1999 Marathon des Sables.

Photos and Article by Tom Demerly.

I did the Marathon Des Sables because I thought it would be a tough race. I was wrong. It is nearly impossible. Popular media embellishes events. Everything is the toughest, longest, coldest, hottest. The media didn’t do justice to the Marathon Des Sables. They didn’t report that near the end of the race you would be wounded enough to need a medevac. The magazines said nothing of how sick you would be. How you would have nightmares about the race as you slept in the desert and wake up in the morning to find you were still in the nightmare. They forgot to say that when you got home you would need blood tests, oxygen, IVs, pills, shots and a long time to let the remnants of your toenails and dead skin fall off. Maybe a month before your feet return to normal size. Somehow the magazines and TV crews missed that.

28 Americans competed in 1999. Mary Gadams, 28, a global strategist, is the US athlete’s liaison for the race. This was Mary’s 7^th time ^{through Hell. Mary is small, pretty, very smart, even more capable and wonderfully level headed.}

^{Ray Nyce of Colorado celebrated his 53rd birthday during the race, or, rather, survived it there. Ray is soft-spoken, very, very pleasant and with a list of adventures extraordinarily long. I met Ray a couple months ago in Antarctica. While I (and most others) suffered heavily during the race, Ray seemed oddly unaffected by it. He never slowed down, never got tired. I think he got a couple blisters eventually. I slept next to Ray in our tent because he is kind, smart and friendly. I learned a lot from him.}

^{A couple nights I slept next to Mike the lawyer. I feel sorry for any lawyer who goes up against Mike. This guy is tough. Lawyer Mike gave us occasional pearls of legal wisdom (on divorce "…It’s cheaper- to keep her…") and asked lots of questions about adventure racing, a sport he is well suited for. Although Mike had never done this event before, he did very well, but his feet got chowed pretty bad, like the rest of us.}

Camera Crews were everywhere, fun most of the time...

The press covered the race in droves. TV guys, photogs, writers. You literally couldn’t take a dump without somebody taking your picture. Big fun on the first day, a bit different as the race went on. Like when you were crying because you didn’t think you could make it. But they had a job to do, and we were the job. A legion of reporters from Quokka.com was on hand. Quokka represents the future of how sports will be experienced by the public. Fast, multi-media, interactive. The "Quokkalopes" did an excellent job reporting. Always probing, looking for the inside angle, the buried story. They covered the race better than anyone.

^{At the start I was uneasy. Too many cameras, too much hype. I just wanted to get going. It was a spectacle, and I felt sorry that people from around the world couldn’t see us start. 600 people, running into the desert to do real battle with their fears, the environment, their fitness (or lack thereof) and everything else which will go wrong over the next six days. To even consider how long and hard this is would be a mistake. So you don’t think about it. You only think "Run to the first checkpoint 9 kilometers from here". Then you run to the next, then the next and before you know it (but after your feet are bleeding) you are in sight of the bivouac and temporary salvation.}

^{The terrain is bad. Really bad. Hard, rocky, sandy, and never-ending. The size of the Sahara desert will scare you if you’re smart. That thing is huge, and it’s all about making you dead.}

^{I made good progress during the first hours. Everyone did. We were fresh and charged with adrenaline. 18 miles across low, intermittent dunes and a few ups and downs including an interesting little rock canyon near the end. It was hot. High 90s, low 100s. My last race was in Antarctica the month before and I wasn’t ready for this heat.}

^{Near the end of the first stage a small Japanese woman dressed in powder blue ran by me with a plastic cartoon kitty-cat mask on the back of her head. The kitty-cat had a wild grin on its face. As she passed me the kitty-cat looked at me. I baked and sweated and came apart and bled as the cartoon kitty witnessed under the white-hot sun. It’s blue, white and black face bounced subtly over each dune and I thought someone put LSD in my water. The kitty was kicking my ass. It ran off into the heat ripples. Blue and white and black and grinning. I suffered. I was going to take a picture since no one would believe me, but by the time I got my camera out, the Japanese kitty-cat woman would be gone. I told some guys the story that night and they were like "Um, I think it was the heat". A few days later Ray Nyce said he saw the kitty-cat runner from Japan, and said she was real.}

