Losing toenails, hallucinating from exhaustion and blistered feet raw to the bone may sound like a form of torture, but it's just a small part of running 250km through one of the driest places in the world. Sam Scannell reports.
Severe fatigue, dehydration and blisters are part of running an ultramarathon. Taranaki's Megan Stewart knows the pain well, and will face her latest test this weekend when she attempts the Atacama ultramarathon in Chile.
"You just have to deal with it," says the 48-year-old during a training session on Mt Taranaki.
"At the end of the day, when you're pulling off your socks, your toenails come flying out and your feet are all mangled to the bone in places, you've just got to grin and bear it," she says with a chuckle.
It's not funny, but Megan has seen worse in her job as a medic.
That training comes in handy even for the simplest of tasks.
"It takes about half an hour to put your shoes on, once you wrap the meat back up nice and tight."
Megan knows what's coming when she embarks on the 250-kilometre ultramarathon; she also completed one in the Sahara in 2010.
"Egypt was one of the only places I've ever wanted to go and it was just amazing. There was a point on the way to the start of the race near Sinai where we went through a checkpoint where I was surrounded by four guys with handguns pointed at me. I didn't realise that Sinai was one of the biggest drug trafficking, people trafficking and body part trafficking places in the world."
Megan isn't tackling the torture for personal gain. She's putting herself through the pain for someone else.
She is running to raise money for St John and the Taranaki Community Rescue Helicopter; something she hopes will save lives. But she is also on an intense personal journey.
"In the Sahara I often ended up on my own and in the middle of the night there was no-one two hours ahead or two hours behind, and if I screwed it up and got hurt or got lost it heightens your perception of everything around you, and it is about survival, getting to the end and not giving up. People will just throw in the towel when things get hard, if only they could go that little bit further to get to the other side and get that feeling of conquering whatever it is, and things are in a better place, your body, your mind and your life."
Megan's daily routine is something of an eye-opener, She works 60 hours a week as an ambulance medic. After that she helps find lost trampers with Land Search and Rescue as a volunteer and she's also on call for the Taranaki Rescue Helicopter as a winch medic.
After working all night, Megan pops back home to catch up with her son, Cam, 13, and husband John, before heading out the door to train for between two and four hours every day.
"Going for a run after a night shift helps to simulate the fatigue you get in ultramarathon events. When you're at a really low point and your body wants a break, you have to push through that. You put on the blinkers and focus on a rock 20 metres away and aim for that, and then the next rock, and eventually your feet stop hurting and it becomes peaceful again. As an ambo heading out to a major prang and dealing with the things you see and have to do, you become incredibly focused and I'd never experienced that level of focus outside of that sort of environment."
That was until she crewed for Lisa Tamati, another Taranaki ultra athlete, in 2009. Megan went along as a medic when Tamati took up the challenge of running the gruelling, non-stop 217km Badwater ultramarathon. It was here that Megan cut her teeth in the ultramarathon world helping Tamati get through to the end.
"Before Lisa asked me to help her through Death Valley I had never run, and when I got her phone call I was like, 'which planet are you from? I can't even run'.
"There was the excitement factor, along with there's no way!"
The next day she went for a 1km run and thought: "This isn't going to happen".
But Lisa is good at motivating.
Megan likens that call to a road block of sorts.
"I was given an opportunity and I could have gone, 'no thanks I can't do it' without even trying or I could've gone well, 'perhaps I'll give it a bash' and so I gave it a bash . . . It started my craziness."
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