The Star Phoenix
A Reginan versus the desert
BY IAN HAMILTON, LEADER-POST APRIL 24, 2012
Stacey Shand keeps going to great lengths to find her breaking point.
The 32-year-old Regina resident – who has competed in extreme running events in the Northwest Territories, Costa Rica and Europe as well as climbing Africa’s two tallest peaks – just completed what is considered the toughest foot race in the world.
The Marathon des Sables is a seven-day, 243-kilometre race across the Sahara Desert in Morocco featuring stages of roughly 25, 34, 38, 82, 42, 22 kilometres. Every centimetre of the way, competitors have to carry a backpack containing everything they need for the whole race.
It’s just the latest test that Shand has taken – and passed.
“My body hasn’t told me no, so I haven’t stopped,” she says. “I keep looking for something more. If I ever got the sign that I was doing damage to my body, then I would react differently and look for different ways to challenge myself.
“Right now, my body adapts really well to the different pressures, mentally and physically. I want to ride that wave and see where it takes me.”
Previously, Shand’s drive to be challenged has taken her to such places as Yellowknife for the Cold Foot Classic (a one-day, 55-km run in the dead of winter), Costa Rica for the Coastal Challenge (a six-day, 227km run in the vicinity of volcanoes) and Europe for the North Face Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (a multi-day 120-km trek through Alpine passes).
Throw in scaling Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya within a week of each other and you get the sense that Shand will do just about anything to test her mettle.
“Each time I’ve done an adventure, the mental planning and preparation that has to go into it in advance in order to be successful is a huge key,” says Shand, a sessional lecturer and community research co-ordinator at the University of Regina.
“You have to do research – and I love doing research. It’s part of my job. This (hobby) ties in so many of my passions. I come back from something and I just feel like I’m a better overall person.”
Shand’s research on the Marathon des Sables started a couple of years ago when she read an issue of National Geographic that contained an article about the race.
“I remember seeing that and thinking, ‘Oh my God, that’s something I would love to do at some point,”’ Shand recalls.
She admits she “couldn’t wrap my head around the complexities of it” right away, but after doing so, she decided to enter the 2012 event.
Racers put up to 30 pounds of everything they might need (sleeping bag, clothing, food, antivenin pump in case of snake and scorpion bites, etc.) in a backpack. The only thing that’s provided by race officials is water – but it’s rationed daily.
A runner who requires more than the allotted amount of water can receive it, but they get a half-hour added to their time upon the first request and an hour upon the second request. A third such request results in disqualification.
Temperatures during the days of the 2012 race ranged from 36 C to 52 C and at nights dropped to between 3 C and 5 C. Runners slept after each stage in predetermined camps under fabric lean-tos.
Shand admits she questioned her decision to enter the race during the first stage, but squelched those thoughts by remembering the way she adapted in Costa Rica as that race progressed.
She notes another tough moment occurred during the 81.5-km stage, which she ran at night without seeing another soul.
“Each race, there’s always a moment when you’re like, ‘Oh my God, I’m just being pushed too far,'” Shand says. “If you didn’t hit that moment, then you’d probably come back unfulfilled and it wouldn’t have been the hardest thing you did.”
Runners in Morocco were given a guidebook with the compass bearings necessary to follow the course. At times, those became necessary for Shand.
“While I was running the 81.5 kilometres, a sandstorm picked up and it became very hard to figure out where I was going,” she says of the stage that took her more than 15 1/2 hours to complete – well within the maximum allowed time of 34 hours.
“There were a couple of times when I had to stop, pull out my compass and make sure I was heading in the right direction.
“The thing is, you could only see footprints in the sand in really low spots because anywhere high the wind had already blown them over – and that’s the only way in that race that you ever knew you were going in the right direction.”
As part of her pre-race planning, Shand found specially designed attachments to wrap around her lower legs to keep sand out of her shoes, thus avoiding the possibility of literally sanding the skin off her feet. But her plans didn’t help prepare her for actually running a whole race in sand.
“It is so hard,” Shand says. “We always said you took two steps and it was like one step back every time. It just took so much energy to get anywhere in the sand.
“And it was all so different. Some sand would go to your ankle and, if you were running down a dune, sometimes you’d go knee deep.”
But Shand again persevered, finishing with a cumulative time of 43 hours, 30 minutes and two seconds. She wound up second among Canadian women, third among females from North and South America, and 365th out of nearly 900 entrants.
Shand subsequently realized the magnitude of what she had accomplished – and now admits the Marathon des Sables is the hardest thing she has ever done.
“I can barely sleep because I’m having nightmares about all of the things involved. It’s finally hitting me,” she says. “I think I pushed a lot of that stuff out while I was on the course.
“Now, I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘Where am I? Which camp am I at?’ It just shows how in-depth the whole race was.”
Shand says the race taught her about her ability to survive extreme conditions and how deep her physical and mental reserves are. Not surprisingly, she’s already looking for another test.
“I’ll try to find something that pushes me even further,” Shand says. “This one certainly did that. Now I need to find another thing that will take me beyond what my imaginable limits are.”
ihamilton
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