The bivouac came into view with about 40 minutes of running left. Man, it sucks when you can see the finish but just can’t get there. After crossing I got my water ration, 4.5 liters, and can of Coke, which, by some act of a generous God himself, was actually cold. A group of guys looking like downtrodden Auschwitz inmates queued up next to the water ration station. "Pour le carton?" I asked. "For the boxes?" It was the line for the empty cardboard boxes. Those were our beds. We unfolded boxes the water came in and slept on them in our Berber tents. It occurred to me we spent thousands and trained months to live like street people or refugees. Evenings spent in the Berber tents were very nice. We let our wounded feet air while the flies dined on them, prepared food from our packs, drank water, chatted and napped. The sun gave up on us for the day and slid around to another part of the world. The desert went brilliant orange, then yellow, then blue and finally a silent, fatal black. The mercury retreated and drove us into our ultra-light sleeping bags. Our feet oozed and stuck to the inside of the bag. The journalists would visit us: "How hard was today?" "Are you thinking of dropping out?" "Can we take a picture of your feet?" and of course, for the thousandth time "Why are you doing this?" The journalists were a welcome diversion. They were clean and smelled like people. The girls smelled like girls. Robin’s long, black hair was stunning. I hugged her one night, and felt bad for touching her when I stunk so bad.

Not exactly five stars, but home for the next six nights.

^{One evening a television producer from Outdoor Life Network stopped by our tent. Yana is 28, very pretty and one of those rare people you meet who is doing exactly what they should be doing in life- making documentaries. Yana asked me a series of questions about why I was doing the race, what I got out of it, and what its effects were. Yana’s skill is in asking the right questions at the right time. She asked me how I was feeling right before the start of the 44-mile non-stop stage. It was the perfect question to ask, and her timing got her an honest answer. The people who view Yana’s documentary about the race will have an accurate, authentic feel for the event.}

^{As with most times spent in the wilderness, life winds down when the sun sets. The Nomads made a fire and we would mill around by it, but it hurt so much to stand we pretty much kept to our tents.}

^{In my sleep I would have wild sex dreams. I dreamt a girl from high school I hated was wearing a short, pleated cheerleader skirt and came up to me in the desert and sat on my lap. I dreamt Bill Gates and I shared an apartment, and he came home with a cannon, which he set up in our living room. When I came home I said "Hey Bill, what are we going to do with this cannon?" Bill just smiled and said "We can shoot it, it will be really fun!" That was the end of the dream. I dreamt I had a big glass of freezing cold Coke with whipped cream on it. And I dreamed I was back in the Army trying to rescue someone in the desert, but could not find them. I dreamt I ran to the top of a sand dune and fell off the other side. I had a nightmare I was still in the race, running on bloody feet and low on water in 100-degree heat. When I woke up- I was.}

^{Occasionally at night the wind would rattle our tent and blow dirty toilet paper around spraying us with sand. We slid deep in our sleeping bags like animals hiding, which is exactly what we were. The cool wind was welcome though. The contrast between night and day was stark. I loved the nomad tent life, and the desert was beautiful at night. My tent mates were great guys, guys I would hang out with any time. They were an interesting mix of personalities. One thing we all had in common: Not once was there ever mention of the ultimate profanity- giving up. No matter how long it took, how hard it was, no one ever contemplated it. We only spoke of continuing, no matter how horrid it seemed.}

^{Morning weather was cool, very pleasant. I wore my Rail Rider sun-proofs in the morning with my running shorts and T-shirt under. When the earth rotated to face the sun it was like someone pressed the lever down on a toaster. The heat came. The temperature climbed 20 degrees every hour until it crescendoed around 1:00PM at some beastly figure best unknown to the racers, but always three digits.}

^{After the first three days I thought "I can do this basically indefinitely". Even though my feet were blown apart and I was running low on food I could get through 20 miles per day reasonably fast. The problem was, on the fourth day we had to run between 44 and 47 miles. Non-stop.}

^{The mood in the camp before the Long Day was dark. No joking around. Everybody got their feet fixed as best they could, ate extra food to store energy and lighten their packs, and tried to sleep early. I had nightmares. The race would never end, I wouldn’t be allowed to finish, I got lost. Finally morning came. I had some sense of a convict facing execution. Yana, the OLN producer, brought a camera crew by and asked what today was like. I thought, then answered:}

^{"The burden of what we have to do today is very, very heavy on us right now- like an enormous weight on our shoulders."}

^{It seemed like we were buried by it. Yana let the tape roll, she asked "What would it take for you to drop out today?" I hadn’t even considered the thought. It was not an option. But I thought of an answer because she needed one, and it was well that I thought about it. As always, Yana had the right question at the right time. "Well," I said, "I’m not willing to die."}

