Enter
Mauro Prosperi, a Sicilian policeman and Olympic pentathlete who
decided to wager his life on this race, because what else was he
going to do in Italy? Eat amazing food and bone beautiful women in
the sunshine? Please: Jogging up an infinite sand dune sounds like
way more fun. Four
days into the race, Prosperi had worked his way up to seventh place
when a sandstorm arose. The rules of the race state that whenever a
storm hits, runners are supposed to stop and wait for assistance, but
Prosperi decided to screw that noise right in its decibel hole. He'd
been to the beach before; a little sand never hurt anybody. He
wrapped a scarf around his head and kept on running.Through
a sandstorm. When
the storm died down six hours later, Prosperi found that trudging
through the desert blind and disoriented had sent him so far off
course that the flare gun he fired was seen by nobody but himself. Completely
alone in one of the world's largest and most inhospitable deserts,
Prosperi had no choice but to keep on walking, even resorting to
peeing in his water bottle to preserve fluid. Eventually he stumbled
upon an abandoned shrine, but rather than get encouraged by this holy
place, he made the reasonable decision to rip bats heads off,
drink their blood, and slit his wrists. We have to assume that the
shrine was to Dio and Prosperi had tried to go out in the most metal
way imaginable to appease His Holy Diver-ness. Miraculously,
Prosperi was so dehydrated that his blood had actually thickened to
the point where his cut wrists were unable to bleed out. When he
awoke with nothing but a couple of bitchin' scars and a headache, he
felt a renewed confidence and decided to fight for life -- although
it seems like death had pretty clearly rejected his advances, so what
were his options, really? For the next five days, Prosperi continued
to push through the Sahara, eating lizards and scorpions and drinking
the dew off leaves until he stumbled upon a group of nomads, who
informed him that he was now in Algeria, 130 miles from where he was
supposed to be.
Pavel Dolgopolov
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