Lovells Beijing partner Fred Chang recently completed the 6-day 250km Atacama Crossing, part of RacingThePlanet's 4 Deserts series and named by TIME magazine as second on its list of the Top 10 Endurance Competitions in the world.
By Fred Chang, Partner, Lovells Beijing
I recently completed the 250-km Atacama Crossing in the Atacama Desert of Chile. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, and this sentiment is echoed by a number of the participants in the race, some of whom are world class elite athletes. What made it so difficult was the terrain (the heat, reaching 44 Celsius in the treeless desert, didn't help)--at its best it was dirt road, or hard packed dirt but littered with stones neither small nor infrequent enough to be negligible; but at its worst (and it was more often at or near its worst than its best), the footing was a physical and also mental struggle: there was of course the loose sand one associates with a "desert" (or beach), which for many is impossible to run and difficult even to walk in; there was also very rough scrub, prickly bushes that drew blood with each encounter; and also bracken and wild stubs of tough, yellowed grass studding pools of salt water or mud flats that were difficult to navigate; and worst of all, appearing in most of the days of the 6 day race, the salt.
A word about "salt"--this is not your Morton's salt ("when it rains it pours"), which while bad enough, at least is smooth like sand. No, this salt took the form of either layers of barely hardened mush, into which all but eleven-feet would sink to the calves; or worst of all, the eerie, and km-after-km relentless array of, twisted, gnarled, rock-hard volcanic outcroppings from the earth which made walking (let alone running) a series of existential decisions as to which crag would harm my feet and ankles least. These choices, footfall by footfall, compounded over stretches of 10 km at a time--NOT FUN.
The race begins outside the village of San Pedro, a 90 minute drive from Calama, which is reached by a two hour flight from Santiago. I arrived in San Pedro the night of March 27, fresh off a series of nightmarish coach class flights (Beijing-Paris, Paris-Santiago, Santiago-Calama) and layovers, the chief pleasure of which was watching Rachel Getting Married (during which I mused on why contemporary Americans such as me celebrate in such a boring or else dysfunctional and unrefined way, largely devoid of the sophistication and high wit of Hugh Grant and other Brits in all those British movies about friends and weddings, or even the old Americans of Hugh's distant relative Cary's ilk in Philadelphia Story) and Slumdog Millionaire, before succumbing to the mind-numbing pastime of the sleepless that is watching movies you have seen many times before (also on flights), and then entering total apocalypse with a viewing of Marley and Me, possibly the worst movie ever made. On a brighter note, I found it cosmic that Debussy's Claire de Lune features prominently in both "Twilight" and the Japanese film "Tokyo Sonata". Included was a five hour layover in Paris, where I had the pleasure of dining on a microwaved hot dog slathered in mystery cheese; and an eight hour layover in Santiago, where to relieve the misery I surrendered to paying US$ 12 for the privilege of checking into their "VIP lounge", where I could feast on limitless peanuts washed down by limitless Johnnie Walker Red--a very nice way to start my race preparation. At the Hotel Altiplanico in San Pedro that night, I found myself rooming with one of my prospective tentmates, and the second most formidable competitor in our tent, the German Harald Meyer, who apparently does these events with regularity, having done countless desert and jungle extreme marathons in the past. He and I dined at that late hour in the small restaurant adjacent to the check-in counter, loading up on pasta and "Kunstmann" lager. Of note are the beautiful stone walks, the pristine clay walls, the strangely and serenely appropriate Buddhistic artwork, the lush greenery, the chic pool, and the star-studded sky that greeted us at the hotel. Sort of Aman meets dusty village/out-of-sorts traveller definitely NOT too sexy for the catwalk.