It hurt to walk the hundred yards to the start line. I couldn’t imagine how I would run 50 miles on these feet. Maybe when they said "Allez!" ("Go!") the pain would go away. One thing for sure, things were going to be a lot different at the end of today than they were now. One way or another. It was a huge turning point day in my life. The burden of not finishing this thing and going home with that knowledge would be horrible. I couldn’t do that. The newspaper ran a big article about me the day before I left. People expected me to finish and come home saying "That was easy, I kicked it’s ass…" I couldn’t face anyone if I didn’t make it. It was the great crusade. Clearly, it was better to die trying than go home a failure. Better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a lamb. So I would face the dehydration, the heat, the discomfort. And I would finish or die trying. That left me with the knowledge that I would finish today- because if I failed I wouldn’t be around to deal with it. So they said go and I started running. And my feet hurt. If I shut my brain off I could make some of the hours just go away. So I thought of every girlfriend I ever had. I haven’t had many so it didn’t work very long. I tried to remember things that were hard for me to learn, and learn them again. I did math in my head. I thought about stories I heard, books I read, movies I saw. I wrote stories in my head.	The downward spiral: Day 1
	Day 3
	Day 5

^{Before long I was with a group of three French racers who were making good time. If I could tag along with these guys I wouldn’t be bothered with making my own pace. One less thing I would have to think about. I ran unobtrusively behind them. These guys were serious. They were moving. We ran across the flat, hard baked crust strewn with rocks for a few hours. Their packs were small, yellow, identical and neatly packed. The leader of the trio flew a French Tricolor from his pack. They rarely spoke until one yelled "Marche!" and they stopped and walked for a few minutes. I almost plowed into the back of them. I had been off with some girl dressed in a garter belt and stockings in my living room at home. After a short walking break we took off again. We neared a checkpoint.}

^{A few miles later I met up with three Brits. One was a pilot for the Queen’s Flight Squadron in the RAF. He flew the Royals around the world. The other guys were reluctant to say what they did, so I suspect they were British Special Air Service. One confessed to being a former South African Recon Commando. He ran like a man who knew how to carry a pack. By now we were mostly reduced to a fast walk, and even that was tough. I walked behind them and listened to them tell stories, talk about this and that. I enjoyed the British slang. When I grew bored with them I drifted back to my world of thoughts and stories. The hours passed. We crested a huge dune attached to a higher rock peak. Distance melted beneath us. A few hours later I realized we only had about 24 miles to go. It wasn’t too hot; we got a real break on the weather that day. Maybe high 90s.}

^{When we started the race they issued us a white and blue punch card. Each checkpoint was represented by one dot. When you went through the checkpoint you got your ticket punched. Most days had four punches. Today had eight. When I reached the fourth checkpoint I was excited because we only had a normal day left. Four punches to go. I had done it before, I could do it again.}

^{We walked into a village of some low adobe mud huts. A kid ran out and started begging in French "Bon-bon?, Bon-bon?" I was wasted and had no extra energy, not even to blow the kid off. I just stared straight ahead. A universal trait of humans is they hate to be ignored. This kid went ballistic when I didn’t even look at her. She grabbed my pack and dragged behind me. A woman started shouting at the kid and she let go. I never even saw exactly what the kid looked like. I was just focused on putting one in front of the other.}

^{The leaders (top 70) started several hours after us to insure everyone raced in the dark. We just crossed the half way mark when a brown skeleton came into view off to my left. Lahsan Ahansal of Morocco was running what looked like a 7:30 pace. He had no water with him. His pack was the size of a women’s purse. Smaller than some. He seemed to be less susceptible to gravity. Every time my feet hit the ground it was with the force of a hundred hammers. Ahansal floated across the ground. He was absolutely flying. He held his hands relaxed in front of him. About the time I was really focused on watching him, he was gone. Ran off into the heat haze. He would be at the finish line six hours before me. I met Ahansal later during the race. He was happy and friendly. We didn’t share a common (verbal) language but we shook hands and I told him in English and French that he did an excellent job. He told me I did also (in French) and we shook hands, he hugged me. He patted me on the shoulder and we went back to our respective worlds. I find it so odd that an athlete of his caliber is anonymous. A guy who hits a ball 70 times in a row on a nice summer’s day is famous, but a guy who can run through hell at warp speed and be totally unaffected is unknown.}

