By my feet was the quiet presence of the other new member of the family, the now sleekly golden Arthur. He was lying on his shiny black bed, one paw tucked under him in his usual position, and looking calmly up at me as I laid my kit out, as if to say, ‘I know what you’re doing. And it means you’re going away. But I know you’re coming back. I trust you to come back.’
I put down the kitbag that I had been filling with headlamps and batteries and went over to Arthur. I knew he trusted me, but I somehow felt I needed to take a moment to reassure him.
‘Hey, boy,’ I said as I knelt down in front of him. ‘You know I’m coming back, don’t you?’ I scratched his dark gold ears and put my nose an inch away from his. Arthur’s gaze – his amber eyes ringed by the distinctive black lines that seemed to emphasise his air of wisdom and calm – was unwavering.
I gave him a quick kiss on the tip of his nose and turned to pick up my son. Thor was waving his arms at Arthur, so I held him nearer so he could say hello. Once he was close enough, he put out his tiny chubby hand and gave Arthur’s nose a friendly squeeze.
Arthur, the most regal and gentlemanly of dogs, remained calm and gentle as ever, just as he had done from the very first moment he had met the newborn Thor. He just lowered his head onto his paw, looked up at us, from one to the other, gave a small sigh and shut his eyes.
For all that the preparations were so familiar, it was strange, this year, to be leaving behind a family of four.
It was almost a year to the day since I had first met Arthur, but it was as if he had always been a part of us. In fact, it’s hard for me – and Helena – to remember a time before Arthur, hard to imagine that we ever planned a day without thinking about how he would fit in.
People often ask me how he’s changed us, how we managed to suddenly accommodate a dog into our lives. I only have one answer: he is just part of the family, no more and no less.
The jungle, Brazil, November 2015
The championship in Brazil was always going to be a major challenge and a hugely important race for us as a team. We were on track to keep our place in the top five in the world if we did as well as we hoped we would and finished in the top six. We knew we could do it and had, as ever, done months of training and preparation for this highlight of the year. Just as we had on the way out to Ecuador, we had checked and double-checked our kit and our strategies, and were fresh and fit from weeks of intense training – both at home and in camp in Turkey.
The people who designed the championship course in Brazil had announced that the race in the Pantanal wetlands of western Brazil would be very challenging and absolutely unforgettable. They were dead right on both counts.
I have been to any number of dangerous, uncomfortable places in the course of my adventure racing career, but this place probably beat all records. We were told to expect jaguars, wild boar, crocodiles and snakes, not to mention bullet ants, tarantulas and tropical mosquitoes. It was as close to Indiana Jones as you could possibly get.
And in addition, the organisers had no regulations about when to sleep or rest; there were no ‘dark zones’ – it was just first past the finish post. The maps had only the sketchiest of details, the terrain was as swampy, dense and unmanageable as we’d ever encountered, and all this in temperatures of over 40 degrees.
We were a different team from the one in Ecuador; Staffan and I were this year joined by Marika and Jonas. We were a well-knit team, though, and I was pleased that we’d come second in the Chile series in the summer. It would be a tough race but we were ready for it, I thought.
One of the members of one of the other teams had spent the morning before the start of the race talking and reading with a class of small children. They asked her if she was afraid of jaguars. When she asked them if she should be, they all nodded long and seriously. It turned out that all of them had already met a jaguar. I wasn’t sure whether to be encouraged that they’d all survived the experience, or worried that we wouldn’t.
The beginning of the race was a paddle up the river. That was only as nice as it sounds for about an hour or so. Soon the heat was intense, one of our boats leaked and we were attacked by clouds of man-eating mosquitoes. The wait for a new boat wasted valuable time, so at the next trekking stage we tried to push through the vegetation as fast as we could. Perhaps too fast, but we were still fresh enough to keep up a good pace, running along the trail whenever we could.
Head down and concentrating on the track, I half registered the signs of jungle creatures that had been that way before us. Then, as I focused more intently on the ground, I noticed a series of huge paw prints. The noise of our progress meant that at first I didn’t hear the sinister sounds of rustling a couple of metres to my right. At that point I was slightly ahead of the others, so I paused to check that it wasn’t just my imagination. No – there was another rustle and, I could swear, the sound of chewing. To be able to hear such a thing so loudly, I could only assume it was a creature big enough to match the paw prints. A huge cat. A jaguar.
I felt every muscle in my body tense as I remembered pictures I’d seen of jaguars in full hunting mode. But then I found myself thinking of Arthur, the world’s most enthusiastic chaser of cats. What would he have done if he were here? Did I smell of dog, and was that a good thing or a bad thing? And then somehow, thinking of Arthur, with his aura of calm and his history of surviving in jungle as dangerous as this one, made me calm down. If he could survive in the jungle, then so could I.
I waited for the others and then, picking up speed, we headed downhill (always welcome, particularly in temperatures of 40 degrees) towards the ‘transition area’ and a large lake where we changed to pack-rafting. The others hadn’t felt the presence of a jaguar, but Staffan assured me he had seen two wandering spiders, which the organisers’ race notes had cheerfully assured us were generally considered to be ‘the most venomous species of spider in the world’. Even aside from the sleep deprivation and exhaustion, adventure racing is not for the faint-hearted.
Pack-rafts are lighter and more stable than kayaks. They are also a lot slower. To start with we were on a network of rivers, so that didn’t matter so much, but then, when we got out into the open onto another lake and facing a headwind, it mattered a lot. Progress was really slow and I was pretty sure we were now quite a way behind two of our major rivals – the Swedish Armed Forces team and the Lithuanians. So perhaps it was understandable that when we eventually made it to the landing area, the rest of the team were impatient to make swift progress up a steep hill rising out of the water.
I’ve been adventure racing for nearly twenty years, and I know that a cardinal rule when conditions are really extreme is to save your energy. So when you are in 40-degree heat and you have a practically vertical climb ahead of you, sprinting up it as fast as your legs will carry you is bound to lead to trouble. The thick jungle at the bottom was tough enough to get through, but the climb after that was hideous – hideously hot and hideously hard going.
I told the team to take it easy, we needed to conserve our strength. But just short of the summit there was a super-steep ridge, the last climb before the ground levelled off. From somewhere, Staffan got some kind of superpower and sped up on the last 50 metres. The rest of us sped up too to stay together but the burning heat – with no hint of a breeze – finally caught up with us, and we just sat there for a while, unable to move.
By the time we arrived at the next transition area, we were not in good shape – not helped by the fact that we’d run out of water. A section of the race that on the map had looked like a simple climb over a hill had been so much longer and tougher than we’d expected that we began to suspect that the whole race was going to be a whole lot harder than any we’d raced before.
The next stage started off with more heat and more hills, but then seemed not