as your legs will carry you is bound to lead to trouble. The thick jungle at the bottom was tough enough to get through, but the climb after that was hideous – hideously hot and hideously hard going.
I told the team to take it easy, we needed to conserve our strength. But just short of the summit there was a super-steep ridge, the last climb before the ground levelled off. From somewhere, Staffan got some kind of superpower and sped up on the last 50 metres. The rest of us sped up too to stay together but the burning heat – with no hint of a breeze – finally caught up with us, and we just sat there for a while, unable to move.
By the time we arrived at the next transition area, we were not in good shape – not helped by the fact that we’d run out of water. A section of the race that on the map had looked like a simple climb over a hill had been so much longer and tougher than we’d expected that we began to suspect that the whole race was going to be a whole lot harder than any we’d raced before.
The next stage started off with more heat and more hills, but then seemed not to have quite as many horrors as I’d imagined. We mostly walked along a boulder-strewn ridge where we could see over the plains of the Pantanal, and the gods gave us a breeze, which saved us from more direct hits from the infernal mosquitoes. Yet soon enough the sun reached its height and the intense heat returned, to make the second 35 kilometres as searingly exhausting as the previous day’s climb. We’d run out of water again and this time the gods decided not to give us any creeks or rivers. We were desperately thirsty and, despite managing to get two or three hours’ sleep in the relative cool of the night, seriously sleep-deprived.
I think thirst and heat makes everything worse, but in particular it makes you drained and very possibly stupid and muddle-headed. Certainly I found it hard to try to motivate everyone, and was depressed by the slow progress we seemed to be making. As a racing friend of mine says, ‘When you’re safe at home you wish you were adventure racing, and when you’re racing you wish you were safe at home.’ On an hourly basis my mind was taking me home.
By the time we got to the transition area we were all desperate for food, water and sleep. Especially sleep. But there wasn’t time to rest properly; I needed everyone to be up and moving on – by my calculations we could gain at least two places if we cut short our rest.
So when we arrived at the waterside, ready for the kayaking leg, we were back in the sort of poor shape we’d been in the day before. Yet as I led the others down to the landing stage where the boats were waiting, I knew that we would have to make extra-good time on this leg to have any hope of regaining a top-five position.
As we got out the kayaks I could feel a light breeze at my back. We were going to be paddling downstream with a tailwind. For the first time in my racing life, we had ideal conditions for me to try out one of my race-winning theories. Tying the two boats together, I put up the small sail that lay buried deep in our equipment box. Marika and Staffan jumped into the first boat and Jonas and I climbed into the second one.
‘Now we can get those two hours of sleep we need,’ I said to the team as we pushed off. It worked like a dream. Roped together, we could take it in turns to paddle and sleep, navigating carefully in the dark and making good progress.
It wasn’t a very comfortable sleep – wrapped in a light silver blanket, lying on the bottom of the kayak like pigs in blankets – but it meant we didn’t need to sleep when we got to the next stage. And we got to the transition area more quickly than I could have hoped. It was one of the best stages in my racing career. So we set out on the next section – apparently the toughest of the race – in slightly better heart.
An hour later we were wading through swamp and rivers, making agonisingly slow progress. Everything in this particular jungle seemed to be either super-dry and bakingly hot, or swamps and water everywhere. There was nothing in between. This bit was a wet bit. And there was nothing for it but to wade through the water – poking our sticks ahead of us to check for stingrays – as best we could.
Another hour later and the stingrays were the least of our problems. There were some strange new creatures swimming round our legs. Remembering the organisers’ helpful race notes, I realised what they were: piranhas – the kind of fish ‘with a powerful bite that makes them adept at tearing flesh’.
‘Whoa! This can’t be happening,’ I said to the others. ‘But look at these guys. Piranhas. Seems like hundreds of them.’
‘Okaaay,’ said Jonas. ‘Well, that’s fine. I seem to remember it says in the book that they only attack if they’re trapped, or if there’s blood in the water.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Keep calm and don’t bleed.’
I reckoned that was good advice for the next bit of the river too. We came round a bend just as it was starting to get dark, but I could make out lots of young crocodiles gathered on the bank. You could hear the snapping noises they made with their jaws. They sounded like they were revving up for a night of hunting.
As we waded slowly past them, through the swamp on the other side of the river, it was getting darker and darker. There was nothing for it but to turn our headlamps on, even though we knew what would happen next.
Sure enough, as if waiting in the wings for lights, camera, action, out came the mosquitoes, the giant wasps and the flying ants. We could feel them biting us – vicious, irritating bites. It was getting harder and harder to keep calm and not bleed. Especially when we remembered that the Brazilians called this time of day, when it got dark, ‘snake time’.
The last time we’d looked at the map it had been especially hard to check our position – reading a map on a scale of 1cm to 1km means there’s not a lot of detail when you’re somewhere in the middle of a 200,000-square-km jungle. I reckoned that we might well have been going in the wrong direction, but it was probably best to push on in the hope that we were heading roughly towards the right bit of water for the next stage.
‘This is worse than Ecuador, isn’t it? Only I suppose this time we haven’t got a dog to worry about.’ Staffan was bending over the map in frustration.
I felt a wave of weakness wash over me at the mention of Arthur. It suddenly hit me that here I was in this boiling heat on the other side of the world, and there he was back at home in the snow with the rest of our family. If I hadn’t known how committed I was to this sport I would have wondered what I was doing here. For that moment, all I could do was stand still and take a moment to hope that he was enjoying a nice run in the snow and not missing me too much.
But meanwhile, the insects were increasing their attacks. To try to protect myself a bit I decided to turn off my headlamp and hope for the best. By this stage we’d run out of land; everywhere around us was water. So we started swimming, keeping in the same direction, with our poles in front of us to push off the thick vegetation and defend ourselves against the bigger snakes and fish.
We found land eventually and decided to rest up and check the map. Laying it on the ground, the four of us switched our lights on and bent over it. Just as our tired eyes focused on the bit of the map where we thought we were, we heard a piercing, terrifying series of loud squeals coming from our left. Wild boar. Herd of.
There was only water behind us, and jungle to our left and right. Staffan said he thought we should climb the three or four trees on the edge of the water. I thought they looked way too spindly to carry our weight, but the noise of screaming and hooves coming our way was now so loud that we would probably have tried climbing a piece of bamboo. Just as we started to pull ourselves up into the trees, there was another sound of screaming – coming from the opposite direction. Another herd of wild boar.
Somewhere in the jungle,