^{There was a short dune section we crossed after sunset. It was pitch black and the sand was awful, up to our knees in places. The dunes were remarkably steep. My feet were coming apart as sand got into the wounds- it burned like fire. Making progress was nearly impossible. The SA Recon man shot a compass bearing across the dunes and we fell in behind him. After an hour or so (it could have been three) we were out of the dunes. My feet were bad now. We stopped to empty sand out of our shoes. My heels bled through the tape, socks and into my shoes. The sand was cemented to it. I scraped it off with my pocketknife and crammed the whole mess back into my shoes. When I started walking the pain was much worse. I took three Aleve and tried to concentrate on the pain as much as possible, hoping this would somehow diminish it. After a few minutes I had wrestled it back down to a tolerable level. Without realizing it the pain was slowing me down. I was losing ground.}

^{Time is funny. If you wait long enough it just seems to pass. Inevitably, irrevocably, it just slips painfully by and all you have to do is stay alive. That’s what I did that night. I just put one foot in front of the other and stayed alive. We reached the final checkpoint of the day.}

^{There had been a lot of discussion about tactics on the long day. We had 40 hours to complete the stage. This meant some people would actually sleep out on the course. To me this was an awful thought. I was all for the slam-bang finish. My British compatriots and I were of the same school of thought: Press on regardless and get this thing behind us. I didn’t want to stop moving for one second until this was over and I could lay down and sleep; off the clock. If you slept on the course, the clock was running and you were losing time and places.}

^{At the final checkpoint things were getting blurry. My memory was going. I looked inside an aid tent at the last checkpoint and it looked like some Picasso vision of Hell. The characters all had their jaws running down their faces and their eyes bulbous and protruding. They looked tangled with each other in tones of black and grey and brown. It was frightening. These were the guys who couldn’t cover the final 11 kilometers to the finish that night, and would sleep in the checkpoint until sun-up. Not me. I was getting to the finish. I struck out with the Brits but quickly two of them had to turn around. Mark continued on with me. At the time I didn’t know who he was, just another body in front of me who I was taking pace and direction from. I didn’t know who it was until the next day.}

^{There was a glow on the distant horizon and occasional flash from a camera strobe. The finish line seven miles away. The terrain undulated up and down. At the top of one of the rises I was startled by a massive form a few feet to my left. When I looked at it two dark black and brown eyes looked back at me from under layers of dark fabric. The figure leaned against an enormous, kneeling camel. The whole figure was barely visible against the black night. It’s outline was uncertain. But the eyes were clear, and they locked on mine, looked into them, through them and out the back of my head. They tracked me and followed me. It was uneasy and frightening. As I walked by, in the silence of the desert black, the figure said, quietly, two words: "Bon Courage". I walked some distance before I figured out what he said, "good courage". Coming from a desert nomad who navigated this hellish place day and night, survived sand storms, bandits, terrorists, scorpions his whole life, this was the greatest compliment I’ve ever received.}

^{The nomad’s encouragement and the lights made me walk faster. Mark mentioned we seemed to be picking it up. And then the finish line was there. It was dark and there were a couple people around. Mark and I crossed, got our water and coke. A couple journalists talked to me and took my picture. A video camera recorded my comments. I queued up for a sleeping box. Two Italians looked at me and gave me the next box that became available. When I asked them why they were giving me cuts in line they said something in Italian I didn’t understand, which a French guy translated as "You look like you suffered much". I took the box back to my tent, tore it open, laid it down next to Ray and Heath and passed out. It was a bit after midnight. It felt good to be done with the hardest thing I had ever done in my life. It was quiet, dark and still in the desert. And I made it.}

^{During the day a pair of Landrovers appeared over the horizon. They were tourists doing - I don’t know what- in the middle of the Sahara. I suppose, just for sport, they decided to drive across part of it. They knew of the race and spotted our bivouac. A few feet from the tent next to ours they stopped and got out. We started begging for food and a woman, dressed in a long floral sundress, reached in the vehicle to get something. A race official appeared out of no where and berated the tourist. A heated exchange ensued and the tourists got back in their Landrovers to drive away. As they did, the race official turned her back to leave. The woman in the second Landrover saw this and hurled a big chocolate bunny out the window and right into our tent. It was like those Tarzan movies where piranhas eat a guy who fell in a river in ten seconds. The chocolate bunny might has well have been set upon by starving hyenas. We devoured it. Ray got part, Mike had some, I have no idea who got the ears, but I think it was Eric. I had part of what looked like a thigh, and it was heavenly. Ten seconds, no more bunny.}