The race, with its 100 or so competitors from all 6 inhabited continents, began on March 29. Like the next three days, the first day was roughly a marathon in length, but spiritually and temporally much longer. Although largely flat, the first day was not necessarily runnable. Truth be told I hardly ran any of the 250k, but the leaders and much of the middle pack included many great runners. By running I mean running, not jogging. To see these men and women actually running, and running, and running, and running, in the heat, in all terrains (other than the salt corals), km after km after km--one can only marvel in awe at the glory of their spirits and bodies. Bravo! And bravo also to numerous other heroes such as my tentmates, Alastair Todd who did most of the race in hideously blister-racked feet, Laurie Brophy who at 76 years of age was a paragon of stamina, gentility and courage for getting up each day and going as far as permitted by natural light and the rules of the course sweepers who had to pick up the pink flags that guided the racers from start to finish, and Mary Gadams, the Racing the Planet founder and CEO, veteran of 7 MDS (for non-extremists, that's Marathon des Sables), Woman of Steel, and really the only human being ever to run a business simultaneously with running 250km in a desert (on a swollen ankle and infected feet). It was an honor to eat Mountain House with them (the most popular form of freeze-dried food at this race, the mere mention of which now makes me want to vomit), as well as shards of dried beef jerky Laurie shared with us (after observing the labelling "produced from Botswana cows"). I discovered the driest and edgiest humor in Sir Laurie. Later he would make a quip about the need to evade Klingons that has been puzzling me ever since.
Back to Day 1. Frankly I can't remember too much about it other than it was the easiest day of the bunch, and really only had the minor challenges, near the beginning, of a slightly dangerous vertical climb up a 20 foot wall, and near the end, of a very long 11 km stretch in a very hot, and unvarying, hard packed desert walk. This would have been run by the stronger athletes in the race--I walked it.
Day 2 was considerably tougher, though again I can't remember much other than a long and icy cold march through a river fed by the distant mountains that filled a slot canyon with little space for land. The miracle of water, and the vivid greenery that penumbrated therefrom, was one of the sole joys of this week of suffering--Atacama is known as the driest place known to man, 100 times drier than Death Valley according to desert metrics. (Sometimes my mind wandered to the scene near the end of Quantum of Solace, and the ironic juxtaposition of the beer ordered in that posh boutique hotel (Pearl of the Dunes I think it was called in the movie) by the sadistic junta leader, and the can of motor oil which the loathsome Dominic Greene is made to drink shortly before expiring in the Atacama Desert after being abandoned there by the vengeance-wielding 007.) I also remember, following that brief respite in the river, the long, winding climb up a mountain, in a chain of competitors (during most of the race I found myself alone, but here was a period of about two hours when about a dozen of us, from Brazil, Japan, Germany, Holland, UK, New Zealand, the US and elsewhere found ourselves basically in a single-file pack), then through a tunnel that was pitch black, with a huge boulder in the middle we had been forewarned about, but mercifully short, then down a long, steep sand dune which, for some, elicited peals of joy (not me). Sand filled the shoes (or in the case of the ever jovial Brazilian Carlos, who is an employee of Crocs, his eponymous footwear). Checkpoint was soon, and that day was over not long after.
Day 3 I regard as the toughest. It had many variations of terrain, most unpleasant, including scrub, sand, salt, dunes and hills. However, towards the end was a breathtaking scamper down a sand mountain, suddenly emerging into a tiny, verdant grove filled with the delightful babble of a mountain-fed spring--I was momentarily stunned by the sudden reversal of landscape, and there I sat, in the grass, dipping my head into the brook, tempted to tarry in this place of enchantment. I was with the German friends, Frank and Karen, decimated by various injuries and ailments, at that point having together traversed some horrid flat desert as they were hurting, and I was tiring and, having been alone for so long, craved conversation. And what a conversation it is when you discover that this attractive 20-something couple (he looks like Edward in "Twilight", she, bedecked every day in a radiant white top and leggings, like a fit and young version of Claudia Schiffer....OK, maybe I exaggerate....a bit) love the US West Coast--San Fran, Seattle, my beloved home--and he is studying String Theory with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. We briefly discussed, with the little energy we had left, the work, at the far other end of the physics spectrum, of my college roommate, considered the world's leading expert on "quantum computing". Again, it is one of the amazements of these jaunts that we find ourselves locked in desperate conditions with the most gifted, but disparate and previously separate-by-more-than-6-degrees, brethren from every corner of the earth, camaraderie generates, and then from within we gather the resources to unlock ourselves from the barriers standing between us and "the other side".
