The bug

Arriving at the Fulbari resort in Pokhara was like stepping through the gate of a chaotic playground into a highly organized running camp for adults. Dozens of people clad in tights and compression sleeves milled about the lobby, and signs listed the schedule of pre-race activities for the following day. Racing the Planet is known for its consistency and organization amid remote trails in developing areas, which is why they're such a popular provider of adventure racing and trekking, attracting endurance junkies from all over the world. Racing the Planet makes a point to provide a wholly immersive experience in a unique country, and it's true that many competitors come for the adventure of the race more than the competition. Beat and I fell solidly into this category. I mean, we were in the shadow of the Himalayas, steeped in a culture a world apart from our own. Why would we want to rush through any of it?

One might ask why we'd bother to enter a race rather than just plan our own trek. But I generally feel similarly about most of my race experiences - I enjoy the camaraderie with other people of similar mindsets, the new friendships forged amid the dirt and distress, the push to challenge myself physically and emotionally beyond what I could in tourist mode, and the personal rewards therein. And especially since I'm not a particularly talented runner in any capacity, I find it difficult to care whether my flailing efforts land me in 67th or 89th or 145th place - just as long as I have fun, meet cool people, take a lot of memorable photographs, and experience an adequate amount of challenge/suffering to fully enrich the adventure.

In the morning, 220 registered participants from all over the world gathered to finalize the logistics. Race officials checked off my required gear and weighed my pack at 10.5 kilograms without water –still on the heavy end of the scale in a list that ranged from 6.5 to 15 kilograms. This wasn't entirely surprising as I had definitely planned a luxury tour as far as self-supported racing goes – 2,500 calories a day, treats in the form of peanut butter and jelly, and enough clothing to stay warm regardless of what the weather did. Again, this was our relaxing vacation. I could afford to move a bit slower if it meant peanut butter-slathered granola bars in the morning. Mmmm.

We crammed into several small Indian buses and lurched down the rough road toward the river. Nepali musicians and holy men greeted us as we stepped out of the bus, dabbing our foreheads with a streak of red paint that would stain our skin for the rest of the week. Camp One was set up atop a cultivated field, and consisted of two rows of basic and poorly ventilated Coleman spring-bar tents with a massive fire pit on one end. Each racer was pre-assigned a tent. Ours contained seven people and hardly enough floor space to accommodate that many sleeping pads, with no room for gear. This was going to be our roving home for seven nights

It was also the beginning of complete food independence. As a competition, Racing the Planet forbid local food purchases during the seven-day stage race. I believe this rule was set mostly to ensure a fair race at the top, and also to prevent the higher risk of illness from strange foods cooked in less than sanitary conditions. Beat and I planned a series of freeze-dried meals for each of our breakfasts and dinners. We rolled out our gear in the cramped tent and walked to the bonfire with our vacuum-packed meals. For the first night in camp, I choose a entree from Backpacker's Pantry called Thai Chicken. It wasn't great but it was tolerable enough to stuff down my throat with the promise of peanut butter and jelly for dessert. Strange to look back now and realize that this was the only freeze-dried meal in my 10.5-kilogram pack that I actually ingested in an entire week. A last meal in more ways than one.

It was 11:34 p.m., about two hours after I went to bed, when the unholy Thai Chicken made its first attempt to exorcise itself from my gut. The sensation lurched from waking stomach rumbles to wide-eyed panic within just two or three seconds. My pad was all the way at the end of the tent, and it was all I could do to wrestle out of my sleeping bag, stumble awkwardly over a row of reclined bodies, rip apart the fragile zipper of the tent and rush into the cold evening. I made it about 50 meters from the tent to an empty rice paddy before the undigested Thai Chicken exploded in an impressive fountain across the mud. I stumbled a few more steps and vomited again, twice. Believing I had successfully emptied my stomach, I turned toward the tent to find toothpaste and water before I felt urgency at the other end. Just a few meters away at that point, I barely made it to the open-pit latrines in time.

I felt fully emptied the first time around, so it was disconcerting to wake up five more times in the night after little sleep with a similar sense of urgency and nothing left to purge. Between painful bouts with globs of yellow foam, I managed to force down enough gulps of water to expel nearly clear liquid out of both ends. I have never before experienced such an intense purging session, violently convulsing to expel tiny amounts of bodily fluid and then writing with full-body muscle aches, fever and chills at the same time. It felt as though my own body was trying to reject itself.

