The Gobi Follow-up
We return to the Gobi Desert as the Australian team recount just what it took to get through the race alive.
The team took seven days to complete, with two injured but not down and a whole lot of team spirit and six competitors from Western Australia finished the race across the Gobi Desert in China.
Crossing one of the most formidable and unforgiving terrains in the world is no mean feat, some say even racing across the Sahara Desert is not as hard. We spoke to Dr Jamie Prendiville about the hard slog, the pain and the completion of one of the most gruelling experiences he has ever been through.
Injuries
Pointing to one of the photos, Jamie Prendiville reads out what is written on a sign for contestants as they run down a dirt track, "relax in the shade as long as you need, strife away, please awake medical only for serious issues, blisters are not fatal!"
It posed the question, in one of the harshest terrains on Earth, what do the organisers classify as fatal? Apart from severe sunstroke, dehydration, muscle melt-down which can lead to kidney failure and a plethora of general injuries, thankfully no one died during the race but many came close. Recounting one of the more serious cases, we spoke to Jamie about what he witnessed.
Perth Woman: Tell us about some of the serious injuries you came across in the race...
Jamie Prendiville: This one guy suffered severe muscle melt-down. When they tried to pick him up and take him in the car he started punching out at everyone and injured his hands. Eventually he escaped from the car and he got about 30 metres then dropped into a semi-coma.
PW: Apart from injuries, what other problems did contestants have to deal with?
JP: You had to make sure you urinated in between stations otherwise the organisers would pull you out of the race, you also had to keep ahead of the 'sweeping crew', who tailed the contestants with camels and if you were passed, you were out. One Australian guy got going at about 6 am so he could make it by the cut off time which was 12 o'clock [p.m.] ... 2 km out he felt the camel breathing down his neck and got dragged back. He was a very fit guy; 38 to to 39 years old, incredibly motivated, trained very hard for it and he was incredibly disappointed.
Noone died during the race but many came close.
PW: So out of the whole WA team, how many of you suffered severe injuries?
JP: The two serious ones were Billy Biffin who suffered vomiting and nausea... he was dry-retching all the time, it was the loudest thing in the Gobi Desert. I had to inject him with three shots of an anti-vomiting medicine straight into his arse. There's no formalities! Gary (Critter) had to have injections straight into his leg.
Before the race began he had problems with his iliotibial band [in his knee], so we took ten injections of local, long-acting anaesthetic... at the end of day four he started getting a fair bit of pain so we left it until the first tent and then we started giving him injections that he needed every four hours after that. Dapper Dawson lost both his small toes just down to fat, all the skin had gone. That will grow back at the rate of one millimetre a week, over a period of probably three or four months but forget toenails, it's like having a full thickness burn.
PW: And how did you fare?
JP: For me it was on day one... At about the twenty-eight kilometre mark I hit the brick wall and just got really nauseous. So I couldn't drink, just couldn't take any fluids in... On day two because I felt so nauseous I couldn't eat very much, so I decided to walk with the other guys and of course when you walk every single stone you tread on has an impact on your foot. So the big downside of not running is that you get blisters and you lose your toenails, I ended up losing six toenails, most people lost four or six... I started getting better on about day four. The hard thing was to take your shoes off at the end of the day, because you couldn't bend over and when you could it would take about ten minutes to get your shoes off. Everyone just took Crocs, but because I was losing all my toenails they banged onto the end of my toes and so I had to walk very slowly... The next morning you just had to put your shoes back on again because it's the only way you're going to finish. After about km the pain goes, not completely, but you block it out. Three of my toes went completely numb on both feet and still are. It's concussion of the nerves; it'll come back eventually.
The Course
Barren landscape and extreme highs and lows were what the runners had to deal with, day in and day out. Perth Woman wanted to discover how hard it really was...
PW: The terrain looks harsh and unforgiving. Describe to us a specific location you mentioned earlier that you have to "die before you can get to Heaven's Gate!"
JP: Heaven's Gate is basically a huge hole in a mountain where you've got to climb straight up as it's just impossible to run up and some are just crawling on their hands and feet. After the gateway there were seven mountains you had to cross.
PW: What was the heat like? Was the temperature dropping from one extreme to another?
JP: Most of the days it was around about 35 degrees Celsius with no breeze. Day three we had to climb up a small hill and went through this maze cut between these 100-foot mountains, and the space was as wide as your shoulders to get through; it was like being in a pizza oven because the heat was just trapped. That took about an hour to get through and when we had finished I came running up to the finishing line - but there wasn't one - everything had got blown over. There was some sort of small tornado that came through and blew the whole lot over! Bent metal, everything and all the media stuff got smashed around the place and the finishing line got wrecked. I didn't care... I was just dead, I honestly just felt like "if I die, I die!"
