days on average?" "Fine. I don't. But I used to! A bit, at least. Anyway, that's not the point. It sounds like a great challenge and I am going to make it happen." That, my dear friends, was yours truly bluffing her heart out. When I declared to my friend that I was going to "make it happen" in what I had hoped to be an offhanded manner, a part of me was terrified at the prospect of actually preparing for the race. Terrified. I knew next to nothing about the science and art of running, to say nothing about desert survival. All that I knew about sand came from my childhood days of experimental sand castle-building. My friend probably had a point. But you know what's the wonderful thing about people? We can accommodate both fear and hope; the two can co-exist. Even as we're standing at the cliff's edge and terrified at the prospect of falling, there is a spark within us that hopes that when we take the leap into the great unknown, we will not fall, but fly. My Sahara Race journey started in the most ordinary of places: back at home one unassuming Saturday, while reading the weekend edition of the local newspaper over breakfast. The article about a man who had just finished the 2009 Sahara Race sparked something in me. I let the spark stew over breakfast, took the spark onto the train and blabbed about the spark to my friend. Let the record stand that said friend was wise enough to not comment too skeptically about my newfound aspiration. Not that it mattered; if he did, I would have just channeled Bruce Lee and thumbed my nose at him. From that spark came the idea of doing the race for a cause. After some research, I got in touch with World Vision. Then came the idea of getting sponsorship. After all, if we're about to do something crazy and fun and potentially life-changing for myself and others, might as well string the whole town along and make a proper splash of it, eh? After that everything else started to come together. There was training, fundraising, interviews, research, blogging, and work going on all at once. The schedule looked insane but I was fast discovering that there was a lot you could fit into the span of a day if you were willing to work at it. And you know what? I had never felt so alive before in my life. One of the most common questions I get about the race is "why would you want to do something like that"; it is always some variation of "why". I know from virtually all angles it sounds irrational. What on earth could possibly possess any sane human being to sign up for a race of this nature? No shower, no bed, no TV, no plumbing, no proper food and just a ton of sand to navigate through in oppressive heat for a week - where's the sense in signing up for something like that? Beyond the easy answer of "pushing the limits", let's consider for a minute the state of our world. A UN Progress of Nations report noted that in 1998 alone:
And if something you do in the span of one week could make the suffering a little less painful, the question is not "why would you do this" but "how could you not?" No child should ever have to eat scraps off the ground to feed themselves. The Sahara Race began for me as a personal challenge, a daredevil adventure of sorts. But by the time I was done with it, it had turned into something so much more. In the depths of the 7-day journey, when getting to the finish line seemed all but impossible, I drew strength from the VisionFund cause. After all, whatever we were going through out there in the desert was a shadow of the realities that many have to face. After one week, we can all return to the comforts of our air-conditioned rooms and ergonomic pillows. For some, the hardship is real and will last for a lifetime if no one does a thing about it. There are certain truths about life that one simply cannot glean by sitting at a computer at home. You have to don your shoes, strap your laces, and head out in full sprint and just embrace everything that comes your way. However you came to be reading this blog, as always, thank you for reading this far, for going on this amazing journey with me. If you forget everything that I've talked about so far, remember at least this: The world is a large and endless treasure trove waiting to be discovered at every turn. Whatever you aspire to achieve in this lifetime - be it to complete a desert race, to pick up a new skill, or to visit a remote dream destination - know that no matter how bad the odds appear, that dream you aspire to is a lot closer to reality than you think. It exists, it is real, it is possible, and it is yours for the taking. If you want it bad enough, you will find a way to make it happen. The starting point of my journey was that with enough heart and enough discipline, there is nothing in this world that we cannot accomplish. And for all the life-changing moments I've had the luck to experience in the last year, this central tenet of life remains unchallenged. I will simply leave you now to ponder over the immortal words of Mark Twain: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbour, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." Until our next Grand Adventure, Jane We maaaade it!!! We're walking on sunhine, woh-oh...!!! So they said the race will end at the Great Pyramids. Thanks to my hyper-active imagination, I had this vision of a surging 100+ man contingent charging towards the Pyramids from afar, raising dust from the horizon like Lawrence of Arabia on his horse. Oh, it would be a very grand affair indeed. That was the dream. Now the reality: we decamp, get on a bus and go on a bumpy ride for three hours. We are dropped at the Pyramid entrance, we go through security check like cattle, then we get to do a 2km victory lap to complete the final leg of the 250km. There's nothing particularly wrong with this picture, except by the time we make it to this point in the race, everyone is extensively dirty/ mangly/ sunburnt/ injured/ banged up in their knees/ thighs/ back, etc. such that we no longer bear much resemblance to human beings, much less the venerable Lawrence. The trekking poles have been demoted from being