We were supposed to have seen the warning on the website before signing up:
Before you consider applying for this race, we want to point out how dangerous the Mongol Derby is. By taking part in this race you are greatly increasing your risk of severe physical injury or even death. The nature of the Derby means that if you do fall off, the response time of the medics is going to depend on where you are. If you are seriously injured you may be hundreds of miles away from the nearest hospital. The Mongol Derby is an extremely physically demanding and dangerous race, and holds the title as the toughest horse race in the world for good reason.
I had missed it.
I didn’t understand the coming race, and wouldn’t until I rode in it. I did, however, assume that something would go wrong for all of us riding and that we would need to step back and ponder the silliness. After all, didn’t entering such a competition demand a deviant imagination? Could we envisage ordinary days blown from their moorings? Could we pretend that moving through space with unbearable intensity had been a natural habit our whole lives?
Even some of the Mongolian parents I would meet, whose eight-year-old children could gallop for hours without saddles, thought the 1,000-kilometer distance crazy. No wonder, then, that the race had been thought up elsewhere—by a man in Bristol called Tom Morgan. Tom found out that the steppe’s medieval messaging systems were still in place until the 1960s, and with the guidance of an original postal rider, he helped stage the first Mongol Derby five years before I entered. The race had since grown, and was now summoning a field of thirty to forty riders annually.
I like to laugh matters into detachment, but I found the approaching monster tricky to belittle. A week before my departure for Mongolia, I lay in bed thinking about William the Conqueror. How mad of him to risk visiting England with an army in 1066.
Me, 947 years later: No desire to conquer. Merely wanting to leave Normandy, as it were. Live a little.
Half an hour after these musings, across a breakfast table laden with tropical fruit, my godfather, Michel, lowered his newspaper to make an announcement.
“No one wins the Tour before their early thirties. . . .”
The man knows about endurance sport, having competed in Olympic luge and, more recently, cycled Tour de France sportives.
“They haven’t developed the combination of mental and physical toughness,” he continued, turning his bold gaze to me. “You—what are you—nineteen?”
This kind of pinpointing tended to prompt my rebellion and excitement. But next to me I noticed my mother’s mouth slowing down as she chewed, her forehead rising into wrinkles. The person who often did not notice when she lost her six-year-old daughter in the supermarket as she floated along, silently focusing on the goat’s cheese—the person who bicycles blindly across main roads, leaving traffic to swerve out of her way—began now to engage with the reality of the race.
A few days later, I walked over to Aunt Lucinda’s to borrow some equipment. I must’ve expected some advice, too—she was my go-to ahead of any equestrian event. She lived 150 meters away from us in Appleshaw.
Aunt Lucinda never likes to concentrate fully on one thing, so she was weeding the gravel in her driveway when she hollered some last words to me.
“I suspect you won’t make it past day three but don’t be disappointed.”
She raced inside to get me a can of Anti Monkey Butt—some powder for sore bottoms she had discovered in America—and waved me away, yelling she had to fly. She was on her way to Austria for teaching.
This kind of perennial rush might be a family trend. We flee from the waiting, lest it confronts us with some startling boredom. If we really questioned why, though, I’m not sure we’d have an answer. Maybe rushing is a symptom of self-importance, or a fear of getting close to others, lest they shatter us.
Although Aunt Lucinda lived across the road, her house, which arrived flat-packed on a lorry from Scandinavia in the 1980s, was almost always deserted. I was frustrated by the absences of my champion aunt, whose achievements held a mythic place in my rural imagination. She earns her living flying around the world teaching people how to ride cross-country, saying things like “Squeeze the horse like a tube of toothpaste. Not too hard, we don’t want it all coming out at once.”
What I couldn’t accept was that it might be difficult for a champion to lay her head on the same pillow each night, since the glorious memories might only be going stale. It must, I suppose, be easier to be consumed by airplanes, hopping between sites of forgetful newness.
Even on the ground, Lucinda advances in quick, short strides, as if awakened by a storm. Apparently her mum once told her, “Being mother to you is like being mother to a lightning conductor.”
After I left her that day, she sent me a text reading Xxxxxxx. This is the type of message she sends when at a loss as to what to advise.
From an old history teacher, I had a short email: I’ve heard from people that know people that they eat testicles in Mongolia. And that was it.
It didn’t surprise me that no one was taking my race attempt seriously. I was that scatterbrain who lost Oyster cards on the Underground and failed driving tests. “I find it difficult to park between the lines,” I explained to my eldest brother, George, who has been serious about cars, and many other things, since the age of four.
“You don’t even know where the lines are,” he said.
What was it that kept them all from trusting me—not with the keys, the cars, the dogs? Nor with time? The not trusting meant bits missing. Lara’s got bits missing. She’s not fully here. She’s a clock without some numbers, a clock who forgets to tick. I trusted myself a little at least, suspecting the missing bits were waiting for me somewhere. Certainly I had felt flashes when I went to get those chickens from Dorset on the train. Ticktocks sounding out in my core.
It is too late to get fit, too late to pull out, but not too late to organize kit. With five days to go, the lights are out in the kitchen as I draw a stick figure of my Derby self and label the clothes I’ll wear on each plot of body, ticking off my bottom first. The super-padded knickers have arrived and seem good—larger than granny pants, fatter than boxing gloves. Every day I mold my stubborn bunions—big bone onions, my witchiest features—into my new secondhand trekking boots. For other stuff, I am deep into bargaining wars on eBay, tending towards items cheaply made in China. Many will decompose during the race, maps and water bottles flying out of my broken pockets across the windy plains. I begin scribbling a list of things to pack.
1. Me
2. I like lists
3. I can be orderly
4. I do love lists
5. And so I stumble
6. Like a poem unfurling
When the day came to peel myself from the British Isles, summer was high, the best plums were ripening, and all the grass looked Wimbledon-worthy. These commonplace things I had rarely noticed before transformed themselves into snippets of certainty, their impending disappearances conjuring my new appreciation.
I’d discovered, via Facebook, that a certain competitor had been thrown a send-off dinner at which she was presented with a horse-shaped cake wishing her good luck. Seeing how the race could merit celebration before its first kilometer had been ridden leant me a sense of achievement, although my own departure was not a public affair.
My father blasted my mother and me out of the house, fretful, as usual, that we might be late for the airport. In the terminal Mum shed tears, which were, as always, saddening to receive. I sometimes think of her as a balloon not entirely tied to earth—she drifts along until the concluding point,