First Person

From South China Morning Post - 18/09/2003 (722 words)
James Bryson speaking to Hannah Lee.

James Bryson, 38, an ex-British Army officer turned stockbroker, has just returned to Hong Kong after racing across the Gobi desert for a week with a 14kg rucksack on his back in this year's Gobi March. The 250km race also gave Mr Bryson the opportunity to meet Mark Pollock, a fellow participant who became blind five years ago and completed the march successfully with the help of his race partner, Nick Wolfe.

Mark is an amazingly determined person - quite humbling when doing the race sighted was the hardest thing I've ever done. It wasn't just running across a flat piece of ground - there was quite a bit of clambering, climbing, going through rivers, going up very steep sand dunes. I was tripping and falling over at times. So to do the race without being able to see is quite a staggering achievement.

Connected to Mark by a metre-long piece of rope, Nick effectively acted like a navigator for a rally driver giving pace notes, saying things like, "there's a rock on your left ... we're going to be going down a grassy bank". So for him, it wasn't just about completing the race for himself but also providing constant description and support for Mark - his demonstration of patience was almost as staggering as Mark's determination.

For everybody, watching a combination of Mark's determination and guts and his partner Nick's patience in guiding him through was a very humbling experience. They were given a special award at the end of the race to recognise how they demonstrated the courage and spirit this sort of event is meant to show people.

Both Mark and I are from Northern Ireland and we'll be having a beer together when I go back there at Christmas. He's a very, very gutsy young guy, yet very low-key and gentle. He set an amazing example for everybody.

Every now and again everyone feels they need a challenge. I haven't done a large number of these adventure races and thought that it looked like an interesting challenge, that with training, it'd be worth a go. With the environment I'm in at the moment - in the finance world - it's interesting to do something completely different, to see how you fare.

When I was running, the last thing I thought about was work. A friend of mine said that in a recent race he didn't think about work for seven days – it was the same for me. I tend to put my mind into neutral. The hardest part is trying to keep going and concentrating over the very long distances. The first day we had to cover 45km, and then on other days we did double marathons of 75km.

It helps to break it down to smaller sections, to give smaller distances to give more achievable goals, distances that can be completed in the next hour or two rather than in the next 14 hours. If you think about how much longer it will take to finish the whole race, you'd go mad.

We carried everything we needed throughout the race while running. The rucksack at the beginning of the race, excluding water, weighed about 14kg. Half the weight was probably food like freeze-dried chicken curry and beef stew, which taste a lot better than they sound.

After days of being the only people around in any direction on a mapless plain, it made me realise the enormity of the desert, the earth and the elements, that the most important thing to me are my wife and 15-month-old daughter. The things that we all worry about - like work, traffic, office politics, things that would normally bother me from day-to-day living - really aren't very important.

It's not an unusual trail for ex-military people to end up in other walks of life and in finance like me. I left the army when it was time to sit behind the desk for the more sedentary jobs and could no longer do the boyish things I joined the army to do. So I thought I'd head to Asia and earn some money.

And I'd rather not say how much participating in the race cost me - otherwise I might get into trouble with my wife ...