Desert Lightsaber to this-is-the-only-reason-I'm-still-standing crutches. The feet are also sufficiently blistered and bandaged for us to look like a bunch of stiff zombie mummies limping back to our pyramid tombs. Man, it was not pretty. But we did get to the final finish line somehow, plus or minus a few ounces of dignity. I will be the first to admit that the end was a tad anticlimactic (to be fair, it's hard for a 2km leg to eclipse the end of a 94km odyssey just the day before.) But!! There were pizza and drinks and family waiting for us at the end. And they gave out finisher medals the size of pancakes. What's not to like? I will do this all over again in a heartbeat. Priceless grins from the whole of Tent 14. Between the nine of us, we've covered 2,250km in the last 7 days. Maghnus, Trish, Ed, Sam G., Ryan, Malcolm, Sam W., Dave - thanks for the fantabulous memories. And the best hat award goes to... Team Singapore and Hong Kong! The precious doctors/ guardian angels of the race. At the final finish line with the one and only Papa D. Click to set custom HTML Stage 5 Part 4: Day of Rest 03/06/2011
I did it! At the finish line of the 94km leg. People often ask how it had felt in that moment of reaching the 94km finish line. Was I overjoyed, was I relieved, was I emotional? The truth is, I was none of those things. The wonders and rigours of the last 20-odd hours had drained every ounce of energy such that the actual crossing of the finish line hardly caused a ripple in the mind. The early moments of crossing the line are a haze. I recall Vanessa waiting at the end as the drums called me home; I remember getting a spontaneous and blissful neck and shoulder massage (a pampering of the highest order after such a trek); I recall asking for a chair or something to sit on, because I feared that if I laid on the ground I may never get up from that spot again. On this sixth date of our desert adventure, the sun rose high and fierce against the skies, as if determined to give us a proper desert send-off on our last day in the wild. The air smoldered like a furnace and as I took the slow, leaden steps towards my tent, each granule of sand beneath my feet burned with the might of a miniscule sun. Tent 14 resembled the abandoned battleground of a recent desert war - bottles of water knocked askew, backpacks spilling their bowels of bandages and needles onto sandy ground, and bodies sprawled over a confusion of bric-a-bracs, snoozing away with a towel draped over their face. A flurry of flies swarmed over the motionless bodies, picking at the dirt and sweat of skin. The scene would've been grotesque under most circumstances. But the desert had taught me in the last few days that comfort was just a relative concept. I dumped my bag to one side and joined the others in their death-like repose. The rest of the day churned by reluctantly, the snail-like pace magnified by the oppressive heat. Even the normally breezy tents became an unbearable oven. The only refuge were the lee of the tents where the sun had cast a shadow. So we all snuck into the narrow slivers of shade and waited for evening to come. With our biggest task of the journey out of the way, conversation flowed like wine, punctuated only by the occasional drum beat heralding the arrival of a competitor at the finish line. I quietly sipped the tranquility of the moment, contented. Riding on my streak of embarrassingly healthy appetite, I scampered about camp for spare food and managed to get some oatmeal off Anders for dinner. (I am not picky, given the circumstances.) Speaking of which, a huge WOOT! to the crazy running machine who signed up less than a month before the race and did both Denmark and Singapore proud. At around 3:30pm in the afternoon, the camp roused in a wave from its afternoon stupor. Something was coming towards us across the horizon. As one, we got to our feet and left our shades to gather around the finish line. For the final time in Sahara Race 2010, the pounding of the drums rose above the sand. The last competitor was about to arrive, 33 hours since the start of Stage 5. It was Dong, a Korean pastor in his fifties. The sweeper camels came in with him. Slowly, ever so slowly, he made his way through the meandering course, and his effort to reach the finish line was evident to all. We cheered him on as one. When he crossed the finish line, there were no theatrics to the manner of his arrival. Two steps past the finish banner, despite being clearly exhausted, he paused to take a long, deep bow which conveyed everything that needed to be conveyed about our journey in the past week - the pain, the struggle, the exhaustion... the doubts, the fear, the defiance of all that ran counter to our intention to complete... and above all, the gratitude for the chance to grow mentally and physically against one of nature's most dramatic settings. Sweeper camel being completely blasé about crossing 248km over 6 days. The Egyptians helping the race organisers promptly formed a conga line of sorts and led us through the dancing and singing for the rest of the afternoon. Two 100-watt smiles and the infamous latrines (in black). Before we knew it, nightfall was upon us and the stars that had shied away at the first light of daybreak came out to play once more. Temperatures cooled and an easy breeze picked up by the lake. We queued up before the campfire for hot water and, for the last time this race, rehydrated freeze dried delicacies for dinner. I treasured each passing moment, knowing full well that I may not have the luck to do this again in a long time to come. Sunset by the last camp of Sahara Race 2010/ credit: Edward Matts After dinner, a group of us gathered around to idle the night away. Choon Poh was tweaking the settings on Joy's DSLR in our vain attempt to capture the beauty of the Saharan night; Trish and I tried to tell the stars and satellites apart, Eric LaHaie weighed in on life in Hong Kong while Wei Yong, the one-woman standup comedy of our trip, cracked yet another joke that sent us all tumbling. I laid on my stomach, taking in the conversation with the night wind as I slipped a scoop of sand back and forth between my fingers, letting the strains of cool, soft sand fall in my palm as in an hourglass. Above us, the stars slid as one across the sky, never for a moment losing their place in the vast spread of heaven. It struck me then how short this journey had been - how could it be the end already when it seemed only yesterday that we were pitching our tents at Camp 1? There was still so much I wanted to see here, so much more I wanted to learn. I wanted the evening to last forever, but the stars answered with an inexorable march to the west. That night, as I slept, I dreamt of a garden strung with stars. Good night, stars. May we meet again. Photo credit: RacingThePlanet Stage 5 Part 3 02/08/2011
