Prologue: Blood and Dirt PROLOGUE BLOOD AND DIRT I HIT THE DIRT HARD and by the time I came up, I was already drippping blood. Several times while training for Ironman, I''ve crashed my bike and jumped right back up--there was so much adrenaline flowing that I didn''t feel pain in the moment. This fall was the opposite. My exhausted body exploded in pain, and my elbow was quickly drenched in blood. I was two days into the Gobi March, a brutally difficult six-stage, 155-mile ultramarathon through the steppes, sand dunes, and rock valleys of Central Mongolia. I''d journeyed sixty-five hundred miles from my home in Nashville, and I was here to win. On the first stage of twenty-one miles, I''d gone out super hard. I knew it wasn''t sustainable for the entire stage, but I thought for sure that if I went out at a crazy pace, I''d ditch my competition and buy myself enough space to get strategic.

I was quickly stunned by how fast some of the other runners were. Not only had a few stayed with me, two of the guys--a Swiss and an Israeli--had left me behind with four or five miles left. Then an Italian guy passed me with maybe two miles to go. I came in fourth, around ten minutes behind the leader. That first finish had me seriously questioning myself. I''d made a boneheaded mistake, traveling more than twenty-four hours from Nashville to Ulaanbaatar less than a day before the race start. I hadn''t even considered how the jet lag and sleep deprivation would affect me. And I''d been arrogant.

I thought I could just show up, fake my way through my first ultramarathon, and destroy everyone. Forget about winning, now I was going to have to destroy myself just to make it to the top three. I knew I needed a different strategy for the second day. The Gobi March had drawn elite, savvy ultrarunners from around the globe who''d been preparing for this race for years, and I wasn''t going to be able to just drop them like regular marathoners. For the second stage of twenty-eight miles, I decided to just run at a comfortable pace and not worry about anyone else. I focused on managing the distance and didn''t allow myself to think about others. If they wanted to go out hard and blow up, they were welcome to. I just had to put my head down and run my best race and maybe--just maybe--I''d chip away at that ten-minute lead.

Day two started with single track and jeep trails that meandered through rolling, mountainous terrain. None of it was smooth turf or sure-footing. Hugo Reinhold, the Swiss guy, and David Dano, the Israeli, raced out in front of me early on, but they never got out of my sight. I wasn''t even consciously trying to focus on them. I was just chatting with this British guy and running my race. Around ten miles, the British guy peeled off and I started closing distance to the leaders. I wasn''t even trying to catch them. I wasn''t speeding up; they were just slowing down.

They''d gone hard on the first day, too, and it must have taken more out of them than it had me. Very slowly, I started gaining on them. Then I caught up with them and we shared a few words--no trash talk, just checking in with each other. Then, without really trying, I slowly pulled away. I wasn''t looking at them, I wasn''t thinking about them. I was focused on running my race and nothing else existed. Finally, I allowed myself a discreet peek over my shoulder. They were ten yards back.

Then they were twenty yards back. We were probably twenty miles into the second stage when I realized I could no longer see them. At that time, we were running through rolling pasture and open fields with good visibility. At a minimum, they had to be five minutes behind me, maybe even ten. I started to feel good. Time to turn up the heat. I might blow this whole thing open right here, right now. As much as my spirits were lifted by eking out some breathing room, I was still deep in the hurt locker and ready for the day to end.

I didn''t have a map so I didn''t know exactly where I was, and since I was in the lead, there were no footprints in the dust to follow. I knew the rough distances of the stages and the distance between aid stations, but we were out here for a primal, even savage experience, and sometimes the distances were off. The sky was so vast, open, and empty, I felt as if I were the only person on some distant planet. When you''re depleted after a couple of days of hard running, seeing something that may indicate your suffering is over is almost like seeing a mirage. At the slightest hint that your ordeal is about to end, you immediately project all your hopes and dreams onto that illusion. I crested a rise and saw a little circle of yurts, and my heart soared. This is definitely the village where this stage ends. My day is done.

