Dean Karnazes captures the coveted desert crown and lives (barely).

filled with struggle and periodically graced with a glimpse of beauty. Everything in the desert must battle for survival, from the weeds to the birds. Nothing comes easy. Resources are sparse and shelter from the hostile elements even scarcer. Don’t get me wrong; there is incredible life in the desert, but it is tempered by the supreme difficulty of merely surviving. Above all, survival is paramount. However, this vacuum of life also creates a landscape of simplicity and scenic

[a tale of the desert is similar to that of a life well lived; it is constantly

beauty. Unique colors are created, soft silhouettes are placed in the distance, and the wide-open spaces allow for expansive views and possibilities. Still, the elements rule. Everything in the desert is held hostage to the environment, which can be cruel and dictatorial. Plainly, deserts are not meant to be sought, but avoided. Blowing dust and 120-plus-degree temperatures are not the ideal setting for your next vacation, unless, of course, you find comfort in extremes. Apparently, Dean Karnazes does.

Eo * *

Asmart man (aka Dad) once told me, “Son, write what you know.” As a 2:20 U.S. Olympic Trialist, I know a thing or two about running marathons. But, honestly, I don’t know much about running 155 miles across the desert. Put me on a fast tempo run along a flat road, and I’m golden. Burden me with gusting head winds, loose sand, extreme daytime heat, and frigid nighttime chill, and you could say that I’m a little out of my element, to put it mildly. But in an effort to get a true taste of the desert experience, I thought I would immerse myself wholeheartedly in the harsh elements. OK, maybe not wholeheartedly, but at least tepidly. Man, did my eyes get opened.

I live on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, and while we don’t enjoy the scorching heat of the Sahara, we do have an abundance of sand and wind. On one particularly squally day, I went for a run along the soft sand dunes. Almost instantaneously, I found myself in total discomfort. First, the loose sand was picked up by the whirling winds and pelted into my skin like an abrasive sand blaster. This forced me to squint my eyes uncomfortably and tilt my head at an awkward angle. At one point, I was literally forced to shield my face with my hands while still trying to dissect the ridge of a soft sand dune without plunging my foot shin deep in the loose topography. I recall muttering that this was ridiculous. Even on the flat sand, there was zero returned energy to my next stride. Every step required both a push and a pull as the sand sapped twice the energy required on a typical firm surface. The final insult was that every orifice of my body—eyes, ears, nose, throat, mouth, and more (yeah, get creative)—became a gritty depository of abrasive residue. And all of this was only after an hour-long run, let alone 10 to 15 hours a day for six days without stop. Not to mention, I was running in cool coastal winds, not the desert blast furnace.

After my little experiment, I developed immense respect for the desert runners. Sure, what they were doing was running, but they were taking the theme to a whole new dimension. This was a sport as foreign to me—a competitive lifelong runner—as the uncharted nuances of the deserts themselves.

What, exactly, are these 4 deserts races?

Just about the toughest damn things on the planet, that’s all. In fact, in 2008 Time magazine recognized the 4 Deserts Racing Series as one of the top 10 endurance competitions on the planet.

Produced by an organization called Racing the Planet, these events give the endurance community an opportunity to run in some of the most desolate and remote regions of the globe. The organization’s catchphrase, “Where Athletic Frontiers Begin,” fails to advertise the remainder of the sentence, which should read “and lives almost end.” The races consist of six stages amounting to 250K

or 155 miles through the windiest, driest, hottest, and coldest climates on earth. Obviously, the weather plays a large part in each race, but the strict event rules do not make the experience any easier.

Not only are the competitors asked to run, walk, or climb along the 250K course, but they are required to carry everything they need. Yep, these races are largely self-supported, which requires the athletes to pack all they need for a week of racing. Food, extra clothing, sleeping bags and pads, safety equipment, and medical supplies must all be schlepped through the desert on your back. So it’s no surprise that the average desert carry-on weighs roughly 25 pounds, making the already difficult race seemingly impossible—that is, unless you’re one of the Italian Special Forces soldiers who sleep on the ground and subsist on 2,000 calories of olive oil a day strategically measured into small vials for easy and efficient consumption. The starting weight of their packs can sometimes be as low as 12 pounds.

Racing the Planet does provide a few accessories to pamper the competitors; these consist of a tent and a strict allotment of plain nightly water. Each athlete is allowed to share a tent with eight other stinky athletes, and Racing the Planet will heat the water, if need be, so that your scrumptious freeze-dried meal can be rehydrated, at least partially. Yum. Doesn’t that sound like supreme luxury after 50 miles of sheer desert hell? It would be the first thing on my mind: “Tremendous,” I would say, “I just trounced through the hot sand all day; now, how about a little astronaut food and an exhausted Brazilian snoring six inches from my head all night? Bring it on!”