Most dreaded sunrise of my life. The darkness of what once seemed to be an endless night was fading fast. It was the 83rd kilometre and circa 5:45am. The air was still stubbornly cold but the sky was blushing pink; it was a matter of time before the sun found its way up the sky and roasted the land again. By now, I was beyond exhausted. You ever tried staring at a word and reciting it over and over again, only to find that as you do so, the word as you know it appears to unravel before your very eyes? Sure, you still recognise the letters that make up the word. But through the act of verbal repetition, the order of the letters loses coherence, and though you've been staring at the word and the letters clearly haven't reorganised themselves under your watchful gaze, you're just not as sure if the word's spelt correctly anymore. It's a disconnect between the word's form and semantics. At this point in the race, I was experiencing that very disconnect between body and mind. My legs were moving as they had been for the last 24 hours or so, but the mind was no longer processing any of this. It was as if the endless repetition of putting one foot in front of the other had stripped all meaning from the act. The mind was detached from the body, just loosely bobbing along like a balloon trapped in the hand of a streaking toddler. It may have almost seemed like a cool out-of-body experience, except I don't think I was compos mentis enough at the time to even have that occur to me. In the home stretch of the Long Stage, it simply felt like I was dragging a corpse-that-may-or-may-not-have-been-myself through the sand. And the distance really does magnify with fatigue. Each step carried the weight of ten, each mile stretched like a hundred. "Where the heck is that checkpoint? Why can't I even see a speck of anything? WHO MOVED THE BLOOMIN' CHECKPOINT?! @$^&$#%#!!" Thankfully, by now I had numb exhaustion to help buffer against whatever frustration was threatening to overwhelm the systems. Besides, it was just no good staring at the spotless horizon every time you turned a corner expecting a checkpoint. The desert will just brazenly stare back, unapologetically checkpoint-less. And one can never out-stare a desert. So on and on and on it went, a battle wrapped in every single step. The sun was climbing mercilessly higher in the sky. The thermometer reading climbed in tandem with it. It was one of those days. Downhill! Recommended pace: happy gallop. By the time I ran down the mountain pass and hit the lakeshore, the whole world was doing a very good imitation of a witch's cauldron with the stove set to "high". By the way, let the record reflect that the lakeshore stank to high heaven. It was sewage, folks. Look, evolution and life on earth is a miracle and all. I get that. But for being such miracles, the greatest wonder of all may just be our universal propensity to create a stink. But I digress. What I'd meant to say was that I was at the home stretch of the Long Stage. Camp was (FINALLY!) within sight and I was trying to slug out the remainder of the distance in the most humanly dignified manner possible. It was a little distracting seeing that my legs were no longer on speaking terms with me and some body cell was evaporating into thin air with every step I took. On hindsight it's a very good thing we no longer had clarity of mind when we reached camp. Because if we did, we would have realised that we had just run day and night so we could pitch a tent at Sewage Central and hang out with swarms of dung flies. Stage 5 Part 2 01/16/2011
"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will." - Chuck Palahniuk Checkpoint 2, a.k.a. civilsation and the mirage of a mirage At the 20km mark we entered the much-anticipated Wadi el-Hitan/Valley of the Whales. From a distance, I saw the most curious desert vision I had yet to experience: a row of black triangles, some right-side up and some upside-down, all perfectly aligned besides each other and floating in, what appeared at the time, mid-air. Good grief! It's only Check Point 2 of 9! Am I hallucinating already?! Thankfully, when I got closer it became clear that these were windows carved into adobe huts. Not just any hut, mind you. These huts formed the tourist info centre, souvenir shop and... toilet! Having survived a whole week on the most basic camp latrine (which wholly involves the simple act of squatting and trying not to look at the bucket beneath you), finding modern plumbing, running tap water and a perfectly normal porcelain toilet bowl (made by TOTO, no less) was a miracle. And as a cherry on top, they supplied toilet paper. Remember: this is a race where toilet paper is such a scarcity that it's as prized as gold. (Probably worth more than gold, come to think of it, as you can't wipe your arse with gold.) It was also a sobering moment to realise I was overjoyed at being in... a toilet. This has got to be a new low in life. Anyway, I don't think we came all the way to the Valley of the Whales just so I can gush about the toilets. So, the Valley. Where to begin? Imagine, if you will, a graveyard of mammoth peach pits, some irregular in shape, some humanoid in profile, others rounded and all pockmarked by what appears to have been a heavy spout of acid rain. The rocks are massive - practically boulders, actually. And nestled between boulders are the