The foundation that got me through the race is threefold – taking one step at a time, helping and getting help from others, and knowing I had support back home.  First, if I look at the overall course and conditions, I became overwhelmed at the entire race -  it is ridiculous.  If I took it one 6 mile checkpoint at a time, and for that matter, one step at a time to get to each checkpoint, the race became much more manageable.  I never thought about the next day, or even the checkpoint after.  All my focus and attention was just completing one short task at a time and when it all added up, I survived, with a smile on my face.  Second, if I had attempted this undertaking on my own, again the task would quickly become overwhelming.  Succeeding meant helping others and getting help in return from them.  I may have started this race alone without anyone I knew directly with me, but I finished it with friends.  I had a great group of 7 others in my tent (John, Spencer, Tony, Janet, Peter, Lindsey, and Malcolm), each of us with different life experiences and different skills.  Some had run the race before and their experience was priceless, while others had different extra supplies and we all shared which became really important towards the end of the race.  The same was true for the other competitors in the 122 total tents, if someone needed something, people shared.  The participants and support staff viewed the goal as getting as many of the runners across the finish line as possible.  Finally, there was the support back home. Whenever I felt too tired, I just thought about everyone back home and drew strength from the knowledge of all the people pulling for me, my energy level quickly picked back up.

As for the race itself, it was hard and challenging, and I also loved every minute of it which is easy to say now with a left leg almost twice the size (swollen) of my right leg.  Words cannot easily describe what I went through and writing is not a gift that I have.  A few highlights though include running over the largest sand dunes in Morocco on day 1.  This is where many of the runners picked up lots of blisters early on (some even lost the skin on the heel or balls of their feet), I myself had 3 good size toe blisters and we learned to love eosine, a red liquid available at the medical tent that you squirt into the pierced blister and it dries up the area and protects against infection.  It also stings like crazy, but this pain becomes secondary as other parts of the body started to hurt more.  For those who looked at the images of the race on the www.darbaroud.com website, the medical tent was always full and quite the scene with the “Doc Trotters” fixing a lot of feet and later in the week, infections.  They had 50 doctors on staff to deal with everyone, and they were great.  For me, blisters and nausea were the two primary factors to battle and my previous concerns about my left leg issues went away.  Preparing for the nausea would have been tough and even though I have experience dealing with and treating dehydration, I suffered from it.   I vomited twice on the day 3 stage near the end of the final checkpoint that slowed me down for an hour, and I had to take an IV on the day 4 long stage near checkpoint 3 at 18 miles around 4pm (one IV was allowed per participant, if you needed a 2^nd you had to withdraw from the race).  I had to lay in the sand with a needle in my arm that cost me time, but after 1 liter of saline solution and 1.5 liters of glucose solution, I felt great being fully hydrated and managed to run 32 miles straight to the long stage finish line crossing at 3:58am looking at a big giant green laser pointing into the sky that was used to let the runners know where the finish line was (in the middle of the night, it is hard to see much, and one could see the laser from about 6 miles away).  My main motivation to finishing in the morning was there was no way in the world I wanted to be in the sun for a second day of that long stage, I just wanted to get back to the tent and out of the sun.  Rumors around the camp were that it was 55 Celsius (131 F) during the 2 day long stage period.    On day 6, I had my head down just putting one foot in front of the other and I ran into a big dried up bush.  Upon hitting the bush, I immediately apologized thinking I ran into someone, until I realized it was a bush and then for some reason I decided to take a swipe at it and say some words I will not repeat here.

What was the hardest part?   Putting shoes on in the morning with blisters and a swollen left leg/foot.    What was the most enjoyable part?  Turning off my headlamp in the middle of the night on the long stage day 4 and walking up the cold dunes in the dark looking at the stars.  This was at about 1am in the morning after already running for over 15 hours and the stars put on a spectacular light show.  The only weird thing that happened that night was that someone in the middle of the Sahara built a bonfire, and for some reason I was convinced it was a pirate and I ran away from them when the person kept calling me to see if I was OK.  I still do not know if the person or the fire was real, or why I would think there were pirates in the desert, or if they were a part of the race.  All I know is I escaped and made it through the night.

Will I do this race again? – No way.  I have been wanting to run this race for 15 years since I first heard about it, and I could probably run it much better next time around, but I have no interest.  It is a once in a lifetime dream and I enjoyed it fully.   So what will I do next?  Well, there is this mountain called Everest that I have been thinking about, but I would only seriously consider it after I finished the Marathon des Sables which is now the case.  That pursuit will take several years to prepare for and the only clock I need to watch now is the ticking of age.

Lastly and most importantly, thanks to everyone who sent emails during the race, I will respond to each one of these individually over the next week or so, but I wanted to let you know how much each and every email helped me out during the race.  A common question I received every day of the race was what charity or cause I was running for and I proudly told everyone about PKU and the PKU community with tremendous pride.  Finally, a huge thanks to everyone who contributed to the National PKU Alliance!  NPKUA is worth supporting, every single step of the way!

Ray