Eugene Bonthuys
eugene@cfp.ky

For many runners, doing their first marathon is the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition. For Ken Krys, it was only the beginning.

When he started running again some five years ago after a long hiatus, Krys found himself going through all the struggles faced by beginner runners.

“I started off by just doing what I think people do when they start running, which is trying to get through that first mile or two. You come back and are just amazed at how out of shape you are and how difficult it is to run,” he recalls with a wry smile.

However, the running helped him deal with the stresses of starting his own company, Krys Global, at the time, so he stuck with it.

After doing his first half marathon in 2007, he started planning for his first marathon, the Rock ‘n Roll Marathon in San Diego. “The high that I got from the run at the end was something I hadn’t expected. Everybody is so competitive at the very beginning and jostling for positions and then when you’re in that last four miles you suddenly find there’s this camaraderie among people. It was just an amazing thing for me, I just really enjoyed it,” he says.

That first marathon experience kindled a fire that scorching deserts, arctic cold and even the great Amazon jungle has not yet managed to quench.

Scorching deserts

When Krys started looking for a new challenge, he was introduced to the Marathon des Sables, a six day trek through the Sahara Desert in Morocco. Participants in the event have to carry all of their food and belongings with them for the entire 150 plus miles of the event, although the organisers do provide water.

Krys knew that the event would be a dramatic departure from his previous runs, but he gave himself plenty of time to prepare, as he entered for the 2011 edition of the event.

“Then they came back and said they had an opening in 2010, do I want that, so I thought if I had two years to train, that’s not a problem. And then in December they came back and said they had an opening in 2009,” he recalls.

Although this meant he would have only a couple of months to prepare for the event, Krys decided to take the chance.

“I said, you know, I don’t know where I’m going to be in 2010 or 2011, I don’t know whether I would still be able to run as you could have all kinds of accidents happen to you. I’m going to go for it. Then when I started reading the blogs about how hard it was then I realised I had probably made a foolish mistake and thought I had better get a trainer.”

Krys remembers waiting to board the flight to Morocco at Gatwick Airport, looking at the rest of the competitors, when the enormity of his decision to take part hit him.

“All of these guys were quite buff, they were quite fit, you could tell they were runners, they had this serious look on their face and I thought ‘Oh my gosh, what have I done?’,” he laughs.

Unlike Krys, most of the other competitors are not accountants or lawyers, but people for whom physical fitness forms part of their daily lives, like personal trainers, police officers, firemen or ex military.

As the run progressed, it became a case of mind over matter for Krys.

“I remember on the last day of MDS, the day before I had looked at my feet and seen the blisters and they were basically starting to come off. So I decided to cut them off and just tape up my feet. So I got up the next morning and I had four goals. One was to see if I could stand, the second was to see if I could get my feet inside shoes, third was to walk to the starting line and the last one was to see whether I could actually run,” he recalls.

However, once he had managed to stand, the rest became progressively easier as the knowledge that the finish line was a mere marathon away helped him push through the pain.

“I came back from that, and it doesn’t take long for anybody involved in any sport before you get itchy feet,” says Krys, who was soon on to his next major challenge.

Frozen wasteland

Having survived the Marathon des Sables, Krys started asking around as to whether anyone knew of an event that could serve as his next major challenge, and the Antarctic Ice Marathon came up.

Just getting to the event proved a challenge, with a charter flight on a Russian transport plane from Punta Arenas in Chile to the marathon course on the Union Glacier. With no airports around, the plane has to land on the glacier and is very dependent on weather conditions.

Yet the experience of being able to run in the Antarctic made the hardship of getting there well worth it, according to Krys.

“When you’re out in the middle of Antarctica, you’ve got the mountains beside you, you’re living in tents, living out in the wild, this mad survival type of thing. It’s 15 to 20 below, there’s not heating, and when you go out everything is just so clean, so fresh, so amazing and clear. Everything just seems like it’s a hundred times better,” says Krys.

Steaming jungles

The next event that piqued his interest was the Jungle Marathon in Brazil, an epic 240 kilometre slog through the Amazon jungle.

Although Krys admits that he likes to be surprised when taking part in events, he decided to take a look at some of the videos of the Jungle Marathon and received a nasty shock.

“I saw them slogging through swampland and having to swim over streams and I had thought for some reason it was just like running down a forest path or something. It’s actually going through the jungle, and the marsh, and the rivers, and the streams and the hills,” he recalls.

Although he had been warned that the humidity and dehydration would be a challenged, Krys believed that running in Cayman would have prepared him for the challenges he was to face there.

“Humidity is not your issue; it’s that you spend half the time in water or wetlands. Most stages you start the day by doing a 600 metre stream run, so I don’t care if you dried out your socks the day before; they’re wet by the time you go in. And you can try and start switching them, but within a mile you’re back in muck, stuff up to your waist, trying not to fall over logs, rocks, trying to not lose a shoe,” he recalls.

There were limited opportunities to run, as most of the event was more like an obstacle course than an actual path, trying to climb over fallen trees, rocks and roots while avoiding cactuses and whatever else was hanging from the trees.

When one of the competitors went missing, a search party was sent out to find him.

“By the time they found him, it was already dusk and he had already put his hammock up, because he hadn’t had anything to drink for six hours, he was dehydrated and exhausted. All they said was when they found him it was a good thing they did, because basically when you’re setting yourself up in a hammock like that, you’re jaguar meal, because you’re just so easy to get. That’s part of the race,” recalls Krys.

Motivation

A part of Krys’s motivation for taking part in the events is that there has been a charity component to each of his efforts. He started his fundraising for Facing Africa, an organisation that assists children who suffer from NOMA in Africa, with his run in the Marathon des Sables, and has continued helping out the charity since.

However, it is about more than just helping others.

“For me, it’s me time. When I’m here, I spend a lot of time doing work; I spend a lot of time travelling. When I’m out there I have no Blackberry access, I have nobody asking me anything about work or anything like that, I don’t have anything else except to take care of me,” says Krys.