fossils of still larger marine life that had once swum across this land. The whole thing had a very Gulliver-in-Brobdingnag feel to it. Gulliver discovers he's no longer in Lillput /Photo credit: RacingThePlanet 40,000,000-year old whale fossils! That is a lot of zeroes. /Photo credit: RacingThePlanet Finally going through the Valley of the Whales Sunset on the dune The rest of the 94km is filled with similarly breathless moments: - It is the 30th kilometre. I bust out the iPod as a reward for crossing this milestone. After being cut off from music for almost a week (everyone has been saving their iPod battery for Stage 5) the opening notes to Glee's cover of Defying Gravity gave a burst of unexpected euphoria. I swear, I have never heard music this sweet in my life. The sound of civilisation! I am truly getting closer to home with every step. The notion strikes me from left field and I find myself inexplicably close to tears. - It is the 41st kilometre. We are simmering in the high heat of the day. A checkpoint lies within sight, set halfway up a colossal sand dune. Two competitors ahead are working their way towards it, but something is wrong. They look like they are in the exact same spot on the sand dune as they had been a minute ago. But they are moving, no? Unless... the zig-zagging jeep tracks on the dune confirm it: the dune ahead is steep. The jeep could only go up sideways; driving straight up could have caused it to flip over. Oh, yeah. The dune ahead is hellaciously steep. - It is the 47th kilometre. The sun has just deserted the day, carving the Sahara into a purgatory straddling night and day: it is too dark to see the path ahead, too bright to glimpse the stars above. And the utter isolation of the twilight hour is gutting. It seems incredulous that I had last seen people a mere 7km ago; how could this be when I feel like the last person on this planet now? The desert really does play tricks on the mind. I have never seen the Sahara in this light before. Usually by sunset I am safely back in camp, huddled over a crackling fire with dinner in hand and friendly chatter all around. We never had to confront this side of the desert on our own. Now, with the Sahara plunging into an ever-growing darkness and nothing for company but the faint light from my headlamp, every emotion becomes magnified. I feel puny, exposed, insignificant, perishable. If something were to happen to me in the dead of the night, they will not find the body until dawn and tomorrow will just be another day. You may think it mere paranoia, but the desert night has a way of making your imagination dance. - It is the 52nd kilometre. I am out of water, humour, and energy. Surely I've aged two and a half lifetimes since dusk. The one thing that spurs me on is the faint memory of a promise to never stop moving until I cross the finish line. A tawny glow in the distance hints at a checkpoint. I want so badly to believe this but am beginning to lose faith in my own judgment. After all, I also see two glowsticks defying gravity and jumping about in the air. That can't be right, even in the desert world. Thankfully, it turns out not to be a mirage but just a volunteer waving the sticks about. I tumble into the checkpoint and realise I am shaking. It's probably fatigue, hunger, or fear, or possibly a combination of all three. I eat, I replenish my water, I change into a thermal top for the night ahead. I don't relish the prospect of heading out into the desert darkness alone. Jennie and I team up and together we march into the darkness towards Checkpoint 6. - It is the 59th kilometre. Checkpoint 6 carries with it the promise of hot water and a tent for a nap. We can't possibly be far from our oasis now but the blisters are back with a vengeance. Every step is bloody murder. It's as if I'm walking on water balloons, except the balloons are my feet. But if you keep up the pace you will find that you get used to the pain eventually; your body comes to accept every step of agonising squish of flesh and water as a necessary pain. The trouble comes whenever we stop to take a toilet break or pause to adjust our gear; once you break your strike it is doubly difficult to get going again. I distract myself with the massive piece of cloud floating overhead. Suddenly, I'm reminded of the wisdom of a fellow runner, "In any endurance race first run with your legs, then with your head. Then, when both have deserted you, run with your heart." It's going to be all heart from here on out. - It is the 63rd kilometre. The desert wind picks up just as we reach a bustling Checkpoint 6. It's been almost 15 hours since I had a proper meal but being back amongst familiar faces is rejuvenation in itself. Avi the Angel helps me with the hot water (because anyone in possession of hot water in a cold desert is automatically seen with a halo and gown). Then, Jennie and I clamour into a tent for a nap. The darkness reeks of sweat, socks, and runners who also haven't bathed for days. But at this point, does it really matter? You're freezing, you're swaying in fatigue and in pain all over. Just lying on flat ground is a luxury. The desert really does teach by taking away. - It is still the 63rd kilometre. I wake from a deep but short slumber. The first thing you register is how toasty your sleeping bag is. The second thing you register is dread: is it really necessary to get out of the comfy oven of a bag and head back into the freezer again? In the twilight of your conscience, a little voice asks why you signed up for this in the first place. - It is the 70th kilometre. We talk anything and everything that can help us keep vigil through the night. We talk about life back home and about unlikely cravings that we'll need to see to once we get back to civilisation ("a big, fat burger from the depths of the worst fast food joint. The burger will be greasy. The greasier the better.") Above us, the colossal piece of cloud is still hovering steadily, its tips stretching from end to end of the wide desert horizon. I wonder at its refusal to disperse, at its familiarity from previous nights. Then, in a