Day 16: Highway to hell

Today the dial on our oven that's Argentina was cranked to its max. By 8:30am we're sweltering, sweat pouring off us like we've been doused

with water, the humidity in the air as thick as mist. Bob joins us this morning as we make our way down our isolated dirt track, making us a

team of three.

It's difficult to articulate what heat like this does to a person but over the course of our morning we would stop every 5kms to rehydrate and

need 1.5 liters of Gatorade and water each just to stay on top of things. This is the maximum volume our stomachs can hold and even then we barely keeping up with the demand.

By 9:30am Bob and Ray are running shirtless in a desperate attempt to wrestle free of the heat. My pale-white complexion won't allow such a bold gesture so I just sweat my shirt to saturation.

Over the course of our 35km morning I drink 12 liters of fluid and only pee twice - and not much at that. It's as if the water goes straight from my stomach to my pores in some panicked physiological response to keep cool. But I'm feeling OK, my body finally adapting to the heat of this environment.

It's fascinating to look back on the past few weeks and see how my body has adapted to this unique effort. The heat seemed unbearable at first

but I've adapted now and brought this under control - I expected this - but my foot injury at the end of day one was a harbinger of disaster and for me, at the time, the likely end of my expedition. If someone were tell me then that I'd be able to run 40, 50, even 60 kilometers per day on that injury for the bulk of the expedition and that my injury would in fact improve rather than degenerate during this process, I'd tell them they were mad. But they wouldn't have been.

In the first week of the expedition Dr Greg Wells worked around the clock testing Ray with a range of mobile scientific testing equipment that, due to its thoroughness, is likely unprecedented during such an ultra-endurance effort. Apart from recording Ray's standard vitals such as pulse rate, blood pressure and weight, Doc Wells would work-up a full blood analysis on Ray three times a day - morning, noon and night - including hemoglobin, hematocrit, blood glucose, sodium, potassium, chloride and creatinine levels. He had Ray run with a special breathing apparatus that measured oxygen uptake, ventilation and carbon dioxide production under various levels of physical effort, all this to understand what happens to the human body under extreme physical stress, under conditions that a clinician wouldn't humanely ask a typical test

subject to endure.

Dr Wells feels that the Expreso De Los Andes expedition has allowed him to peer through a unique window into how the body works, into the

physiology of how muscles breakdown and recover and into how ones immune system responds to extreme effort. My hope is that the Doc's work can

also explain this dichotomy between physical injury and apparent recovery through continued use too.

 Lunch is the the terminus of our dirt road and our return to the dreaded highway #7. We're facing a 45 kilometer section of this daunting road

before we can return to the dirt track for the duration of our journey to Buenos Aires. Our options are very simple now, there are only two

roads leading to our destination - it's either the highway or the dirt track - and at this point the dirt track has disappeared so it's our two-lane nightmare for the next while.

Highway #7 is everything we had anticipated and more - endless truck traffic, aggressive drivers and no running room. We're forced to navigate the overgrown ditch at the edge of the road, a gully of shin high grass that's designed to collect rain water during the rainy season but now a place littered with road refuse and garbage overlayed on a landscape of deep ruts and holes. Walking is difficult enough, running is impossible. We make it 15kms and call it a day.

Tomorrow we'll wake up early and sprint the final 30 kilometers of this crazy highway so we can return to the safety of our dirt track.