There No Bad Races...Only Good races and Races Where You Learn Something.

The current position of Team LBF is far better then the previous 72 hours which consisted of not one, not two but three I.V.s and six different kinds of medicine that have had varying effects on the lower GI Tract. It all started 3 days ago after a 16 hour bus ride to the land where a distinction between hole in the ground and toilet is nonexistent. We traveled through the night to Kurtun, Turkey and after a lot of motion sickness and throwing up into bags, the Hammer was nailed to his bed in the hostel. The next morning we took one of what turned out to be many trips to the local clinic AKA Hospital. Down the 6 switchbacks and 800 vertical feet to the town center, past the raw sewage, round the building made of mud to a place resembling a scene from MASH (Glass IV bottles included). 36 hours after Hammers first IV I began throwing up everything in my stomach and then some. The Doctor said i should be fine and I should just rest but after hacking up a whole load of green vomit and proceeding to turn white (hard to believe more white than normal) he thought it would be a good idea to treat me.

We had our minds set on racing all the way up until 8 hours before the start when we couldn't go more than 45 minutes between bathroom breaks (the breaks were from napping in bed) and the fact that after being so exausted from figuring out which route to take I nearly passed out on the way up a flight of stairs. We took an inventory of our bodies at 9 am and realized that we and consumed a gross volume of 3 liters of liquid and 250 calories (Net after vomiting 1 liter and 14 calories) and we were weak enough to call the hump from the room to the can a grunt.

So long story short we are currently sitting in the Istanbul airport waiting for the Air France counter to open at 3 am to change our flight and make a shameless retreat back to North America where we can live in peace and train to return to Kurtun next year and drop the Hammer!