^{We had to run a marathon the next day. Running 44 (or 47)miles the day before had changed our frame of reference so running "only" 26.2 miles seemed like a minor affair. The catch was 14 miles were across the largest dune system on the planet. Dunes, or "ergs" as the nomads call them, towered hundreds of feet into the sky and sprawled across the horizon. It was a magical, powdery, pristine fine sand sculpted by the wind into perfect curves and shapes. It was fragile though, and one foot in the wrong place would sink to the knees. The crest of the dune ridges seemed firm, but just off the crests was like walking in powdered sugar. This was the longest dune section ever incorporated into the event. The dunes started immediately and were next to our bivouac, so they taunted us all day before the stage.}

^{When the dune marathon started I quickly found Mary Gadams and followed her. Mary has done this thing 6 times before so I figured I would follow her. It was a good move. Mary picked a good line through the sand and we made progress. My feet were really hurting with the sand coming in my shoes but I wasn’t about to stop or slow down because I would loose Mary. I decided when she stopped to empty her shoes, I would empty mine- but not before. Mary is tough. She went for a long time before she even said anything. When she finally did notice me she very kindly said "Tom, you’re doing so well". I thanked her for the opportunity to do the event, as she had coordinated the US team. We went back to our individual suffering and kept running, or mostly, walking. We stopped briefly between dunes to empty our shoes and pressed on. Yana and the OLN film crew had rented camels to lug their cameras (and them) into the dunes. They wanted me to re-enact running down a dune in the deep sand. I took a couple minutes and ran up and down a dune for them to tape. Mary put a lot of distance on me by then and was out of sight.}

^{We crossed the erg section. I emptied the sand from my shoes again. My feet were so swollen I could barely get my shoes back on. When I did, it really hurt. Walking was very bad. Running was a big no-wayer. After a few minutes of truly horrible pain I couldn’t continue. I thought I should be able to employ some ingenuity to make my shoes better. I had duct tape and a knife, so I could fix anything. Before I started carving the toes out of my shoes I tried pulling the insoles out to give me more room. It worked great; my feet hurt 30% less. I ran 9 or 10 minute miles to the next checkpoint 11 kilometers away.}

^{The terrain after the erg section was flat. Quite incredibly flat. There was a rumor we would pass within 1 kilometer of Algeria today so navigation was important. The US does not enjoy good relations with Algeria so being lost in their country would have produced major hassles. After hitting the next checkpoint I was starting to get blown so I settled into a fast walk.}

^{The feeling going into the 26.2 mile marathon stage was one of "This is it, we made it!" Most competitors felt if they completed the 44-mile stage, they could do anything. Now, most of the way through the marathon stage, I was really ready for this race to be over. Once we crossed the finish line today we would only have 4.7 miles left to run tomorrow. The marathon stage kept getting longer it seemed, and the damn thing just wouldn’t go away. After the final checkpoint I looked at my water card. There was room for only one more punch. It looked like Swiss cheese. I was almost there.}

^{For the first time since I’d been in this event I realized the likelihood was that I would finish. It felt really "big" to think I would be finishing. I was excited. The culmination of many things I’ve done came back and I was feeling good about it. Not a conspicuous feeling, but a very private feeling of having been there, done that. A feeling that I had made it, and I could do this again. I felt stronger from it, although I was pretty torn up.}

^{At the start the mood was very happy- we were running to the finish line. It was inconceivable that we had completed such a difficult ordeal. To me, this was really big. Throughout my life I’ve wanted to take on larger and larger challenges, and being here affirmed that my life is going the way I wanted it to. Not many people can say that. For most people, their life is a compromise between their dreams and a reality imposed on them. Here, in the Sahara, standing at the start line of the Marathon des Sables, I was living my greatest dream so far. In 4.7 miles it would cease to be a dream and become reality, thus paving the way for bigger and better dreams.}

^{The night before the finish}

^{Everyone ran faster that day. We could smell the barn. There was a short section across the remaining desert and through a wadi then in toward town. We crossed a little bridge then ran down into some kind of excavation or construction project. At the top of the construction site we saw a paved road and the beginning of a procession of spectators. A Landrover with a TV camera on top of it was waiting. As I got near the road I recognized Yana and her film crew. They were there to film my arrival at the finish line.}