OK, but what about aid stations, you ask? Nope, not really, unless you consider a few water stops to be aid stations. That’s it—you get water. No fancy energy gels, no Vaseline, and no salty snacks. This is not your daddy’s rock-and-roll, high-five, music half-marathon. This is the real deal. This is the 4 Deserts, raw and real. First stop, Chile’s formidable Atacama.

Planet Atacama

The Atacama Desert is not part of planet Earth, not, at least, part of the same planet Earth that you and I inhabit. Dean Karnazes described the Atacama Desert as, “Something like Mars, with sparser vegetation.” Chile’s largest desert is filled with crater-strewn dunes and immense sections of crunchy salt flats and is located at such high altitude that some competitors get nosebleeds. Parts of the Atacama Desert have seen no recorded rainfall—ever! While it may not be the first place you would pick for a light jog, over 100 brave entrants put themselves on the line for the challenge.

It would prove to be just as the Chilean weatherman predicted, “A 100 percent chance of hot and shitty.” But for one enthusiastic man it would turn out to be

A Dean Karnazes blasting across the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth.

“magical misery.” Starting the new year with fresh legs, Karnazes set the stage by winning the first day of racing. Although he seemed surprised by his initial success, it was a good omen. However, he soon learned that there would be battles beyond that of actual running. One of those battles would be a war with the fleeting opponent known as sleep. Each night, camp is basically part slumber party, part makeshift infirmary. And while energy for pillow fights and practical jokes may have been lost upon the previous day’s stage, the “ménage a cinq” adds an entirely new level of difficulty when it comes to day-to-day recovery.

Stage two of the Atacama would be conquered by Rob James of Hong Kong, aman who seemed to have all the tricks of the trade on lockdown. A member of the British armed forces, he kept his pack light and tightly cinched, seemingly bounding across the moony surface. These tactics kept him ahead of the rest of the competitors, earning himself not only his first of several stage wins, but also the warmth of the yellow jersey. Similar to the Tour de France, stage winners are awarded “le maillot jaune” for a stage victory. However, James would not fiercely protect his lead and the yellow jersey, but instead gladly shared his desert tricks with the other athletes. This theme pervaded the 4 Deserts culture as the participants often looked out for one another, even though the competition was at times fierce. Whether it’s a quick tip on saving precious pack weight or just

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a holler to keep you on course, sportsmanship took precedence in the Atacama and all of the deserts that followed. These tips likely allowed Karnazes to learn from his mistakes, and he hammered the notorious long stage to win the Atacama Crossing.

Unfortunately, one of the other athletes seeking to complete all four deserts in 2008 was not as lucky. European Jimmy Olsen of Denmark was injured along the rugged course and forced to drop out. Winner of the 2007 Sahara Race, Olsen was considered a favorite in the title series. But the desert remains impervious to dreams. Four men entered, three men remained.

The great Gobi claims all comers

Karnazes bluntly described China’s Gobi desert as “drastic.” First, temperatures in the region are blazing during the day but become frigid at night. You may start out on your 25-mile stage in the morning, and it’s a chilly 35 degrees Fahrenheit, but then you are running along for 15 or 20 miles through the desert in China and you realize, “It’s 110 degrees!’ Not only does the weather fluctuate, but the terrain oscillates equally. Sand, rock, river crossings, steep climbs on all fours, rapid elevation ascents and descents—basically every variable imaginable. No wonder they tag the Gobi March, “The race of no return.”

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<4 With few trails to follow in the Gobi Desert, Dean blazes his own path from one check point to the next.

Just a few days off a 12-day, 700mile run dubbed “On a Mission,”! Karnazes found the 65 hours of travel toreach the Xinjiang Province in central Asiaa little taxing. But there was no time to complain, no rest for the weary, as Karnazes had to hit the ground running if he were to keep his 4 Deserts quest alive. His first step across the Gobi hurt. And when your first step in a 155-mile race hurts, the prospects for success aren’t so encouraging. “This… is going

… to suck.” When it hurts early in a local SK, you just grit it out and trounce through it. When it happens in a marathon, you may just find out something new about yourself. If your first step in a six-day race hurts, Ihave no idea what you are supposed to do. But Dean did. He remarked, “You shift your paradigm. You look outwards instead of inwards and begin to immerse yourself in the experience. Never mind the pain—you are doing something remarkable and are lucky to be alive. You notice the contrasting snow-peaked mountains with the desert landscape. You smile and high-five the local children while running through their village. You keep putting one foot in front of the other to the best of your ability, drinking in the experience as you move along.” Ultimately, the desert will either crush you, or it will yield to you. You can’t fight it; you will lose if you try. Best to just go with the flow and submit to an omnipotent force that is stronger than you can ever hope to be.

