“You are pushing yourself to the limit and occurred on the fourth day, when he had to trek 51 miles, the last 20 of which covered nothing but sand dunes. Kabbaj’s leg covering broke, and his sneakers became full of sand.“I forced myself to change socks standing in the heat twice,” he recalls. “By the time I got to the next water stop, I was dehydrated and had to tape my feet. As I was leaving the water stop, I was telling myself, there’s no way I can make it.” Down the road another mile, Kabbaj ran into a friend of his, who told him that he couldn’t move any more and that he was quitting. “Suddenly something clicked in my head,” Kabbaj remembers,“and I told him, ‘You are not quitting, and we are doing this together.’” That was around 4 p.m. After stopping to cook something to eat, Kabbaj says the two did not sleep until arriving at the end of that part of the course at 5:30 a.m. “It was so fulfilling to overcome that hurdle. I think we were in another state of mind.We were like robots.” After the slow day four, Kabbaj’s ranking fell to 680. “I gave it my all the last two days to get up to 499. I actually got dehydrated at the end of day five and fainted as I crossed the finish line, but I chose not to get an IV because that would have added 30 minutes to my time.”
K
Desert Run I abbaj, a financial services professional (see sidebar), says he always loved running, but became serious about the sport in 2000 after watching the track-andfield events at the Olympic games in Sydney, Australia. “I ran my first marathon in New York City in 2006,” he recalls,“and since then I have run 13 marathons, one ultra marathon and two Marathons of the Sands.” Kabbaj says the Marathon of the Sands sets the bar for all endurance tests. “It is by far the most challenging thing I have ever done.” In his first desert run in 2010, he ranked 499 out of 1,040 competitors, successfully reaching his goal of finishing in the top 500. The moment of truth, he says,
22
FDU MAGAZINE
I
The Sequel n 2012, Kabbaj was determined to improve on his performance. To prepare, he ran six marathons, and often ran with his 25-pound backpack. Still, he couldn’t be sure what to expect. The itinerary of the race is different every year, and competitors are not given the road map until a day before the race starts.“You can never say, ‘I’ve done the MDS,’ because if you do it 10 times, it’s going to be 10 completely different experiences.” Kabbaj says that in 2012 he may have started a bit too confident. “The first time you run this race, you’re scared, the second time, you take it for granted,” he says. “You have forgotten the pain and how hard it was, you only remember the good times. But days one and two smack you in the face.” Writing to friends from the course on the first day, he told them that he nearly got dehydrated, his ear was burned from the sun, and he “forgot how difficult this
P H OTO G R A P H : © KO RT E B E I N