These five years I have kept driving with an outrageous dream as the goal: the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge. I have taken on all sorts of things, and run into all sorts of things. There have been clear days and days of heavy rain. There have been storms. There have been days a rainbow came out.
Running the third corner into the final, fourth corner
Put it in racehorse terms: this is the third corner, the jockey has the whip out, running flat out, alreadypast what mind and body can give. No — from here is the last corner.
Yes. This, right here.
The usual pattern is to push hard at the third corner and move up, and then have nothing left for the final corner and the home straight,and fade.
I came out flat out from the start. Rather than fading, the world I could see kept changing every time I kept going.
The horse running beside me and the one running ahead both disappeared from view. Yes — I am living as myself. I think it is because I have simply run my own road.
After all, I am the first Japanese woman doing this — heading towards a challenge nobody has done before, so perhaps I get to be a winged Pegasus, past any thoroughbred: a mad racehorse, and that is fine by me.