By this time next year, Austrian marathon runner Christian Schiester will have crossed four of the world’s greatest deserts. We track him down.
“Doctors have a hard time with me,” says Christian Schiester with a sigh, “that’s why I stopped consulting them. The last few doctors who performed a check-up on me suggested I calm down, stop my self abuse and get a real life.”
It comes as something of a surprise considering the 42-year-old’s aerodynamic frame, sinewy physique and a resting pulse rate of 31bpm. He seems to be cocooned in a blaze of solar energy. Think Johnny Storm, but even more chatty. Everything about him seems to be designed to move in one direction: straight ahead. The aquiline nose, the piercing eyes, the darting fingers as they illustrate his trenchant views and bittersweet anecdotes from a time when he was in very different shape.
When he was 20, Christian had a huge beer belly and smoked two packs a day. His evenings were spent on pub crawls. Was it just the exuberance of youth? “No, not really. I felt displaced in life, I wanted to get out of my sorry self. I figured the easiest way would be to destroy it,” he says. “I was the cynical, wobbly kid, hiding from every reason to live behind his 12th pint, telling everyone about kicks I had never experienced, and places I had never been to. You couldn’t shut me up – I was a hyperactive dreamer, bound for the nightmare of physical ruin.”
He idled away the working week on shifts as a back room clerk at the post office. One day he couldn’t even put his socks on without needing to sit down. If he dropped a pencil, he’d get a new one out of the drawer, rather than pick it up. When he topped 90kilos (200lbs), his doctor told him to change his lifestyle or die from a heart attack.
The warning hit home and Christian started running – and hasn’t stopped since. But this was no quick conversion: his first attempt at long distance running took him about as far as the nearest phone booth where he rang his dad to pick him up in the car.
At least Christian kept on trying. He took part in a seven-mile fun run, but gave in at the fifth mile. His next goal was a five-mile fun run. He crossed the finishing line in third-to-last place.
But he was dismayed to be passed at the line by a 72-year-old. Something snapped. One year later, Christian ran the New York Marathon in less than three hours and won his first half-marathon the same year. It was the first of many national titles. “Torture your body or it will torture you!” had become his motto.
Jürgen Skarwan
He put it to the test in 2003, during the infamous six-day Marathon de Sables across the Saharan sands of Morocco. He finished in 12th place, held back by a combination of diarrhoea and the slippery sands which made him run “like Pinocchio”. What he learned from that nightmare was the ‘Duck Walk’, a technique he copied from Italian runner Marco Olmo, and the heartfelt knowledge that he would rather die trying than give up.
“In the Sahara I realised for the first time that the vast natural environment stimulates my senses in a primal, animalistic way. I began drawing on extra energy resources. An additional battery. It is really quite amazing! Like turning into an alert, self-sufficient beast.”
In the Race Across the Himalayas a year later, Schiester could be seen smoking again: a pipe of cherry tobacco – a rare pleasure as reward for not only winning the 100-mile-run at altitude in 14 hours and 43 seconds, but for setting a new record for the event. It was the equivalent to jogging up and down the Empire State Building from the subterranean garage to the mast at the top 512 times in a row!
2006 brought another change of scenery; after the sands of the Sahara and the heights of the Himalayas, came the perils of the Amazon Jungle Marathon in Brazil. Coming in third (about 107 minutes behind British winner Jamie Lowe), about 50% of the soles of Christian’s feet were blisters and he was utterly disoriented by a loud droning inside his skull, possibly a result of the sweltering 56° heat.
'I have never experienced anything as terrible and as frightening as the Ultra Race!'
Despite the torture, he still has fantastic memories of his adventures: “Snakes and spiders escaped from under our sneakers and yellow-greenish jaguars’ eyes were watching from out the reeds at night,” he recalls.
“[If I’m stuck] in traffic jams or waiting in line at the supermarket, images ascend from my subconscious – like that one gigantic tree, rising like a dark, the ivory-clad dome on a lonely glade that I came by during the jungle run in a trance. The memories lift my spirits immediately.”
After his feet had healed, Schiester retreated to more familiar territory; the mountain playground of Mautern in Styria, where he lives with his girlfriend and their two children. His next project would take him to his greatest sporting triumph: the 2007 Antarctic Ultra Race. “I have never experienced anything as terrible and as frightening as the Ultra Race!” he admits. “It was the longest day of my life: 63 frozen miles in 20 very, very lonely hours.”
Red Bull equipped him with a NASA-inspired survival suit, complete with temperature-sensitive microchips to warn him if he started to freeze, spike-boots and space food which would stay soft enough to bite at -60°.
But what is his most abiding memory of racing in the Antarctic? “A huge, white bird, the size of an albatross, soaring above my head for miles, almost guiding me into finish. But I couldn’t swear now, that he actually existed. It might as well have been a desperate striving of the soul for other forms of life or just an hallucination...”
So is he born survivor? He smiles broadly: “Yes, I feel comfortable in the knowledge that wherever I find myself, I could escape and run home on my two feet, even if it would take me days or weeks.
“I am fortunate that my body can carry my spirit to exceptional places. That makes the difference between me and most of my contemporaries.”
At the time of writing, Schiester is trying to survive a bout of flu, but even that doesn’t seem to affect him like mere mortal men: “Influenza doesn’t last long with me. It is burnt up by increasing my body temperature. I just run the evil bacteria out of my system,” he says, blowing his nose furiously and examining the contents of his Kleenex with ideological contempt.
Christian’s latest project is a stunning quartet of desert marathons, each covering 155 miles, the Four Deserts Cup. In March he was duck walking across the sands of Chile’s Atacama, finishing in sixth place after a 13-mile detour. Next month, he’ll be back in the Sahara again, this time in Egypt, in April he takes on the mighty Australian Outback and in June will take him to the great Gobi in China. Having crossed the Sinai desert from east to west last December (“as a warm-up”), Christian picked up some invaluable tips from the Bedouin who accompanied his small expedition.
Looking like a high-tech-nomad, he praises the nutritional values of brown millet and dates. He also tested several kinds of backpacks and socks and has settled on a waterproof type of running shoe that repels water and, equally, the vicious, blister-inducing sand.
Despite all the preparations, is he scared of what lies ahead? “I have realised on my previous trips that most of the time it is better not knowing exactly what awaits me. Ignorance has often proved to be a great advantage to me.”
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