Day 1 is a real shocker for everybody. Just a few hundred meters from the starting line, we’re forced to swim across a wide creek (this wets our feet, which makes it easier to damage them). Robert sends us up and down endless hills and along vicious side slopes.
On the uphills, my heart beats so strongly, I feel it pounding in my chest. My lungs are burning and my breathing is deep. There is so much humidity in the air, there isn’t enough room left for oxygen. I’m drowning on dry land. Sweat pours out of us with the intensity of a rain shower. People find themselves dehydrating within minutes.
On the downhills and sideslopes, the feet slide violently to the fronts and sides of the shoe, bashing toes and rubbing skin. Blisters form within the first few hours. By the time the week is over, Jay’s altimeter watch had registered 5,000 meters of cumulative altitude gain and loss. That’s the equivalent of running up and down half of Mt. Everest in one week, with wet feet and 10 kilos on our backs, all in extreme tropical heat and humidity.
But hills aren’t our only problem. Thorns and branches jab and slice our skin. I remember our jungle survival training the day before the race where Gershon, our Brazilian army instructor, took a blade of jungle grass and cut a piece of raw meat with it. Well, we are running through that grass today. The jungle is brutal and everything out here is out to get us. “Velcom to ze jungle,” I think to myself. Velcom indeed!
Anke from Germany drinking water at a checkpoint.
Base camp that evening is a sorry sight, though spirits remain remarkably high. Competitors dress their wounds, proudly comparing who has bigger blisters and bloodier gashes. Let’s call it a form of masochistic camaraderie. Flies linger on open sores, but once shooed away they don’t return. There is plenty of fresh meat around.
Around 15 people drop out on day 1. Take Karl for example. He was so proud of finishing the Sand Marathon that he had the race logo tattooed on his neck, right above the word “Jack”, the name of this first born son. Karl was taken out of the race today due to severe dehydration, with three infusions required for recovery. The Jungle Marathon tattoo will have to wait.
As opposed to the desert where the only real enemy is passive heat, the jungle is a much more complex and deceiving environment. Despite the tranquil sounds of chirping birds, rustling leaves and babbling brooks, the jungle actively wants to kill me. First, the vegetation is designed to slow me down and impede escape. Roots trip me up, stumps stub my toes, vines entangle my body and thorny leaves and branches snarl my clothes and rip my skin. The jungle holds me in its grasp and invites me to linger.
In addition to hostile vegetation, anything that moves in the jungle generally wants to eat me. If I sit on the jungle floor for more than a minute, an entire ecosystem of insects appears out of nowhere and starts to devour me. We are bitten by ants, bled by leaches, infested by ticks, covered by funguses, stung by mosquitoes, and potentially eaten by jaguars. Every form of life in the jungle has but one goal: to recycle me to the bottom of the food chain. Life itself is trying to kill me. Even the chickens at camp start to eat my food.
