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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 that the race was 80 percent mental.)

Walking Counts

Another of Donna’s key insights was that walking should also count as mileage since there would be times at which running was not possible during the race. All of a sudden, I was at 25 kilometers and felt better already. My first decision to focus on walking was to get rid of my car and become a commuter/walker. This added two to three kilometers a day.

Life’s Enjoyment Grows with Better Health

Before the December holidays, my weekly distance was relatively low, between 25 and 30 kilometers a week, including walking. My body was adjusting well. An unexpected benefit was my performance at Monday-night hockey: I went from being a journeyman and fourth on my team in scoring to first. I had never been a “go-to” guy in hockey; apparently miracles can happen even at 45. (It does help to play in the appropriate-level garage league.)

The training was to follow the proven easy-hard marathon training rule of mixing slower and faster runs to build performance and keep things interesting. As the training continued to deliver stronger legs and increased vascular capacity, I continued to climb in the hockey standings and ended up winning the scoring championship in March. I also played tennis and realized I was chasing down balls and return shots that I used to give up on. Despite not truly enjoying the running itself, these early measurable successes in the two sports I loved made it easier for me to continue my training.

The change from being a two-way player to being the lead offensive contributor on my hockey team opened my mind to the fact that change was possible, even at my age – change that might even help me reset an abysmal business year, which was the reason for signing up in the first place; change that might even reset my life.

Picking a Theme Song

Music can change the world because it can change people.

—BONO

When I had been having a particularly difficult time of getting motivated to exercise, during the social and alcohol-laced holiday season, Donna suggested I choose a “pick-me-up song.” I thought of “Rocky” but was never fond of drinking raw eggs. I went for safety and chose “Beautiful Day” by U2, which was my Pavlovian bell, especially during the holidays, to get up and get running in the morning or to lace up my shoes and get out the door at midnight. I frequently found myself running well past midnight, after one too many cocktails. Not being a morning person, I was beginning to fall into the unproductive habit of running before my increasingly later bedtime.

Freedom Comes from Building Your Own Plan

Listen to everyone, follow no one.

–DEAN KARNAZES

(RAN 50 MARATHONS IN 50 DAYS IN 50 STATES)

I struggled to follow imposed routines and calendars and discovered that it was easier to follow a self-imposed one. Looking ahead at the March and April training schedule was overwhelming; the mileage targets were beyond anything I could conceive of doing. And the plan was for a big push in May before tapering down before the race itself. The calendar looked like this:

Winter running included various road risks, but running in the snow was the closest I’d ever get to running in the sand.

A key component of my plan was that I would not run a marathon until the Gobi March itself. That way completing the first day – the first marathon of the race – would have even more significance for me. Another component was my decision, since I was not a runner, to leverage my other athletic endeavors as cross-training for the race. I couldn’t prove that cross-training would produce a faster time, but I knew it would help me minimize injury and would hedge the monotony of training. I also decided not to run long distances in my training – all of my training sessions would need to be under two hours so I could maintain my other commitments. I kept my distances under 20 kilometers, saving my legs from a steady diet of pounding. I decided I would just have to live with the risk that my legs might be under-prepared for the challenge.

Follow Your Plan but Listen to Your Body

I built a schedule and did my best to follow it. I focused on building my capacity to do what I said I was going to do and honor my promises to myself, as opposed to listening to my body’s aches and pains. Some hockey nights my training earlier in the day made me feel like I was the slowest guy on the ice.

The repetitive nature of running is fraught with risks, if you do too much, too quickly. Over time I would learn about recovery, rest, and sadly, over-training. While the science of recovery is simple and you can find an expert at every street corner, finding out what works for you and executing it is a process of trial and error. The demands of an over-scheduled and over-committed life meant I could get to the training, but not to preventative care, nutrition, good sleep, and adequate rest and periods of recovery. My head knew what to do, but my calendar had a life of its own. Fear of failure was what drove me most. I ran as much as possible, breaking the ennui with hockey, tennis, and personal training. Yoga found its way to the calendar, too, once a week.

Winning Compromises to Break Up the Routine

I quickly fell in love with not having a vehicle. I created a pick-up schedule to get me to hockey, a compromise that helped me get to know my mates better. As February rolled in, it was time to invest in a treadmill and alternate between indoor and outdoor activities. While I loved its benefits, I grew bored of running, especially on the treadmill. It pained me more, mentally, to run on the treadmill than to deal with wind or cold temperature outdoors. I got myself through by watching TV, an activity I was trying to eliminate from my life, and by listening to audio books while running outdoors.

The audio books were great. I could now torment my colleagues with the latest idea that I had heard the night before while running or walking. Looking for efficiency, I migrated to book summaries, which yielded ideas five times a week and lengthened everyone’s project list. A few of my colleagues hoped I would stop running soon.

The book summaries produced another good idea: I built a digital library of a few hundred titles and book summaries that I had heard on my runs and custom-loaded them on iPod nanos, which I gave to clients.

I’m known for being competitive, but I don’t see myself as athletic. Nothing has come to me easily; I’ve had to work at it. I realized how little I knew about running – such as pacing, running hills, or buying the right shoe – and probably even less about everything else involved in the event, from what clothes to wear, to layering, to nutrition, to sleeping in a tent, and being forced to interact with strangers throughout the run.

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