Читать книгу Run and remember - Дмитрий Волошин, Dmitri Voloshin - Страница 6

Backpack is stuffed. I’ve gone through all the necessary trainings and studied all the info. Mental state is just fine. Feet are ready to go. I reassured my family of my safety and asked all my friends to cheer for me. Here comes the day of departure.

Morning in Chisinau. Alarm. Pants on. A banana. Bag on the shoulder. Lots of hugs and kisses. Padremobile to the airport. Then the plane: Rome, Casablanca, Marrakech.

Upon arrival I had to wait for an hour in a queue. Finally I left the airport and my lungs took in the hot air of the Morocco night. Half an hour later I was already snoring in my hotel.

My first morning in Marrakech was boiling hot. I crawled down for breakfast and met my future “roommates’ – Pafnutiy (= Pavel, Pasha, Pashka etc.) and Jurasic. They had already been here for 2 days fighting the heat off with juice18 mixed with local wine, and having massages and sunbathing. My new friends quickly gave me a fill-in as to local lifestyle so soon we were smoking a hookah enjoying the sunny sky and the cool swimming pool.

Pashka’s happy voice announced that his luggage (his backpack with all the stuff) never reached Marrakech and got lost somewhere in the Mediterranean region. He seemed quite positive about it but actually there’s nothing funny.

More experienced friends warned him: keep all the important stuff with you. Shame. At least Pafnutiy has good friends, so he immediately reached out to them and they sent him all new things from Moscow. While waiting for them to arrive he borrowed something from me or from the hotel (like slippers).

Marrakech is a big and vivid part of the Arabic world so we decided to start with a walk around the city.

The city is all minarets, markets, crowds, hustle, dirt, women covered in black and men in white… Altogether it feels quite oriental and ancient.

Over the day we managed to tick off the whole list of mandatory attractions: dined on delicious lamb at the market, taught the Berbers to dress meat correctly, hugged a couple of snakes, hypnotized a fakir, rode around in a donkey carriage, wandered through solitary streets. Having completed the list we returned to the hotel.

It could have gone quite well if I hadn’t forgotten my iPhone under the Morocco sun – it clearly wasn’t its best day ever.

The next day we went for a run to check out our equipment for the MDS and our abilities to sustain the heat. The main objective was to get an idea of how fast we could run under such conditions.

Our run took us to the airport where we met two more martyrs – I mean runners. They were Iya from Russia and Vlad from Ukraine. Also Pashka had finally gotten his luggage. Based on its looks I can suggest it visited at least Chile and Sydney.

To celebrate happy morning events (and to show affection to our feet) we went for a pedicure. If only those feet knew what they were about to sustain…

The following day I inspected my backpack and carefully repacked all my food checking every calorie out of those prepared for seven days. Again I came to the conclusion that I’d go with two meals a day, one bite of nuts, and two glasses of tea (from one teabag). Eventually it turned out I was right.

Left to right: carb shake19 for quick recovery after running, breakfast-lunch, lunch-dinner, a bite (nuts and dried fruit), energy gels20 for power charge during the run, teabags and sugar. X-day is some spare food for emergencies.

Then I packed together food for the first two days and stuffed my backpack. The digits on the scales were quite a nice surprise: 6.35 kg. Just the necessary minimum, within the range of sanity. Great!