moment of startling clarity, I see it for what it truly is: I am not staring at a large band of cloud, but into the very depths of our Milky Way and the universe itself. The band of white is formed by stars, so numerous that they litter the night sky and glow as one. If you try to count them you would be lost by the first dozen, such is their vastness. It is the greatest shame that, for all the images I have to share of the race, I cannot bring back the one most enduring scene of the entire journey: our world cloaked in the darkness of a moonless night, the undulating horizon of sand dunes and mountains backlit by the blue/yellow glow of civilisation, and a sprawling night sky that starts from the fringe of the horizon in a deep blue hue, then bleeds into perfect blackness in the space overhead until it meets with the dizzying spell of stars piercing through its canvas. At this instance, the spellbinding notes of "Go the Distance" from Disney's Hercules turn up on the iPod as a pair of shooting stars dazzle across the sky ahead. It is the most wonderful thing, to witness first-hand the grandeur of the world around and above us, to realise that there is so much more to the world than our immediate existence, to feel a pang of insignificance but be swept up by a burst of awe and pride in being a part of it all in the first place. In this moment, suspended between rapture and exhaustion, I know in my heart that this scene will live with me until the day I die. Photo credit: RacingThePlanet You would expect, when the 94km Stage 5 finally dawned on us, that we would all be scrambling around planning the last of our provisions and double and triple-checking our gear. After all, on such a long stage every mistake is magnified and every gram on your back weighs that much more. Yet, as we prepared for our Long March I found myself turning increasingly inward, focused on the mental and spiritual aspects of the race. On the surface, the Sahara Race is a logistically-driven expedition: bring enough food, electrolytes, pack the right gear and you can complete the distance. In other words, do your research, test your gear, train thoroughly, and you will be fine. But the last few days out in the desert had taught me so much about the one component of the race that cannot be acquired with any amount of gold or research: heart. To pick up virtually every other sport on earth, you would first need some instructions. You need a coach or mentor before you can golf, swim, pitch, or ski. Yet running is singular in its intuitiveness. As long as you know how to walk, you know how to run. And while we may have been taught to how walk by our parents, we all began running on our own accord. As toddlers, we had one day walked enough to became confident in picking up our pace. One foot in front of the other, faster, faster, faster - and all of a sudden, we were running. In other words, we run because the body remembers, because the body knows. Photo credit: RacingThePlanet The Sahara Race began for me as a rebellion against time. Late last year, as a freshly minted graduate, I was thrown into the working world and shocked at how quickly the days flew. Blink and entire weeks would slip by, leaving no trace of their passing except for the faint but disturbing notion that they weren't all that eventful, just like the week before it and the week before that one. Where on earth did all the time go?! Of course, if I wanted to be absolutely honest with myself, I did know where most of the time went. I was pretty adept at slacking, you see. And who wouldn't be? We live in the era of an incredible time crunch. Everything needs to be done pronto - our hyperactive, tech-savvy world demands it. We are surfing the net, checking our mail and listening to music on the iPhone while on the train to work all at once; over lunch we are checking our stock performance, scanning news headlines and planning our weekend with each hasty bite, and when we do work, we work so hard that in the rare morsel of down time on the weekends, it becomes easy to justify our slacking, "I deserve this break. I've been going non-stop all week." It doesn't take a lot of effort to be lazy. Youtube was a particularly convenient avenue for slacking off - and I was a champion at it. I was the sort that could handily spend 3 hours at a stretch watching Youtube clips. A friend could send me a link, and after watching it I would click through other clips, or I'd catch a second wind of, "oh! And now I absolutely have to Youtube this completed unrelated topic too!" Minutes and hours would melt away this way. It wasn't that I particularly enjoyed YouTubing. But I did it for the same reason that others did it - it was so accessible and it was "good enough entertainment". Youtubing required no more commitment than a click of your mouse and TADA!! Instant gratification and the illusion of connecting with the millions of people who have also seen this video. How much easier can it get? And yet, because all that mindless internet surfing asked so little of effort and commitment, the entire experience was also rather shallow. I didn't feel particularly fulfilled because I just watched a cute doggie wag its toosh across a room or seen the popping of the world's biggest zit. In fact, the whole thing had the distinct taste of eating fastfood or flipping through a gossip magazine - indulgent at the time but leaving you sick to the stomach afterwards. Shopping and movies had the same effect. The thrill from accumulating material wealth is so fleeting, so short-lived that the light was hardly worth the candle. And while I love a good movie as much as the next person and would happily re-watch the best ones a dozen times, I still find the concept of "the cinema as a regular venue for social interaction" confounding. Because, you know, spending a few hours facing the same direction in the dark without exchanging a single word and listening to scripted dialogue is such an exemplary way of bonding with friends. It was easy to lose track of time and meaning in a milieu of modern conveniences. 如此虛度光陰可謂一種自我折磨。 為何老是眼睜睜地讓寶貴的時間在眼前化為烏有？