Nico’s ready to march off into the Gobi desert for EIA

My name is Nico Zurcher, I’m a fire investigator and consulting scientist living and working in Hong Kong. In just over two weeks’ time, I’ll be taking part in the 250km Gobi March in the north-west Chinese province of Xinjiang, in what will be my first ultra-marathon.

In doing so, I’m also raising money for the Environmental Investigation Agency and, for my sins, they’ve asked me to provide a brief glimpse into how the whole thing came about, how one trains for a week in the sand and why I chose to support EIA.

Nico on the Ma On Shan dash

I signed up to the Gobi March a few days before Christmas last year. Sat in front of the laptop, I repeatedly flipped my credit card in my hand, scanning my brain for one last flimsy excuse for why I really shouldn’t be signing up to a race like this. Eventually, though, I came up blank and was left with no other option but to hit the confirm button. Truth be told, the idea wasn’t a new one and had been in and out of my head for years. Also, my knees had randomly started creaking a lot, so my prospects were hardly going to get better the longer I waited.

The Gobi March is 250km, spread over seven days and is, for the most part, self-supported. Self-supported means the race organisers provide water and a corner in a shared tent at the end of each day, but everything else is yours to procure and carry – that’s seven days’ worth of food, a sleeping bag, sleeping mat, changes of clothes and about 37 other things on the mandatory gear list. It quickly adds up. The shrewdest travel light, carrying a meagre six kilos plus water. Those of us who aren’t snapping the ends off toothbrushes and investing in aero-grade titanium alloy spoons (I’m not joking, they exist) have been advised that carrying more than 10kg is unnecessary at best, foolish at worst.

We haven’t been given the exact race route yet but the course will take us along the fringes of the Gobi desert and the eastern end of the Tianshan mountains, through a procession of grasslands, dusty and stony desert, farmlands, riverbeds and alpine valleys. The course profile looks relatively forgiving, with only two bigger climbs on days one and two, but that’ll be compensated for by the inevitable dunes and a general absence of shade, so I’ll park the hubris for now. As for the daily distances, it’s 40km, give or take a few miles each day for the first four stages, before the aptly named Long March on days five and six, which carries on for a foot-blistering 75km. Come the morning of day seven, the finish line will be only 15km away, a mere jaunt.

That said, my training’s been far from ideal. I was going well up until early February and even managed a 45km hill marathon in six hours. But soon after I developed iliotibial band syndrome (ITBS) in both knees and that pretty much put an end to the running. Putting in the miles by walking takes an inordinate amount of time, so I opted to do body weight exercises every day to get stronger, walking to and from work with a bag of rice in my backpack and saving the long hilly hikes for the weekend with even more rice. It is what it is, whether or not it’s enough, I’ll find out soon!

I’ve always been a strong advocate of conservation and sustainability, so I decided to use the Gobi March as vehicle to raise money for an environmental charity. I began reading with interest about the kinds of investigations EIA undertakes and I liked where they were coming from – the causes they get behind are serious and warrant international attention and I respect an organisation that puts the effort into researching, uncovering and succinctly presenting the facts.

Since then, I’ve also come to understand how a lot of EIA’s work relates to Asia, the continent I grew up in and where I’ve spent most of my life. It’s a sad fact that investigative work relating to environmental issues can carry the ultimate price here, yet it is an equally encouraging fact that despite this there are people willing to make their voices heard to protect what remains of our increasingly fragile ecosystems. I hope I can support that in some way.