^{Sometimes you dream of finishing a race with a camera crew in front of you, a crowd cheering you on to a triumphant finish, and all this fanfare. The reality is that normally no one is at the finish and you’re just another face in the crowd among other finishers. You get a medal, a t-shirt and you get in the car and drive home. This finish was different. The last two miles were on pavement and I felt like I was running a 7:00 mile. My feet, which were excruciating earlier, only tingled now. People rode along side me on bicycles and jabbered encouragement in wild languages. The crowd on the sidewalk was building and spilling into the streets. The camera vehicle turned off to the left at the insistence of a Gendarme and I saw where I would be making a right turn through a corridor of screaming spectators. The space was barely wide enough for a runner to get through. It was deafening. People were high-fiving me, slapping my back, waving there fists in the air and clapping and jumping up and down. It was mayhem. Once around the corner I saw the finish line two blocks down. Despite the spectacle of this finish, the noise, the crowds, even with all this it seemed like somewhat of an anti-climax. For something so hard, there is almost no adequate finish. One of the OLN cameramen spotted me with a hand-held camera and followed me along to the finish. He asked me what it was like. The night before I tried to think of some profound thing to say that would sum it up in one sentence perfectly, but failed miserably. All I could say was "This is incredible- really incredible."}

^{When I was a kid I saw Bjorn Borg win a tennis match. They brought a wheel-barrel full of gold coins onto the court and gave him a huge crystal trophy. It was blazing hot and Borg was soaked with his own perspiration and completely exhausted. In the most spontaneous and genuine victory celebration I’ve ever seen he took two big handfuls of gold coins and poured them over his head. He grabbed the trophy and held it up to sun while he sank to his knees. The rays of the sun poured through the crystal and hit his face. The crowd came to their feet, the photographers knocked each other over trying to get the shot. It was a divine spectacle of triumph. I never forgot that. It was imprinted on my brain. I said to myself, if I ever do anything worth celebrating, I would get down on my knees and salute the sun.}

^{There was a sense of relief. A group of Americans was standing just past the finish line in an area roped off for finishers. Every American who entered the Marathon des Sables, all 28 of them, would finish. Some made it despite terrible injuries and illnesses. Michelle’s feet were so bad she couldn’t wear shoes for the last two days, and had to complete the race with her feet wrapped in gauze, Compede, duct tape and wearing Teva sandals. The success of the Americans was a great source of national pride to me, and a testimony to the American spirit, especially in competition with other countries. The American ideal is to never back away from a challenge, no matter how tough, and this ideal was apparent in each individual from the United States, as well as the other countries. I was very excited to be an American that day. It was a status of very high esteem.}

^{There was a long bus ride back to Ourazazate. About 6 hours. The race organizers gave us a little bag with a lunch in it and a clean t-shirt, since we smelled so aweful after a week with no shower. We stayed at a beautiful hotel in town, near the famous Kasbah, where they were filming a movie called "Rules of Engagement" about US Marines.}

^{I got to my room, stripped off, and got in the shower. How you can be miserable, hot, stinking, in pain and generally gross one minute and then in a luxurious shower a few hours later is a wonder to me. What a transition. The water sheeted off me along with the dirt, week old sunscreen, sweat, urine, more sweat, blood and pus from my feet and some dead bugs from my hair. After I was done, I took another shower. Shaving hurt. When I wiped the steam off the mirror I looked like a human being again. Actually, not bad either. I lost a couple pounds and had quite a tan. Putting on clean clothes was incredible. I walked up to the poolside bar and sat down with some other Americans and had a hamburger. Awesome.}

^{Our awards dinner was the most elaborate affair of any type I’ve attended. His Highness, The King of Morocco, was there. There were palace guards with muskets dressed in white robes on huge, clean camels. Trumpet players heralded our arrival at the banquet, held in enormous, luxurious tents like the Arab Sheiks enjoy. A big bonfire roared in the center of the tents while dancers and musicians swirled around it. Hurried waiters brought us course after course of Moroccan delicacies. Suddenly, a concussion rocked the ceremony as Camel mounted infantry soldiers saluted by firing their muskets en masse. I talked to Robin, the reporter from Quokka. She was stunning in a low-cut, long black dress. How Robin got that dress all the way across the desert in pristine condition is a mystery.}

^{For the next two days we lounged by the pool, talked about races in the future and past, read magazines and listened to music. We were convicts liberated. It was a wonderfully private couple of days to reflect on something that would mean little to anyone other than myself.}

^{Photo Notes: All photographs on this page were shot using a stock Yashica T4 Automatic. Film is either Fugi Reala 100 or Kodak Photo Journalist PJ 400 Pro, Processing, film and camera from Adray Photo in Dearborn Michigan 313.274.9500.}