Heavens’ Gate is basically a huge hole in a mountain where you’ve got to climb straight up as its just impossible to run up and some are just crawling on their hands and feet.
PW: So when you would go to sleep at night after you'd had a day like that and you knew you had double still to go, what did you think?
So when you would go to sleep at night after you'd had a day like that and you knew you had double still to go, what did you think?
JP: You had to do mind blocking, if you didn't you'd go insane. You just took one step at a time, just focused on what you were doing and looked at the ground all the time... You had to look up occasionally to see where you were going but apart from that...
PW: Describe the kit you were wearing...
JP: I had two 500 ml bottles down by my waist and two up near my shoulders, you'd have some sort of electrolyte solution in one and glucose in another and have bits as you're going along. [We had] three litres of water in the camel pack but it's hard to operate that way, you could have two litres every 10 km... Your problem is not the water you carry but you just can't absorb it, or drink it fast enough, it's physically impossible to drink enough water to get into your system. All the food we ate was just desiccated, dehydrated stuff that you add water to. They supplied us with hot water at night time so that we could put it in our food, it wasn't for washing... You just wore the same stuff. I took two shirts and at the 80K I changed over to the second shirt.
PW: So how often did you come across the villages and other people or locals?
JP: Well, we came across probably three villages in the 250 kilometres.
PW: What was their reaction?
JP: Oh yeah, anyone you see you wave to, some just look at you with this very blank stare, no expression in their eyes and other people are saying "yeah, yeah, come on!" Kids will come up to you and whack you on the hand. They wanted all the empty water bottles as they could use them to store things.
The Team Spirit
Although the contestants were not only pitched against other teams from other countries, but members of their own team also, in such severe conditions was it every man for themselves or did contestants come together?
PW: So how was it seeing other teams around you? Did some days they just pass you as they were going by?
JP: We'd pass them and then we'd stop and fix someone up and they'd pass us. Everyone just laughed together, a couple of groups were very focused on just winning and they couldn't give a stuff about anyone else.
PW: So was there a real competitive element going on or were you doing it more for yourselves, to finish, for the experience or as a fundraiser?
JP: Well the first thing you have to make sure of is that you finish because we were doing this as a fundraiser. Every time someone thought about failing they thought about the pain Scott Kirkbride went through when he had his malignant melanoma at the age of 27 and the number of months he was suffering, so our pain really paled in scalarity and that kept us going.
PW: So out of all the things you experienced every day, what stands out most in your mind?
JP: The thing that's always going to stick in my mind is going to be the hardest day, which is day four, the hardest day I've ever done in my life... going through the Gates of Heaven. The second thing was the camaraderie... it was just the pain and the team spirit. As far as the villages were concerned it was just amazingly interesting the people we came across because we were really stuck in the middle of nowhere, the north-west corner of China, near Russia and Taliban and Mongolia so it was really a pot-pourri of people around the place.
The Aftermath
Still not fully recovered 10 days after the race, Jamie joked that he would only run the Gobi again if he went insane. But for this challenge-loving adrenalin addict, we give him a year until the next challenge is on the horizon.
PW: What advice would you give to someone else who was considering doing it?!
JP: I think you have to train hard, there's no doubt about that and you have to train in different ways. I'd also go over there for a week and just walk around, get the altitude and just walk up a few mountains... In an ideal world you carry as light a pack as you can, as you dump a lot of the stuff on the way.
PW: So what do you think this meant to the Scott Kirkbride Melanoma Research Centre?
JP: I think it's mainly about the fundraising and the awareness, Scott Kirkbride was a young person, only 27 when he died and 24 when he got it, so it could be anyone around you; a son, a daughter, a brother. It just makes it not a black box, you know that it exists and people know that they can do something about it if they give funds for the genetic research. The way to cure this is to identify a gene to block it genetically.
PW: So overall who won the race?
JP: The guy who won it was a South African. I think there was something like 26 countries represented in the whole race and this guy is a real jet, he used to train inside Cape Town and just ran up and down the mountain there, he's getting the altitude; that's what we needed, a bit of altitude.
So the team was short on altitude but not on the right attitude. They went, they competed and they did Western Australia proud. Out of the 26 countries who entered the race, the final winner was a 25-year-old South African. Does the WA team care? Not a bit.
To find out more about the Scott Kirkbride Melanoma Research Centre and to make a donation, visit www.skmrc.org.au
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