After one of my trips to the latrine, the fever flared up with such intensity that I had no choice but to drop to my knees in the field before I lost consciousness. I still felt dizzy so I laid down atop stubby stalks of harvested millet, right in the mud. The paddy was along my "route" and could have been covered in vomit for all I knew, but I didn't even really care. I shivered and sweated on the soft ground and grasped for understanding. Was this simply food poisoning/traveler's illness? I'd been as careful as I possibly could. I only drank and brushed my teeth with bottled mineral water, and the only non-packaged food I'd eaten was two breakfasts at the hotels. Even then I basically stuck to cooked grains and vegetables, avoiding meat, fruit, milk, yogurt, even cheese. But then again, everything about Nepal was foreign to me. Perhaps some things were just too foreign.

I coughed a few times to expel bits of white foam before rolling on my back. I gazed up at an explosion of stars; the only dark space in the entire sky was encircled by a sliver of the moon. The glittering starlight was enough to light up the snowy face of Annapurna South, far above the surrounding "foothills" that were nearly as tall as the Rocky Mountains by themselves, with Annapurna nearly 25,000 feet over my seemingly broken body. I breathed a happy sigh in spite of myself, simply grateful to be in the presence of such an immense mountain when I was so small and so weak. But the peaceful feeling soon gave way to dread. Was this all I was ever going to see of the Himalayas? What if I had a parasite or other serious illness? Was I going to have to transfer to a third-world hospital in Pokhara, or worse, home? I couldn't remember the last time I felt so sick, and I sincerely believed I'd be lucky to stay mobile, let alone attempt the 17 miles with two huge climbs and descents that was simply the first stage of Racing the Planet Nepal. The race began in less than two hours. But if I didn't start the first stage in the morning, that was it for me. I'd either have to wait it out in a hotel room or go home.

But the mud-streaked truth remained that I was too sick to really care one way or the other. I pulled myself up from the exhaustion and plodded back to the tent, finally admitting to Beat that I was really sick and "who knows?" about morning.

"Don't bother waking me up for breakfast if I'm sleeping," I said. "But maybe I'll feel better in the morning."

Kathmandu

The race is still three days away, but the challenge begins the second we step out of the airport. The psychological gap between the chilled, empty terminal after midnight and the crowd of shouting faces outside feels vast. Once I cross it, I can't step back. Literally.

Two charismatic young hustlers grab our luggage and rush us to a taxi, then demand tips in twenties, U.S. Still smarting from the scam, we pile into the dusty cab. I grip the seats as the vehicle lurches into the darkened city. Motorcycles and tiny cars stream past in a chaotic blur. There are no street signs, no traffic lights, no lights at all. Every day for as many as 16 hours, Kathmandu shuts off the electric supply to prevent grid overload. The chaos of life, however, keeps churning.

I admit the notion of world travel makes me feel uneasy. I'm enthralled with the Earth, but the world of people often intimidates and sometimes frightens me. People with all of their cultural and individual differences create a bewildering geography that seems impossible to bridge. My personal barrier is not so much a social anxiety as it is an overwhelming desire to understand every single one of them in a way I never will. The hunched man pushing his cart of vegetables up the rough street after dark. The skinny 7-year-old boy riding an adult bicycle along the road much too late, and by himself. The beggar in tattered robes with a piercing gaze. The motorcyclist dressed in Western fashion and weaving fearlessly through smog-belching taxis. The unseen thousands inside of all those darkened buildings. I gaze wide-eyed out the window and imagine what their lives might be like, what they return home to at the end of the long day, what they set out to do in the morning. The barrage of images and unknown stories overwhelms my senses, until I find myself retreating into daydreams about frozen tundra.

But I am still in Kathmandu, where broken cement litters the street and shanty towns line the trash-clogged river. A city of a million-plus in a developing country is as far from my people comfort zone as I've ever ventured, and I'm not sure how to process all the unknowns. The truth is I don't really know anything about these people. I know from books that they are largely Hindu, a conglomeration of dozens of different regional ethnic groups, with many cultural similarities to India. I know from newspapers that they are still recovering from a decade-long political uprising and struggling to establish an effective government, although a rapid increase in tourism is driving improvements in the economy and infrastructure. I know from maps that Nepal is a mountainous region full of tortured geography. I know from the things I see that the residents of Kathmandu are largely poor, but I've never been one to equate poverty with unhappiness. In fact, I believe the cycle of hardship and overcoming hardship is the key to happiness; but of course it's a complicated puzzle, and of course I am a first-world person with first-world perspectives. So I know nothing of the Nepali people, but I guess that's one of the main agendas of world travel – broaden the horizons.