Day 4 had the longest day in salt, in all its cruel variations, including one endless stretch (14km) of salt desert, where the mighty Alasdair Morrison, veteran of many endurance races and former Jardine Taipan and Morgan Stanley Asia chairman (and Mary Gadams' husband), provided one of those Lawrence of Arabia moments which only a man of his steely, competition-hardened experience and mien can--he stood, under the searing sun in the halfway point of this salt desert for hours on end, providing water to us dehydrated souls, and words of encouragement. Some probably regard this day as the toughest.
Day 5 (the 74 km long march) was, for me, the high point, aesthetically and spiritually, of the entire event. It was filled with lows as well. Such as the introductory, and by now to most of us gratuitously painful, prolonged reappearance of the !@#$% salt corals. Followed by a very long stage on dirt road, where I had the pleasure of being passed by the various elite runners, led by the top male and female finishers, Mehmet Danis, the Turkish Canadian dentist to the Canadian Army who bided his time during the first four days and then hammered the course on the long day, and Fleur Grose, the Australian who won every Day's stage in the women's category. The elite runners' start time was delayed for two hours on the long day precisely so that people like me could hear these thoroughbreds thundering down from behind and then see their dust trails as they ran past us. To a man (and woman) they would always offer me a thumbs up or a "good job" without any condescension--such is the spirit that Mary's events engenders in its participants. It is an experience like no other, where individuals--all unique--somehow intuit that they are deeply in a common and indivisible enterprise or Event.
The third stage of Day 5 was famous (infamous) for its equally unending passage through rougher ground, becoming increasingly undulating with hills and distant cliffs near its end, but with little preparing us for what we beheld upon surmounting that stage's penultimate hill--the sight of a monumental sand dune that looked like a pyramid in its austerity, magnificence, height and incline, and the black specks that were inching up its face. My God, I had an hour of walking to the base of that dune to gird myself psychologically--and I still wasn't feeling up to it when I got there (I recalled the remark of one of my ex-Goldman Sachs teammates when we did the 1996 HK Trailwalker together: "If I had had a gun, I would have killed myself; if I had had a car, I would have driven."). But on and on and up and up I trudged, driven only by the fear of stumbling or simply ceasing to move and thereby tumbling down the dune and having to re-start the ascent. Eventually I made it to the top, whereupon I entered a plateau of lunar (or might it be Martian as it was ochre in color) desolation. The checkpoint followed, where my blisters and tendonitis were tended to by Dr Alice (along with Dr Grant, Dr Jay and Dr Marla, and the entire support and logistical management led by the indefatigable Zac Addorisio, heroes and martyrs for having to deal with 200 unwashed, injured feet for 7 days), who forbade me from leaving the checkpoint until she watched me consume a Larabar (I hadn't eaten all day since "breakfast" of some purportedly Indian chicken rice pullau (Mountain House again)), which I managed to do only because it was a Larabar as opposed to some other of my energy bars that will go unnamed. Larabar must have tasters with tastebuds like to mine--their Chocolate Cashew is like Mom's brownies, equally moist and fudgy and nutty. Great when washed down with Clif's "Green Apple (with caffeine)" energy drink which had filled my Camelback.
Sun would last for another 90 minutes or so when I left the 3rd checkpoint, and it was a pleasant walk to the next checkpoint, at about the 54 km mark. A short rest, then onwards to the last checkpoint, with its promise of hot water. It was now dark, and the first glimmerings of the eventual nocturnal glory that awaited. I could see ahead of me the flickers of the little red flashing lights which RTP requires its participants to adhere to their packs for this portion--the only portion of the event at night. Glow sticks now supplemented, at every 100 meters, the pink flags that marked the course during the day. I estimate that about 6 of us were in some proximity to one another from here to the end of the day's stage some 22km away.