明明是有能力去改變自己， 卻因習惰成疾而荒廢了一生。 瞬間，聯想到60歲的自己將是一個一無所成的老婆婆。到時，後悔莫及！ Loosely translated, this kind of slacking was tantamount to a self-inflicted form of torture. In those moments of regretting lost time, I suddenly saw what the future held: a weary 60-year old waking up one day to find herself not quite able to happily answer the question, "did I spend my life well?" Besides, there had to be better ways to spend one's time, right? After all, I was given a brain and a pair of perfectly healthy legs - so was I really just going to lose my days to Youtube, shopping, movies, and more shopping? I wasn't sure what laid ahead but if I had a tombstone at the end of it all, I knew that I did not want it to read, "She swiped a lot of credit cards". But laziness comes naturally to everyone. And once we get used to it, it becomes so hard to extricate yourself from that comfortable stupor. Before you know it, you're a downward spiral where laziness begets laziness. There's a Chinese idiom that succinctly captures the heart of this problem: 逆水行舟, 不進則退. That is, you live life as if you're paddling upstream; if you aren't moving forward, you're losing ground. In those moments, I saw that if I wasn't going to do something about it, life really was just going to pass me by. So I started to run. Because when I ran, the world around me would start to zip by in a blur, and the harder I pushed the faster it flew. Trees would melt into an indistinguishable blur of green and brown, rocks on the ground would rush into vision like a camera on perpetual zoom. It was like discovering the fast forward button on a time machine. The best were the weekend morning runs, when I'd be out the door before 7. By the time I had done two loops of the trail, pumping with endorphins and a runner's high, most of the country was still in bed. It was satisfyingly productive - as if I had managed to steal a piece of time from Chronos when he wasn't looking. And from then on, there was no looking back. I would run and run until the strength of each kick surged through the rest of the body, I would run until every stride felt like a whipping lash singeing the silence of the air. I ran until the ticking seconds seemed to come to a complete standstill, as if the sheer force of that forward momentum would propel me into another dimension... I ran until time and distance lost all meaning. There is no adequate way to explain the euphoria of wholeheartedly pursuing a singular goal, of flirting with the edge of your limits then charging right past them and discovering that you are capable of so much more. I thought of all the training I had been through the past few months, of all the endless rounds of planning and deliberation, of the long journey that led me to Cairo and how, even after all of that, racing through the 5th stage of the Sahara Race today I still wasn't entirely certain I'd be able to complete. But then again, if we only pursued things that offered an assured and certain outcome, we wouldn't have achieved a whole lot in life, would we? Rant: Funky Stage Names 12/16/2010
Apropos of nothing (but I really gotta say this): who comes up with the names for each stage of the race? Imagine, it's the morning of a new stage and you're all fired up to go crunch some serious distance in the desert. You pull out the race itinerary to check the course description and you see... "Stage 4: Gardens of the Castle". Castle? Gardens? ...For real? The name's so grand and whimsical you almost think you've been thrown into some Hayao Miyazaki movie. I half-expect Totoro or some hungry spirit to pop over the next sand dune or something. And if we're lucky, we might get to see some pseudo space ship a la Howl's Moving Castle. For a visual, this is the words "gardens of the castle" conjure to mind: Miyazaki, Sahara-style: 'Look, Totoro! I see a checkpoint up ahead!' And this is how the so-called "gardens of the castle", a.k.a. Stage 4 of Sahara Race 2010, really looked like: Oh yeah, no castle and no gardens here. Reality - you always need to ask it for a refund. /End rant. Stage 4: Part 2 12/04/2010
A brilliant start to Stage 4 (Continued from the previous post) Mammoth table top mountains rose from the desert floor, the layers of sand creeping up the rock face until, perhaps, one day they would swallow the mountains whole. In the morning light, the tip of the mountains glowed bone white. Sediment lines ran the length of the mountains, a jarring vision of geometry in a land so liberated from order. At the feet of the mountains, the ubiquitous curves of the Sahara sand snaked up the ridges of dunes in an iridescent play of shadow and light. In the midst of the morning rush, I hardly had the presence of mind to fully appreciate it. Even then, to the distracted mind the Great Desert was so utterly breathtaking. The desert has an uncanny ability to shrink people and jeeps to mere specks. Click for full view. It has been said that the Sahara has the presence of an unseen ocean. To this day, having been there and back, it remains difficult to place a finger on its allure. For generations people have wandered into the Sahara in search of something - an adventure, a challenge, or simply a passage through which caravans of goods must be delivered. The conditions the desert presents are formidable, and not all who wander in manage to wander out. So why do we go out of our way to cross it? If we wanted to experience adversity and Nature in all its might, there are a whole lot of other places in the world to prove our mettle. Why pick a piece of land where there is effectively nothing but sand, sand, withering heat, and more sand? Would it seem incredulous if I said that I did it in part out of sheer curiosity? I once read that there are so many stars in our universe (not planets. Stars! Like our own sun.) that if every single grain of sand we have were a star, there wouldn't be enough sand on Earth to represent all the stars in our universe. In fact the ratio is approximately one hundred stars for every grain of sand we have - and that's just the conservative estimate. The sheer scale of that comparison blew my