Rat Race Mongol 100 | Part 1
Written by Dr. Harrison Banks
05/04/2024
It was early November when I received an out-of-the-blue phone call from Patrick, the director at TrailMed. In his wonderful lilting Zimbabwean accent, he asked whether I would cover the Rat Race Mongol 100 – possibly one of the hardest ultra-challenges in the world. Mongolia!?
The land of Genghis Khan, sky burials and a vast and mostly barren frozen wasteland bordering Siberia? Where medical infrastructure is sparse, evacuation times are outrageously long, and your IV meds can freeze before your eyes? Hell yeah, count me in.
Infrequent flights from Manchester to Mongolia earned me the pleasure of a 24h layover in Istanbul; filled with extravagant mosques, mournful minarets and as much grilled meat as your heart could desire. Following my night in a cheap hotel, later pointed out to me that it was probably a brothel, I boarded a 9h flight to Ulaanbaatar. On the sun rising over Mongolia, I was awestruck by the most exquisitely pristine landscape I could imagine. Miles and miles of rolling, snow covered, steppe; utterly devoid of any suggestion of life… and I was to provide medical cover in this environment. This should be interesting!
On landing in Ulaanbaatar, I met my TrailMed partner in crime, Donna Finnis. A very experienced paramedic in remote locations – I was happy to have her by my side. We had exchanged messages in the months leading up to it, such as ‘crap, how cold is your sleeping bag rated to?’ and ‘how thick do you reckon the ice is?’. It was nice to finally put a face to the name. We met with the rest of the Rat Race team and loaded our bags onto 4x4 minivans (known as Delicia’s) ready for the gruelling 16h drive up to Lake Khovsgol. I wish I could say more about this journey, but after some brief excited chatter with my vanmates the light faded, and soporific snowflakes drifted me in and out of broken sleep. It was bitterly cold, even with the heating on, and on more than one occasion I wondered how challenging this hostile environment would be to work in. Around 1am we arrived into Hatgal, on the southern border of Lake Khosvgol where we unloaded kit, helped participants to their gers and finally bundled into the staff cabin to grab a few hours of sleep.
Day 1 kicked off with a participant briefing from the Rat Race leader Abbi, going through the general plan for the next couple days and some ice-safety tips. I conducted a medical briefing, which a few participants confided in me afterwards was ‘informative and scary!’. In a medical briefing it’s important to inspire confidence in the medical team to deliver care for the participants whilst also balancing and empowering them to look after themselves. For example, a few choice (could be perceived as scary) facts about frostbite will encourage participants to take all necessary precautions against getting it! We ended the day with Donna and I checking through and dividing out medical kit amongst ourselves. We had agreed that we would have 1 ‘roving medic’ each day who would be mobile up and down the course checking on participants and one stationary at the halfway point each day. We would swap between the roles over the course of the event.
Day 2 involved travel in the 4x4 convoy up to Turt at the northern end of the lake. Driving on the ice is an exhilarating experience, you can hear the ice crack and boom below as you drive along and the only encouraging thought is that they surely wouldn’t be driving on it if it wasn’t safe… After any initial misgivings, you’re able to enjoy the otherworldly view - crystal clear ice pockmarked with snowdrifts spreading out along your field of vision to a horizon capped with snowy peaks. Magic! In Turt, we spread out into gers and cabins and had a final delicious meal. With the weather forecasted for -30°C in the morning with headwinds, Donna and I conducted another short briefing after dinner to ‘empower’ participants to ensure their noses were covered! Frostbite can occur within minutes in these conditions and if it does, that’s the end of the event for that participant. That evening, heaven arrived in the form of a sauna and the opportunity to wash myself with some warmed buckets of water. A stand-out memory of this trip involves me standing in the entrance to a wood-fired sauna, totally alone and totally naked, pouring buckets of warm water over my head and flagellating myself with a pine branch – apparently this is the normal custom! Still, it always important never to pass up and opportunity to wash I enjoyed picking pine needles out of my clothes for the next few days.
Day 3, the event begins!
It’s a chilly (-33°C!) start to the day but the sunrise over the start line makes for extraordinary photos. Mongolia is sometimes poetically referred to as the ‘Land of the Eternal Blue Sky’; and this morning Mongolia was showing off her splendour with a 360° sunrise of brilliant yellow and orange in the East, fading and blending into subtle pinks and purples in the West. Participants will have to cover approximately 25 miles on snow and ice each day of the Mongol 100 and they are all excited and eager to set off and with a few final words of encouragement from expedition leader, Abbi, they set off. The crew bundle into their allocated vehicles and steadily head off to go about their roles for the day. As roving medic today, I travel in vehicle number 1 with Baba, the second in command of the Mongolian team. With his limited English and my extremely limited Mongolian, we work out a few terms and creative hand gestures that work for us: ‘go’, ‘back’, ‘circle around’, ‘thanks for offering me your snuff, I don’t partake’. The usual really. We roam up and down the route checking in on the participants with a handy thumbs up/down approach. Occasionally we get a thumb down and stop for a chat, perform some footcare or offer a warm vehicle to escape the elements for a while. We end at a beautiful camp on the side of the lake and after a delicious 1000kcal dehydrated meal… it was time to snuggle into our arctic sleeping bags and get ready for sleep.
Over the next few days we fell into a simple pattern. Wake, perform footcare and attend to any other medical issues that arise in the morning, try and force down 1000kcal breakfast, separate into vehicles and perform our roles for the day, marvel at the endless wonder and beauty of the landscape we were travelling through, respond to medical needs on the route, arrive into camp, another clinic for footcare and other medical needs, choke down another 1000kcal and finally sleep. Temperatures in the gers alternated between incomprehensibly hot and bitterly cold depending on the attentiveness of the Mongolia ‘Fire Fairies’ – members of the local team who would wander into your ger at seemingly random intervals through the night to stoke the fire.
Day 2 had some brilliant moments, with a feast of grilled reindeer, enough vodka to total a small Russian army and one of the most stunning sunsets I’ve ever witnessed as the orange sky reflected off the broken shards of a crack in the ice of the lake.
The hangovers amongst some of the participants were particularly brutal in the morning. Though, this revelry did give Donna and I the conundrum of the increased risk of hypothermia in intoxicated individuals, and with a particularly cold night the evening before meaning many participants were mildly hypothermic in the morning... we were somewhat concerned. Thankfully, the Mongolia Fire Fairies rose to the occasion and kept everyone ‘boxer shorts warm’ in the sleeping bags through the night.
