Gobi Runner. Stefan Danis

I could control? I wondered. The only thing I could think of came back to my physical health.

      I had to stop indulging in how bad and victimized I felt. I needed to save myself from my defeatist mindset, which was paralyzing me. I needed to do everything I could to protect the business so it could weather the storm without too much damage and see the sun rise again. But that felt like having a goal to not die – how noble. I was getting depressed seeing so many people in my own and related industries unemployed and panicked about their futures. Perhaps focusing on helping the ones who were in the worst shape would give a purpose to my year and my life. Maybe I could combine that effort with my run.

      Finally I thought what the heck and went online and registered to run the Gobi March, scheduled for June 9, 2009. I paid the $3,100 entry fee in full. I had six months to prepare and become an ultra-marathon runner.

      I guess as of today I am a runner, I announced to myself. I now had a plan to get myself through 2009, the year I thought I could lose it all.

      There is no telling how many miles you

       will have to run while chasing a dream.

       -UNKNOWN

       Testing, Testing

      I was like many men who dismiss annual health tests. When I turned 40, four years earlier, I hadn’t had a physical since my first job, at Procter & Gamble, 19 years before that. In fact, I didn’t even have a doctor. The big 4-0 had seemed like the right time, so I signed up for an upgraded physical. The electrocardiogram, taken during my stress test, resulted in a positive: I was stopped halfway through and asked to step off the treadmill. I was told that the result required more investigation.

      I embarked on a series of other tests. The first was the echocardiogram, in which sound waves are sent toward the heart and the waves’ bounces are measured and collected for assessment. The returning sound waves suggested congenital heart disease, so I was upgraded to a third test, the Ecolite. In this test, a radioactive liquid (Cardiolite) is injected in the bloodstream to monitor the blood flow to the heart. Relatively little Cardiolite accumulates in any part of the heart where this is a blockage. Pictures can then identify the areas not receiving the blood flow. I tested positive again.

      I was confused. I had always thought of myself as being strong and healthy. Furthermore, there was no family history of heart disease. Well, not till then, anyway. Just as I was going through the tests, my dad had a heart failure and required triple by-pass surgery and subsequently a pacemaker.

      Next came an MRI of my heart, which also came back positive. The next step was a more invasive procedure, an angiogram, the last procedure before surgery.

      By then, in light of my dad’s surprise heart problems, not only was I worried about his health for the first time, but I was also worried about mine. The angiogram, a standard procedure, involved inserting a hollow tube in my groin and advancing it through the blood vessels all the way to my heart, with a catheter at the end of it maneuvered into all parts of the heart to monitor blood flow.

      The negative result of that test trumped all of the others; to this day there is no explanation for the irregularity of my heart. At last this chapter was partly closed for me.

      No so for my dad. Three months later, he would die of heart failure. My mom is a strong, proud woman, but she has never been the same since Dad collapsed right in front of her. Dad’s diagnosis had created an opportunity for me to have some completion conversations with him prior to his surgery, but some things were still left unsaid. As an only child, watching all of this unfold from a six-hour drive away, I raged about the hospital, the treatments, and the guidance he had been given about managing his recovery from surgery.

      After signing up for the Gobi, I returned for my first physical in four years. I wanted to get to my health baseline fast. I was worried about my heart, right knee, and nutrition. I signed up for a full medical at Medcan, a fantastic private health-care clinic that generously stepped in to sponsor me. I was also granted access to Leslie Beck, their famous nutritionist. I failed the ECG, of course, but now, in light of the running, my main concern was my right knee. I had a lot of scar tissue from the ACL and MCL reconstructions 18 years prior. Flash forward: The MRI’s results, which I received two weeks prior to the race, showed a partially torn meniscus that was good enough to go. I remember thinking during the procedure, at 2:30 a.m. (after a five-month wait, given that my case wasn’t urgent), I realized that if I succumbed to any anxiety about my health, I would never go. Sometimes you have to trust it will all work out, I told myself.

       Later in December 2008

      Anybody can do just about anything with himself that he really wants to and makes his mind to do. We are capable of greater things than we realize.

      —NORMAN VINCENT PEALE, AUTHOR

      We all have a preferred learning style, and mine is visual. Beauty touches me deeply. I can spend hours looking at a mountain, the ocean, a garden, architecture, or art. I’ve filled my life with visual prompts of what interests me, or what my commitments are. Building on that, I converted a wall of my home office into a war-room board with the following headings for me to research:

      • Distance Chart

      • Schedules

      • Feet

      • Gear

      • Nutrition

      • Gobi Facts

      • Mentors

      • Fundraising

      • Tips and Advice

       Finding a Mentor

      He who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning.

      —DANISH PROVERB

      To ground myself, I needed to research all of the facets of the project, and to get organized I needed a mentor. My wife connected me to Donna Carrigan, a 2007 Gobi participant and a certified executive coach. We met online.

      “Will you be my mentor?” I wrote.

      “Sure,” she replied, without even asking to meet me first, a sign of the generous things to come from those connected to these kinds of events.

      She collected her thoughts to help me build a plan based on her experience, providing me with key content for the war room. We set up a communication system. I reported to her by email every Sunday, giving her the distance I had run during the previous week along with my observations and questions. Her responses were always encouraging.

      Her first move was to feed into my visual sense. She sent me a tiny clay pot containing Gobi sand and bearing the inscription, “From an idea, anything can grow.”

      To make good on Donna’s advice, I looked at past competitors on the Internet, which led me to Mehmet Danis (no relation).

      Mehmet, a dentist in the Canadian Military, met me at a Starbucks and shared his experience in vivid detail. He would become a beacon of hope and a close friend as he let me in on his preparations for his second desert, the Atacama Crossing, while I prepared for the Gobi.

       The Race Is Half Mental

      Donna’s training thesis was that the race was half mental, half physical.

      “Stéfan, if you can run half in training, you can run it all,” she wrote me.

      That’s what I needed to hear. My modest distance objective was a modest 15 kilometers per week (3 x 5 km) by the end of the year; I was working toward 125 by late April 2009. (I would later learn