mind. So of course I had to go get a better idea of just how much sand there was in the world to fit that concept into digestible terms. And where better to start than the Great Desert of the legends, the Sahara itself? At the top of a steep climb with Mie-san, one half of the Japanese couple who chose this trip for their honeymoon. Still, the notion of crossing the desert on foot on a week-long self-supported race was every bit as intimidating, remote, far-fetched and impossible as it would have seemed to any rational mind. Just this February, I couldn't make up my mind whether to sign up for this race or not. Now, I see that there never really was a choice. Curiosity always gets the better of me. That is a lot of sand/stars in the universe. The desert turned out to be every bit as mesmerising as the legends promised. On this day, Stage 4, I felt the full imposing aura of the Sahara. The truth is, the beauty of this desert is not like anything we're accustomed to. You'd think in a land of such stunning landscape, something ought to move, if only to justify its grandeur. But there is absolutely no drama to the brand of beauty you find here; no rocks to come crashing down in a violent avalanche, no lark to break into song, no trees to mark the passage of time, no swishing waves to fill the silence. A twisting mountain in our midst Despite its size, the Sahara makes so little fanfare about its own presence that if it were a living organism it might as well be a gnat. That nothing ever seemed to move or change here accorded the land an air of uncompromising immovability. We love to exercise our imagination and call the desert romantic, terrible, hostile, unforgiving, and so on. But in reality the Sahara isn't any of that - because how could a desert set out to be hostile or unforgiving or beautiful? No matter how you want to spin it, the desert simply defies any adjective; the Sahara simply is. Still, in that state of blasé existence lay its true magnetism. The many shapes of the Sahara - rectangular, pyramidal, arch, bump and squiggly. I thought of the miracles and tragedies that transpired from this land - of travellers who, stranded, drank the radiator water from their cars in a bid to avoid death by dehydration. When that ran out, some drank the gasoline and their own urine; it was the only way to stay off the battery acid. Some won in their bet against nature; others weren't so lucky. I thought of the terrible ordeal that dehydration brings, as chronicled in scientific detail by William Langewiesche in his superb book, Sahara Unveiled. An extract from the chapter on an ill-fated Belgian family: "Thirst is first felt when the body has lost about 0.5% of its weight to dehydration... .. Up to a 5% loss (about a gallon) the symptoms include fatigue, loss of appetite, flushed skin, irritability, increased pulse rate, and mild fever. Beyond that lie dizziness, headache, labored breathing, absence of salivation, circulatory problems, blued skin, and slurred speech. At 10%, a person can no longer walk. The point of no return is 12% (a 3-gallon deficit), when the tongue swells, and the mouth loses all sensation. Because swallowing becomes impossible, a person this dehydrated cannot recover without medical assistance. In the Sahara it may take only half a day to get to such a condition. As the body dehydrates in a hot desert climate, a disproportionate amount of water is drawn from the circulating blood. The blood thickens, and finally can no longer fulfill its functions, one of which is to transport heat generated within the body to the surface. It is this heat that ultimately kills. The end comes with an explosive rise in body temperature, convulsions, and blissful death." I suspect "blissful" is justified when death becomes a release from the earlier tortures. In the Sahara, stories transpire by the simple virtue of one getting lost. I didn't know it then, but our very own journey through the Sahara on this day was going to be a day of stories as well. She saw seashells in the Sahara. Up ahead, far beyond the reach of the rest of the competition, the front-runners of Sahara Race 2010 were having a show down. Up until this stage of the race, Anders had been in the lead. But today Ryan Bennett, the second leading man, decided it was time to go full throttle and make an assault on the lead. Ryan pushed ahead in what would later be described by Anders as a "brutal pace". The chips of the race had yet to fall. Further back, the rest of the field was busy fighting their private battles. Ian McMullane was struggling to keep his pace even as some monster blisters were developing. A Korean competitor noticed his limp, and at a checkpoint passed Ian his pair of trekking poles. In a desert race, giving up your poles is equivalent to giving up your shoes. It was a gesture of generosity in a race packed with moments of such humanity. And I - I got to meet Father Christmas. Oldest competitor to complete Sahara Race 2010 is... Father Christmas. /Photo credit: RacingThePlanet Allow me to backtrack a little. There's a 65-year old German competitor on our race who's built like a tank and walks like one. For the race he's chosen an all-black outfit with a turban to match. To paraphrase my hilarious tentmates, "Even when he's just walking around he looks like he's about to take you down." Here's the punchline: he's also got a handsome full beard of silver that only looks even more badass against the black of his turban. Earlier, the highly quotable Sam Wilson walked into our tent asking, "That man in black - you reckon he's Father's Christmas on holiday?" Which made a bit of sense, seeing that the Father Christmas we all know would spend the whole year up in the North Pole preparing presents with a whole town of elves. Imagine it'd be nice to get away from all that and just wander around in a simmering desert for a bit just before the pre-Christmas bustle. So from that point on, German Badass was known to Tent 14 for all intents and purposes as "Father Christmas-otherwise-known-as-the-toughest-man-in-the-race". So here I am busy popping stray blisters at Checkpoint 3 of Stage 4. Out of the blue, Father Christmas who also happens to be there rears up (because he never just "walks over"; he rears) and says, "Are you Jane? I am Volka. I liked your blog very much." He gives me the most bad-ass thumbs up I've ever seen and sets off into the desert. And here I am, left blinking in the wake of his very-dignified presence, with a blistered foot propped up on one knee and a needle in one hand and a sock dangling off a pinky toe, and not quite sure to do with the revelation that Father Christmas reads blogs. You never do know what stories would transpire from the desert, do you? Father Christmas on holiday /Thanks for the photo, Vanessa Tan! Stage 4: Part 1 11/22/2010