An aside on our packs. Before the beginning of the race on Day One there was much conversation about how the smart, elite athletes managed to compress everything they needed into 7kg. My pack was considerably heavier, burdened with an oversupply of Mountain House which I began giving away to the Media Tent after Day One, and what also turned out to be excessive quantities of Gu tango mango flavored energy drink concentrate. I was also embarrassed by my poor packing skills--on three separate occasions, either my sleeping bag, or my lycra leggings, fell from my pack, including during the first km of the first stage on Day 1, necessitating a 10 minute search. But I grew to love my pack--purchased online at the RTP virtual store--as it doubled as my pillow at night and was the well from which I drew my most crucial sustenance at my most depressed moments--Peach Tea flavored "Sharkies" (the gummy bear of choice for Lance Armstrong). These packs contained everything on which we survived for a week, other than the tents and water, which were supplied by the support infrastructure of RTP. Among the marvels included in the packs were goodies such as "second skin" (a blue, gel-like adhesive that, applied to blisters, miraculously molts into skin), sunscreen (notwithstanding the use of which my calves reddened, then blackened and eventually shed a long layer of skin from relentless exposure), a second pair of socks (the brand new first pair were thankfully discarded after Day Four, riddled with holes), Purell, and wet tissues (for those awkward, tragic moments behind bushes or big rocks when Nature called as runners flew past, mercifully either ignoring or not aware of my business).
I reached the final checkpoint around 11 at night--some racers were asleep in tents and would carry on only after sunrise. I tucked into the only Mountain House packet I enjoyed eating--it was a nonspicy chicken rice dish, that became a soup once hot water was added. I thought I detected the flavor of celery, which I find a remarkably refreshing flavor. I treated myself to two servings, knowing that would leave me with only two more meals for the totality of April 3 and 4. I would get by on those days with extra energy bars, which I refused to further eat on this night.
The final stage of Day 5 remains for me the most miraculous, uplifting two hours of my life other than witnessing the birth of my two daughters. It was 12km, starting with a short patch of....yes, salt, but a gentler, kinder version that, under the starry firmament actually glowed white like snow, and the crunching of which sounded like hard packed snow (I managed to fall, for the fourth time in the whole race, tripping on a rare coral-like outcropping in this stretch), leaving my hands bloodied yet again. From there it was nothing but a two hour, rapturous, radiant soliloquy with the stars. The terrain was reasonably navigable, with the glow sticks, the nocturnal light, and the only path through a narrow canyon on both sides of which were immense mountain walls. There were intense concentrations of stars, constellations, galaxies, and then in other sectors of the hemisphere above, empty expanses of cobalt night or the slightest wisps of cosmic matter curling like thin vapors. And I thought I discerned a corridor of stars aligned with the parallel walls of the canyon, as if, after 240 km of cruel and capricious indifference to us humans, Nature finally relented gently and unambiguously to lead the lonely runners to their destination. The ancient geology of terrain which had oppressed us for a week, finally melted into the freshly revealed, but still more ancient cosmology of the sky, all bursting with what Conrad called the "tenseness of life". One of my mentors in an earlier life of toiling in a NYC law firm once referred to New Canaan (Connecticut), his home, as God's Country, a place he could not leave, when I suggested to him playfully he should consider packing his bags and relocating with me to Asia. I now know that God's Country is well to the south.
Forever came to an end, around 1 am, as I reached the final campsite and the familiar clean, flapping white banners of the RTP and Atacama Crossing logos and the ordered sequence of 10 competitor tents, media tent, and medical tent, too weary to utter anything other than "Wow, the stars made this whole event worthwhile", greeted by David Smale (perpetually our tent's top finisher, and winner of the "Sportsmanship" award for the entire event's most sportsmanlike competitor, as he was constantly helping other people out and lending affable cheer to those who might get down--at some point in our conversations in the tent, it dawned on me that he enjoys every minute of these extreme events, or at least has trained himself not to mind any of their severe low points, and he very cunningly insinuated into my mind the seductive splendors of doing a third RTP race, the Sahara from Western Egypt culminating in the Pyramids, exploiting my fondness for starry horizons by recounting his experience with the western Egyptian nighttime sky) and Harald Meyer. I believe one of my other quotes from a checkpoint (possibly during Stage 3) has been expurgated from the official race chronicles (a journalist asked me how I enjoyed the stage just completed and instead of tossing off a bon mot about the sublimitude of the landscape, I muttered, "That completely sucked" as I drew the last dregs out of my Camelback).
