Having survived stage three cancer, Hazel Harrison has put her physical and mental resilience to the test again, running for seven days through one of the world's most inhospitable places - the Sahara Desert.
On an obsidian black night deep in the Sahara Desert, Hazel Harrison questioned whether she could go on.
She’d been running through the red sands of Morocco for three days, and the scorching heat – where the mercury rose to 55.6 degrees Celsius – was finally taking its toll on her body.
Lying under a canvas shelter, with seven other people she’d only just met, the 56-year-old Wellington ultramarathon runner was suffering severe diarrhoea and cramps.
“I was thinking, ‘I don't know if I'm going to make the next day. I don't really know if when I get up in the morning, I'm going to be able to do this’,” Harrison says.
Already, the seven-day Marathon des Sables - nicknamed 'The toughest footrace on Earth' - had lost half its 672 starters. One runner had died.
But Harrison lives by the maxim ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. Just two years before, the former army nurse had survived stage three melanoma skin cancer.
So the next morning, she rose early to try to force some breakfast down. “But I was like, ‘Not a chance’,” she tells the Dirt Church Radio podcast from her MIQ in Christchurch.
“I felt really nauseous and I thought, 'I don't know if I go off and run on my own … because I'd run most of it on my own... what if I crash? And that happens in the desert? How irresponsible is that, knowing I've had only 280 calories?’”
So she made a “brave call”, asking her British tent mates who were walking-running each stage if she could join them for the testing 82.5km double day that lay ahead.
Earlier that morning, Harrison had opened a note her partner back in New Zealand had written before she left for the race. “That note said, ‘Don't be afraid to reach out for people for help today. You know you would help other people’,” she says.
“And I thought, ‘Oh my god, that's gives me validation…Yeah, actually, this is the right thing to do.’”
So Harrison set off with her newfound friends, walking and running through the huge expanse of desert through a day and a night. And she recovered to finish the “brutal” race earlier this month, crossing the line 168th of the 353 finishers, and fifth in her age group.
It was a real lesson, she says, in what the mind and body are capable of.
Harrison’s challenges started years before she even reached the Marathon des Sables start-line.
Born in Scotland, Harrison joined the British Army as a nurse at 18, and started running to pass the twice-yearly fitness test.
“I was a track and field runner, and the irony is I used to get bored doing anything more than 800 metres,” she laughs.
Then in 1985, she read a magazine article about the first Marathon des Sables. “I can remember sitting in my room in the army, reading about this crazy race across the Sahara Desert,” she says. “Seventeen people took part in it, and I thought ‘Oh god, one day I’m going to do that’. So I popped it on my bucket list and left it there.
“I knew that it wasn't the physical fitness that would be the issue. It would be the mental fitness and the resilience to do something like that.”
Harrison's relationship with running hasn’t always been a healthy one. In her early 40s, she became “addicted to exercise” – she lost her periods, and lost a lot of weight. When she was hospitalised with an infection, she realised she needed to stop running. “I was fed up with it controlling me,” she says. "[Now] I'm doing this because I enjoy escaping in the trails and I enjoy that feeling of solitude."
When she moved to New Zealand eight years ago, to work as a theatre nurse in Wellington, she started off slowly.
She didn’t own a car, so she ran to and from the hospital every day. Then she discovered the city’s labyrinth of running trails. In 2018, she decided she would tackle the 2020 Marathon des Sables, the 35th anniversary of the race.
She had run single-day races up to 100km, “but I wanted to push my body and see how would I cope doing that day after day after day for six days,” she says. “And then add in the unpredictability of the weather, the hostile environment, the fact that you are having to cook for yourself, and you're sleeping on the floor in a tent with seven other people.”
Everything in her preparation was ticking along nicely, she says, until October 2019, when she had a mole removed from her left shoulder. She thought nothing more of it and ran the Abel Tasman Track as training.
When she returned, her doctor rang and told her she had stage three melanoma. She had to undergo surgery, which has left her with a scar from the top of her shoulder to her armpit.
Still mindful of the Marathon des Sables five months away, Harrison “negotiated” with her doctor to take just three weeks off running – rather than a month – because she needed to get used to running with a backpack on.
“At no point was I not going to be doing it,” Harrison says. “So I cracked on with the training. But then it wasn't that that stopped me, was it? It was bloody Covid that did it.”
Three weeks before the race, it was postponed. “It took the legs off me, because it was a whole year of training, and the melanoma, and then they weren't going to do it. And I sat down and I cried - I grieved for the fact that this event had been taken away from me,” she recalls.
The race was postponed twice more, finally getting underway 18 months later, on October 1. In her final build-up, Harrison raced the Unity Ultra, a 51-mile (82km) event through Christchurch to honour the 51 people killed in the mosque terror attack the year before. “That was a really important event for me to do to get rid of some emotion,” she says.
While the rest of New Zealand was in lockdown, Harrison flew to Morocco for the multi-stage 250km race across the Sahara Desert. What makes this race even more of a challenge is that runners have to be fully self-sufficient.
Every day they must run with a pack filled with a sleeping bag, a venom pump (for poisonous desert creatures), a compass, 10 safety pins (Harrison still has no idea what for), and their food and water for the entire race. Each runner had to have at least 2000 calories of food a day.
Harrison also took a change of clothes, sandals, toiletries, hand sanitiser and a stove (which she ditched during the race, using the sun to cook instead). At the start-line she'd got the weight of her pack down to 11kg.
The heat on the first day was searing: “Like it was eating me up from the insides.” She'd spent time in the heat chamber at Wellington Hospital to acclimatise, but nothing could prepare her for 45 degree fieriness from the get-go.
Harrison also had to get used to the difficult terrain – sand, rocks and dry riverbeds. “I felt like I was on a planet somewhere else. It was pretty grim.”
By day two, running through the towering Merzouga Dunes in a race record 55 degree heat, runners began to fall by the wayside. “People were vomiting on the side of the track,” she says. “I got to the first checkpoint and it was like a war zone. There were people on drips everywhere.”
At the end of the day, the remaining runners were told a Frenchman in his 50s, an experienced ultra runner, had died on the course.
“So I was hoping that this would be a wake-up call for people. This is serious… it’s life or death out there,” Harrison says.
But she would have her own wake-up call after the third day, when she fell ill after running 37km in the heat. Fortunately, she recovered, and walked out of the desert to the waiting buses, after the seventh day on her feet.
Harrison, raised almost $8000 for Melanoma New Zealand throughout her race campaign. She’s still in MIQ, waiting to return home to Lyall Bay and their doggie daycare business (Harrison is also a transformational coach and business mentor). She's been spending her rest time writing a book on her experiences.
“It was really brutal. It surpassed all [race] history for the hottest temperature and the most drop-outs. It was real pure survival,” she says.
“I feel like I've had a bit of PTSD in a way because of people dying out on the course, and processing all the smart, brave decisions I made. And just how wonderful the brain is and how wonderful the body is to deal with things like this.”
* Dirt Church Radio is a Kiwi trail running podcast hosted by Eugene Bingham and Matt Rayment. Learn more at dirtchurchradio.com