The Stage 3 marathon had done a number on us. By the time Day 4 rolled around, the drop out rate had already equaled the total drop out rate in past years' races. And the distance was finally taking its toll - either you couldn't keep any food down or you simply burned a lot of calories; whichever path you took you would have acquired a frighteningly gaunt look (Edward Matts, I'm looking at you). The men were also sprouting cavemen beards. So in some ways we just looked like a bunch of refugees stuck in a really badly planned weight loss camp. A star attraction had also blossomed in our neighbor's tent as the abomination that are Emma's feet (if they can be still called that) was rapidly becoming the gold standard for injuries amongst competitors. Honestly, the woman deserves a medal just for her speedwork in developing blisters. By Day 2 the blisters at her heels had grown so big that she looked like she had four heels instead of two. You can only imagine the condition the feet was in by Day 4. A perfect day to be out in the desert But whatever cards we were dealt, the sun rose over Stage 4 anyway and we were off at a gallop again for our rendezvous with the next campsite. I say it like it's some romantic adventure, but in reality it was a lot more strategically thought out than that. Having survived Stage 3, most of us were already casting our sights on Stage 5, the infamous Long March which was set to be all of 94km this year. Today's 38km stage was effectively a breather, a gulp of air between dives; all strategies deployed today had the sole purpose of getting us to the starting line of Stage 5 in optimum condition. An undercurrent of tension ran through the camp the morning of Stage 4 as we mulled over the implications of this stage. Should I go out strong and finish this leg in good time to get more rest time at camp in preparation for Stage 5? Or should I take it easy and stock up on energy for Stage 5? If the former, there was the risk of going out too strong then blowing up during the Long March; if the latter, then the long stretches spent out in the sun today could wilt you away even before Stage 5 began. It was always a battle of balance. Against the backdrop of such cold, logical deliberations, we witnessed the most romantic start to the race we had yet to glean. (More to come.) Average life expectancy. 11/14/2010
We now interrupt the odyssey of the Sahara with a thoroughly excellent and thought-provoking piece by Adrian Tan, who was the guest-of-honour at a recent university convocation. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008. ----- I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband. My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me. On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable. Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife. And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument. Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you. The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning. You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers. The good news is that they’re wrong. The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy. I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life. You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap. Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom. So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper. Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy. I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy. After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average. Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much. That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste. If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average. What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate. Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows. What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over. Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free. The most important is this: do not work. Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable. Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust. There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful. People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense. Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway. Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself. I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist. So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher. Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working. Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence. In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror. I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross. One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong. The other side of the coin is this: fall in love. I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone. Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable. Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul. Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm. You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart. You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you. Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it. Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone. | FAQ: "How was the race?"
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