I do not at length describe the final day, an obligatory 9 km "sprint" from the final campsite back to San Pedro (where about 100 boxes of locally produced pizza, orange Fanta, Zero Coke, diet Coke, regular Pepsi, and the entire adobe's population (including various tourists) awaited us with fanfare and pomp). Everyone who participated applauded as each runner came in, with every last racer cheering when Alastair Todd brought home the final pink flags, barely mastering an agonized hobble on two walking sticks he used as crutches for what used to be his feet. Music blared. And here a word (almost entirely favorable) to the medical and support staff again--each morning their DJ pumped out, at high volume, a track of hits from the '60s to the present, Coldplay, U2, the Stones, Van Halen, various chick bands with whom my daughters would be more familiar, and then veering towards the end of the event with Billy Joel and culminating, on the final day, in Barry Manilow's "Can't Smile (Without You)". Words fail me at this point.
During the whole event, I saw only one living thing besides the race participants, and that was one lizard. I am told others saw llamas and alpacas but I seemed to miss those (I did see copious amounts of dung, though)--most of the race takes place at 2500-3300 meters above sea level. Actually I did pass the carcass of an alpaca--I was at that point with yet another of my originally 7 tentmates, Ken from Toronto (I fondly called him Wade Belak, the offbeat, curiously good-looking former pugilist for the Toronto Maple Leafs, each time we crossed each other during the stages), who suffered horribly from diarrhea and knock-on ailments during the event, and who observed (of the carcass), "Slow runner!" (a 7th tentmate, Gary from Wales, also pulled out due to damage to his knees which he wisely declined to make permanent by continuing). We passed through all of one village--again I saw no people, and certainly no evidence of a shop that supposedly sold cold drinks and potato chips, as had been promised--and perhaps 3 or 4 scattered houses. Never have I been to a place so remote, not even Gobi. I understand that evidence of human civilization 10,000 years ago exists in the Atacama, as do ruins of the Incas, whose empire was vast indeed. The phenomenon of life takes on precious new meaning when juxtaposed with such forbidding environments. A virus (including the heartbreak of diarrhea) can originate anywhere, and a human being can subsist where there is a will to do so under almost any conditions.
But life without sufficient education is merely grinding survival, and here I end my account with a request to donate to the Esquel Y.L. Yang Education Foundation. Esquel Group, founded by a Shanghainese entrepreneur in HK and now run by his daughter, the MIT-educated Marjorie Yang, is the world's largest manufacturer of men's cotton shirts with operations and sales throughout the world including Xinjiang Province in China, and sponsors the aforementioned separate HK-based NGO (this NGO's overhead is paid entirely by Esquel, with 100% of donations applied to the designated charitable purposes). Some of you may have seen Zhang Yi-mou's "Not One Less", and remember the irascible, naughty Zhang Hui-ke, a truant pupil who is turned by the dogged determination of his teacher to find him in the city after he runs away from the village. But for the grace of God and much self-education spent poring over books (sometimes as punishment doled out by teachers), I once was Zhang Hui-ke, a chronic school trouble-maker bored out of my mind. The Foundation, among its other charitable programs focusing on underprivileged children in Xinjiang Province (including Mandarin proficiency and support for children of AIDS-stricken parents), provides, with the proceeds of such charity, books to schools and libraries in Xinjiang. This is a conscious decision to provide a pathway to improvement the very old-fashioned way: not online, not via the computer, not with New Age guru-speak, but with the classics of western and Chinese literature in hard copy. Education is, before anything else, a tactile, sensory experience, and the look of print on a yellowed, moth-bitten page, an illustration, the texture of the cover of the book, the smell of aging paper, and the images conjured as one's eyes move down a paragraph, are intimate events and irreducibly necessary to entering a new world for these children, which no authority figure can possibly take away. Like seeds in a desert, children who grow up with books never available to their parents will spread and sprout throughout China and the wider world, and reverse an intellectual desertification for which they share no blame.
If you are interested, please send to the attention of :
Kelsey Lau
Lovells, 11/F, One Pacific Place
88 Queensway, Hong Kong,
a cheque made out to "Esquel Y.L. Yang Education Foundation".
All cheque received, regardless of currency, will be remitted to the Foundation. (The Foundation is registered in Hong Kong, and cheque made payable to "Esquel Y.L. Yang Education Foundation" will be tax deductible in Hong Kong.)
Please help Esquel help children in Xinjiang make a life-changing crossing compared to which traversing the Atacama, and the current global recession for which the Desert stood as a metaphor, would be but minor triumphs.
Many thanks to all of you.
Fred Chang
April 2009