I am relieved when the driver actually drops us off at our hotel rather than dumping us in an abandoned alley after robbing us for everything we have. I feel guilty for fretting about this, and experience more first-world guilt as we step into the hotel, which drips with false opulence and independently generated electricity. The room is stocked with fresh fruit, which Beat instructs me not to eat, and two liters of filtered water, which Beat informs me will have to cover all of our water needs from brushing teeth to drinking to shaving for the next 12 hours. The race is just three days away and we can't afford to get sick now.

The next morning we return to the airport for our flight to Pokhara. The regional terminal is  packed wall-to-wall with throngs of people, including tall, blond-haired tourists wearing brand new hiking boots and a Nepali woman with a caged chicken on her lap. We pass through a single metal detector that probably doesn't work, and line up under rafters occupied by live birds. The weather in Pokhara is bad that day, and we're informed that all flights have been canceled. A group of a couple dozen other stranded Racing the Planet participants have gathered in a corner to organize alternative transportation. Matt, a former Marine from Florida, assumes the leadership position and manages to round up six rented jeeps with drivers. The four of us from the Bay area – Beat and I, and our friends Steve and Martina – wedge ourselves and our stuff into one Reagan-era four-by-four. Back on the road.

I wish I could describe the six-hour drive from Kathmandu to Pokhara, but I really can't. I can only say that it was one of the more terrifying experiences of my life, and I was mentally preparing for my life to end in a white explosion until I became too car-sick to care. Imagine a minefield of broken pavement, potholes and chunky gravel, barely wide enough for two lanes of traffic, except there are no lanes, and no signs, and no laws. Traffic generally flows on the left, or opposite side of the road, except for when it doesn't because drivers usually just travel the “best” side, regardless of who's approaching. Huge Indian Tata diesel trucks barrel down as motorcycles buzz past on both sides. Our own driver doesn't seem concerned about anything except getting rid of us as quickly as possible. He overtakes vehicles on blind corners, bounces the wheels over road craters, buzzes pedestrians and swerves away from oncoming trucks at the last possible second. After four hours of this, smoke begins to pour into the cab. The driver pulls over, pops the hood, mills about for several minutes discussing the mechanical with the locals in Nepali, starts the engine several times, waits until smoke stops streaming into the cab, and declares the problem fixed. We are still fifty kilometers from Pokhara. “We can probably run that if we have to,” Steve suggests.

We make it to Pokhara still alive, but it feels like a lifetime away from San Francisco after the insane road trip, night in Kathmandu and 35 hours of international airport travel that now separate us from home. “I'm not sure anything about this race could be as hard as just getting here,” I think. I almost say it out loud to Beat, but stop myself, because it sounds too much like - as they say - famous last words.

Culture shock

As the three of us ran into the finish line together - Beat, me and our new Canadian friend Patrick - I absorbed the strange familiarity of the scene. Beautiful Nepali children twirled in rapid circles, world flags flapped in the breeze, and the November sun cast brilliant light on the 8,000-meter peaks towering over the valley. A race official draped a medal over my neck as an old man dabbed red paint on my forehead. We had come a long way in one week. Farther than I could yet understand.

Contrasting the celebratory scene was a memory from the night before the race began, in Camp One just outside of Pokhara. I stumbled out of my tent for the fifth time that night and sprint-shuffled to the toilet, making it just in time to experience the startling sensation of purging a nearly clear liquid out of two ends simultaneously. I have had the flu and intense food poisoning before, but I had never before been so sick to really experience what it's like to have a body reject itself. As I stumbled back to my tent, I became so weak and dizzy that I had to lay down in a rice paddy, with my head resting on a clump of grass. They sky was white with stars, surrounding a sliver moon. The snowy mass of Annapurna South seemed to glow in the starlight. "If I don't start the race tomorrow, they won't let me continue. I won't be able to see any of it. Any at all."

I don't remember much about stage one. I remember Beat coaxing me out of the tent to the starting line and force-feeding me Hi-Chew candies. I remember sucking down sips of water at the first checkpoint and gasping as I struggled to keep it down. The race volunteer looked so concerned I thought for sure they were going to pull me out of the race, if I didn't quit myself. I remember wanting to quit. I remember Beat pulling me up the first mountain by holding one of my trekking poles as I limped along behind him. I remember vomiting water and Hi-Chews right in front of two Nepali children. I remember taking stone steps one at a time between rests with the other sick back-of-packers. I remember the Annapurna skyline in the sunlight. Actually, I guess there's a lot I remember about stage one. It was a difficult challenge unlike anything I've ever taken on.

I didn't want to gut out the first stage of Racing the Planet Nepal but I did. I'm so glad I did. It was an incredible experience and as the time comes I'll have much more to say about it, and of course tons more photos. More to come.