The rest of the race belongs on the Travel Channel, as the runners marched up and down the Gobi’s undulating Silk Road, creating memories for a lifetime. The race organizers obtained special permits for the Gobi March; this part of the world had never been seen by foreigners before. Ryan Sandes of South Africa won the Gobi March.

But as remarkable as the experience had been, it was also ruthless. For the second event in a row, another one of the original four was forced out. Professional

endurance athlete Ken “Tintin” Johansson dropped after stage five. While it has been said that there aren’t many men tougher than he, the Gobi seemed to get the last blow in this bout. From four men to two—only Karnazes and South African Paul Liebenberg now remained. The next stop would be the Sahara Desert, but Dean had a little detour along the way.

Quenching a desert thirst with some Badwater

Prior to accepting the 4 Deserts challenge offer, Karnazes had signed up for the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon. The full impact didn’t really hit him until he opened the door of his air-conditioned SUV in Furnace Creek and got a blast of 122-degree wind. Suddenly, he seemed surprised.

Badwater is not just any race. Starting in Death Valley, the course takes competitors 135 miles through Death Valley and up to the Mount Whitney portals. It is thought by many to be “the toughest footrace on earth,” and just finishing this single race is the pinnacle of many ultra-endurance careers. For Dean, this would be his eighth Badwater. He won the race in 2004, though he remarked later that he “survived the fastest.”

Conditions were what you would expect in Death Valley in July—hot, really hot. While it seems to be a blessing that the Badwater course stays off the natural desert terrain, the alternative is a sun-roasted road. This is a road that has the nasty habit of making the soles of your shoes melt. You will often see competitors hugging the shoulder as they dance along the painted white line in an attempt to keep their shoes cool.

Although his legs were anything but fresh, Karnazes used his experience to finish a solid fourth place overall. It’s never easy to get through Badwater, period, let alone to finish top five in sub-30 hours against an elite international field: impressive, to say the least. Considering all the global travel and cumulative race miles, it was a miracle the man was still standing. Clearly, Karnazes is a very determined individual and hugely capable. But there were still plenty of scorching days and sleepless nights left to cover. Whether he could keep up this rock-solid consistency was anybody’s guess.

The Sahara odyssey

Similar to the good from far, but far from good attraction of the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, the Sahara entices you with sweet, serenading calls. In your planning stages and preparation, your mind envisions majestic pyramids and enchanting desert oases. But reality greets you with 400-foot dunes, whipping hot winds, sandstorms, and endless miles of parched earth. From the comfort of your laptop research, it’s a fond memory to be made, but when your shoes hit the ground, it’s a whole ’nother story. The Sahara Race would prove daunting for all of the

A Dean and his friend Rob James at the finish of the Sahara Race.

competitors, but for the two remaining men in the 4 Deserts challenge, this was a particularly brutal undertaking.

In one of the biggest and most competitive fields ever assembled for a 4 Deserts race, nearly 200 competitors representing some 25 different nations gathered at the Egyptian oasis of Farafra. There were familiar faces in the field, such as Rob James, Ryan Sandes, and Brazilian Carlos Dias, along with a host of other competitors who were vying for the overall desert crown. To win the overall crown, you needed to have the best cumulative results in all four of the 4 Desert races, though not necessarily in the same calendar year (as Liebenberg and Karnazes were attempting). Most of the other desert crown hopefuls had spaced the individual races out over a number of years, thus preserving their legs and allowing for adequate recovery between events. A smart strategy, no doubt, as Karnazes would freely admit.

South African Ryan Sandes won the Sahara Race, with Karnazes placing runner-up. The two men ran the entire 100K stage five together, sharing the serenity of the desert during a grueling 11-hour push through a variety of terrain and topography.

The race within the race at the Sahara, however, was the increasingly competitive duel between Liebenberg and Karnazes to be the first to complete all of the 4

Deserts in the same year. Liebenberg finished just three places behind Karnazes this time, the closest he had come in the three races thus far. Karnazes remarked, “T’ve never seen anyone lay it all out the way Paul does. When he finishes a stage, he is entirely spent, | mean completely cooked, to the point you question whether he can keep going. But the next day he’s right back at it. His resilience is absolutely remarkable.”