I won the stage and may have taken the lead. I''m fucking back, baby. Seeing those yurts on the horizon lit a fire under my ass and I started running harder, doing everything I could to bring my time down. When I finally rolled up, I realized what I thought was the end point was a deserted Mongolian shepherd village. The yurts had been left behind by nomads who''d taken their sheep, goats, or cattle somewhere else this time of year. I couldn''t see another village from here so that meant, what, another four miles? Maybe five? That distance was incomprehensible. My mood instantly tanked. I''d carried a twenty-pound pack almost fifty miles in these last two days, the first time I''d run with a pack.

Between the travel and the exertion, I was incredibly fatigued. I was in the lead and didn''t want to waste a second doing anything unnecessary, so I hadn''t been eating enough. At first it was because I didn''t want to break stride, but as my energy plummeted from lack of calories, it became impossible to muster up the willpower necessary to even reach for a gel pack. I was so dehydrated that my vision had started to blur. And I was so depleted that I couldn''t even think straight. How many miles are left? How many minutes per mile? How much time in total? I kept sending those requests for information, and my brain kept coming up with nothing. I kept running. Nothing felt stable.

My reflexes were so slow, it was like I was underwater. My forward momentum was the only thing keeping me upright. But my body was so fatigued by this point that all the stabilizer muscles in my ankles and feet were lagging. The signals weren''t getting to my brain fast enough, and everything felt squishy. You got to fucking pay attention here because your brain''s not working. I still couldn''t see the next village. The day had suddenly become incredibly long, and I couldn''t conceptualize that, eventually, it would end. Hold fast, buddy.

This could go really bad really fast. I kept hammering out of instinct alone. Around twenty-five miles with maybe only three miles to go, I started descending a small hill. From a distance, the tall grass made the terrain look smooth, but it was anything but. It was hybrid desert pasture, full of rocks and roots and tiny coarse bushes grabbing at your feet. It would have been terrible to run on if I was a fresh, fleet-footed twenty-year-old, but I was fifty-one, totally beat to shit, and still trying to outrun guys half my age. My pack plagued me with each step. Twenty pounds doesn''t sound like a lot, but I was only 170, which meant I had an extra 10 percent of body weight resting above my center of gravity.

With that added weight, even the slightest misstep made me feel like I was about to careen out of control. I was catching myself constantly, just trying to manage getting down the hill, but each footstep felt more unstable than the last. Then my foot slipped just a little more than I could account for, I lost my stability, and that heavy pack drove me into the dirt hard. I went ass over teakettle, tumbling and flipping and flopping down the hill, just a ball of dust. I felt something pop. Dear God, let that not be a ligament or tendon I need to run. I was ready to crawl the rest of the way in to finish the stage if I had to, but a torn hamstring or Achilles tendon would end my race. When I finally stopped falling, I sat up.

My sunglasses had fallen off, there was dirt in my teeth, and everything hurt. I jumped up, determined to finish. My elbow was bleeding pretty badly but I could stand without any issue. The pop I''d felt was the strap of my backpack breaking. I grabbed hold of the broken strap and, somehow, I started running again. My pack flopped awkwardly on my back like it was an animal fighting to get free. I could feel the blood dripping down my arm, but I could not give a shit. My skin would heal.

My backpack wouldn''t. And it would be impossible to run another hundred miles with it flopping around. I couldn''t believe it. I''d come all the way to Mongolia, and now I wasn''t going to be able to finish this race because of a stupid equipment failure? All my buried insecurity came roaring to the surface. No one''s going to believe this really broke. They''re going to think I was just hurt and tired and frustrated and ripped it myself to give myself an out so I could quit. I hobbled as fast as I could, fighting the flopping backpack with each step. I''d killed myself to bury the leaders from the first stage and now, inch by painful inch, I could feel that lead slipping away.

Finally, finally, finally , I saw what was unmistakably the finish for the second stage. As I shuffled across the finish line, I could see the race organizers'' eyes widen at the blood smeared on my face and dripping off my arm. I''d done it. I''d won the stage. Yeah, I''d prevailed, but I''d completely ruined myself in the process. I w.