The night came early – around 5:30 or 6 PM. Long before we finally stopped and poured loose eyed out into the moonless night. Here was the start of the sand, so the busloads were further divided into jeeps, which sped into the enveloping night, revving engines and spinning tires to the site of our epic beginnings.
The encampment was well laid out with the welcome of sand below, as it would be the rest of the race offering a gentle, yielding respite at the end of each leg. The soft sand a mixed blessing for its comfort at night, yet the promise of blisters and sore knees the next day… but little did we know about that for now. I was second to arrive in the Djoser tent (number 6) after Rupert. Soon the Polar Bears – Stuart, Miles and Martin, then JiHee, Shane, Annabelle and Jaqeline followed. We settled, dumped kit where we could, and shared pre-race snacks, then had a fine feast in the cool, open-aired desert night.
My back had by the day before become more than annoyingly painful, forcing me to seriously consider bailing before the start for fear of doing real damage to what felt like a bulging disc… But the orphans would get nothing if I didn't at least run the first kilometer, so I’d start and see how far the pain took me.
The night brought visions of scorpions strolling into the tent, and a dull dread of the looming effort to come, but then it brought something quite unexpected in the deep night: RAIN! And a heavy fall by the sound of it. I awoke in the midst of this great rainfall, thinking – “in the desert?” and in my heavy-eyed haze I arose and stumbled out to grab my shoes before they were too wet to run in the next morning.
Only when I reached the outside of the tent, did I grasp that it was the hurried flapping of colors flying, thirty flags representing the colors of competitors countries from around the globe. Standing in the whipping cool, I realized that nature was calling for a different kind of water fall. I’d wonder off to find some distant spot of sand, but then I remembered the scorpions, so I stood there for a moment, unable to find my shoes in the darkness, and feeling a bit sheepish about going back in the tent to retrieve my headlamp after my wobbly rush out the door. I waited for a long still moment in the cool air, eventually grasped my way back in and found the nicest patch of dry desert to water… and I watered it well with a monument of stone looming above me its massive shadow barely visible in the starlight, and rather than ominous, it was somehow comforting as a big brother or knowing guide.