Although he managed to fare well in the Sahara, Karnazes was definitely feeling the effects of so many cumulative race miles throughout the year. His legs were beginning to feel heavy and tired, which concerned him. However, Liebenberg also expressed similar sentiments as he described the Sahara as difficult to enjoy with so much fatigue from the previous deserts. With both men feeling the effects, completing the fourth and final desert was anything but a foregone conclusion.

The final desert: Antarctica

First, you probably want to know how A-town is considered a desert. It’s covered with snow, right? Well, apparently a desert is defined as any region with less than 254 millimeters of precipitation per year, and there are hot deserts and there are cold ones. With less than 200 millimeters of precipitation a year and the lowest temperature ever recorded—a staggering minus 129 degrees Fahrenheit—the Antarctic definitely meets both criteria. Curiously, however, the racers this year would be greeted by snow, making the course conditions vexing, more difficult than even the soft sand of the Sahara. Slogging through kneedeep powder was like trying to find your footing in a pool of Styrofoam beads. Not only would your foot sink up to the knee, but once you were immersed, there seemed to be no bottom from which to push off. It was ironic; here they were running in

b Dean running across Antarctica— the final frontier.

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the most remote place on earth, and they were literally tripping over each other trying to stay on the worn path.

But this was a hardy lot. To compete in this race, racers must first successfully complete at least two of the other 4 Desert races. Beyond Liebenberg and Karnazes attempting to be the first to complete all of the 4 Deserts races in a single year, the overall Desert Crown winner would be determined in Antarctica. The champion would be selected based on the sum of the highest placing in each of the 4 Deserts races (again, regardless of how many total years it took to complete each race). Whichever competitor had the best total score would be declared the winner. Fourteen individuals were vying for this crown.

With a first in Atacama, a fourth in Gobi, and a second in the Sahara, Karnazes’s total score stood at seven points going into this final event. This made him a front-runner for the desert crown, though he downplayed the possibility. “Anything could happen,” he said. “This is Antarctica.”

He reminded me of a passage from one of his favorite books, The Endurance, about Emest Shackleton’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition. The posting used to recruit men for this legendary journey stated:

~ MEN WANTED ~

For Hazardous Journey. Small Wages, Bitter Cold, Long Months of Complete Darkness, Constant Danger, Safe Return Doubiful. Honour and Recognition in Case of Success.

The 48-hour boat ride from the tip of Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego to the frozen continent was the first taste of things to come. Heavy winds and rolling seas made nearly everyone on board seasick. And I mean everyone. This experience was probably best described by Last Desert racer James Elston of the UK, who candidly described the scene: “I boycotted dinner last night as I felt so sick… but no bad thing as it was so rough that all of the dinner for 50 people went onto the floor of the kitchen and one of the chefs cut his arm open. In fact, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.”

Luckily for Elston and the rest of the competitors, once you finally reached stable ground, you got to run a six-day, 155-mile stage race in foot-swallowing soft snow. Oh, joy.

After transporting everyone to the island in small inflatable boats known as Zodiacs and staking out the course, the organizer got the runners off for their first stage. Karnazes got off to a wobbly start. Against his better judgment, he had used the popular “patch” to prevent seasickness on the boat journey over. Unaccustomed to the side effects, he suddenly started experiencing bouts of vertigo

and lightheadedness. At one point, with his ears ringing incessantly, he was forced to sit down in the snow to find his bearings.

This was disconcerting. A DNF here would put an end to an otherwise remarkable streak. He managed to eke out a small victory on the first stage but knew his prospects were less than favorable if the motion-sickness medication kept wreaking havoc on his system.

The next two days were not pretty. Liebenberg took an early lead, with Elston in second and Dean doing all he could to keep his balance while moving through the deep snow and confusing oasis of white. By the fourth stage, however, Karnazes had his land legs back, winning the stage in solid form. This turnaround performance helped seal his victory, not just in successfully completing all of the 4 Desert races in one year, but also in capturing the coveted desert crown as the overall victor in 2008.

The running conditions in the Antarctic can be described only as surreal. Each course seemed to be lined with rookeries of waddling penguins, backdropped with the vertical silhouette of jutting crystal glaciers. Racing aside, the scene seemed to make all of the harrowing travel worthwhile. Unfortunately, the ride ome nearly turned a remarkable experience into a deadly one. Force 11 winds whipped the sea into a frothy white cauldron of churning waves and frozen ice