Finding Gobi. Dion Leonard

I’d been told to allow myself two hours to get on the train, but as I stared at the great tide of people ahead of me, I wondered whether it was going to be enough. If the previous day’s taxi ride had taught me anything, it’s that if I missed my train, I wasn’t sure I could overcome the language barrier and re-book another ticket. And if I didn’t get to the race meeting point that day, who knew if I would even make the start?

      Panic wasn’t going to help me get anywhere. I took control of my breathing, told myself to get a grip, and shuffled my way through the first security check. By the time I cleared it and worked out where I needed to go to collect my ticket, I discovered I was in the wrong queue. I joined the right one, and by then I was way down on my time. If this was a race, I thought, I’d be at the back. I never ran at the back.

      Once I had my ticket, I had less than forty minutes to clear another security check, have my passport stared at in forensic detail by an over-eager policeman, force my way to the front of a line of fifty people waiting to check in, and stand, open-mouthed, panting and staring frantically at signs and display boards I couldn’t read, wondering where the heck I had to go to find the right platform.

      Thankfully, I wasn’t entirely invisible, and a Chinese guy who’d studied in England tapped me on the shoulder.

      “You need some help?” he said.

      I could have hugged him.

      I just had time to sit down at the departure point when everyone around me turned and watched as the train crew swept past us. It was like a scene out of a 1950s airport, the drivers with their immaculate uniforms, white gloves, and air of complete control, the stewardesses looking poised and perfect.

      I followed them onto the train and sank, exhausted, into my seat. Almost thirty-six hours had slipped by since I left home in Edinburgh, and I tried to empty my mind and body of the tension that had built up so far. I looked out the window for something to interest me, but for hours on end the train just sliced through a bland-looking landscape that wasn’t cultivated enough to be farmland and wasn’t vacant enough to be desert. It was just land, and it went on for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

      Exhausted and stressed. This was not how I wanted to feel this close to the biggest race I’d faced so far in my short running career.

      I’d taken part in more prestigious events, such as the world-famous Marathon des Sables in Morocco, universally agreed to be the toughest footrace on earth. Twice I’d lined up alongside the thirteen hundred other runners and raced across the Sahara Desert as the temperature topped 125 degrees in the day and sank to 40 at night. I’d even finished a respectable thirty-second the second time I ran it. But fifteen months had passed since then, and a lot had changed.

      I had started taking note of the changes during another 155-mile race across the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. I’d pushed myself hard—too hard—to finish second overall, my “first-ever podium finish” in a multi-stage. I’d not kept myself hydrated enough, and, as a result, my urine was the color of Coke. Back home my doctor said I’d caused my kidneys to shrink due to the lack of liquid, and all that running had left them bruised and resulted in blood in my urine.

      A few months later I’d started having heart palpitations during another race. I could feel my heart beating wildly, and I got hit by a double blow of queasiness and dizziness.

      Both those problems flared up again almost as soon as I started the Marathon des Sables. Of course, I ignored the pain and forced myself through it, all the way to a top-fifty finish. Trouble was, I’d pushed myself so hard that as soon as I got home, my left hamstring went into violent and agonizing spasms every time I tried to walk, let alone run.

      For the first few months I rested; then for the next few I was in and out of physiotherapists’ consultation rooms, all the time hearing the same-old same-old: I just needed to try whatever new combination of strength and conditioning exercises they were suggesting. I tried them all. Nothing helped me to run again.

      It took the best part of a year to find a physiotherapist and a coach who both had running expertise and knew what was going on to discover the truth: part of my problem was that I wasn’t running correctly. I’m tall—well over six feet—and while my long, steady, loping stride felt easy and natural, I wasn’t firing up all the muscles I should have been using, so I had sharp, painful spasms in my legs every time I ran.

      The race in China was my first chance in a tough competition to try out my new, faster, shorter stride. In many ways I was feeling great. I had been able to run for hours on end at home without pain, and I’d followed my usual pre-race diet better than I ever had before. For the previous three months, I’d avoided all alcohol and junk food, eating not much more than chicken and vegetables. I’d even cut out coffee, hoping that would put an end to the heart palpitations.

      If it all paid off, and I ran as well as I thought I could do in China, I’d tackle the prestigious race that the organizers were putting on later in the year—across the Atacama salt plains in Chile. If I won there, I’d be in the perfect shape to get back to the Marathon des Sables the following year and make a real name for myself.

      I was the first passenger off when we pulled into Hami and at the head of the pack as we surged towards the exit. This is more like it, I thought.

      The guard manning the security checkpoint put a quick end to my joy.

      “What you do here?”

      I could see a long line of taxis outside the door, all waiting beside a vacant pavement for my fellow passengers to lay claim to them. I tried to explain about the race and say that I wanted to go and get a cab, but I knew it was no use. He looked quizzically back and forth between me and my passport, then motioned me to follow him into a trailer that doubled as an office.

      It took half an hour to explain what all the packets of energy gels and dried foods were for, and even then I wasn’t convinced he believed me. Mostly I think he let me go because he was bored.

      By the time I got out and approached the pavement, the crowds had all gone. And so had the taxis.

      Great.

      I stood alone and waited. I was fatigued and wanting this ridiculous journey to be over.

      Thirty minutes later a taxi pulled up. I’d made sure to print off the address of my hotel in Chinese script before I’d left Urumqi, and as I showed it to the driver, I was pleased to see that she seemed to recognize it. I climbed in the back, squashed my knees up against the metal grille, and closed my eyes as we pulled out.

      We’d only got a few hundred feet when the car stopped. My driver was taking on another passenger. Just go with the flow, Dion. I didn’t see any point in complaining. At least, I didn’t until she turned to me, pointed to the door, and made it perfectly clear that the other passenger was a far better customer, and I was no longer welcome in the cab.

      I walked back, spent another twenty minutes getting through the inevitable security checks, and lined up once more, alone, at the deserted taxi stand.

      Another taxi came, eventually. The driver was happy and polite and knew exactly where to go. In fact, he was so confident that when he pulled up in front of a large, grey building ten minutes later, I didn’t think to check that I was at the right hotel. I just handed over my money, pulled my bag out after me, and listened to him drive away.

      It was only when I walked into the entrance that I realized I was in the wrong place entirely. It was not a hotel but an office block. An office block in which nobody spoke any English.

      For forty minutes I tried to communicate with the office workers, they tried to communicate with me, and the phone calls to I-didn’t-know-who failed to get us any closer. It was only when I saw a taxi drive slowly past the front of the building that I grabbed my bag, ran out, and begged the driver to take me where I needed to go.

      Thirty minutes later, as I stood and stared at the empty bed in the budget hotel the race organizers had booked, I said out loud my solemn vow.

      “I am never, ever coming back to China.”

      It