The German runners:
The way is their goal!

Joey Kelly, 27, a famous German popstar from the band "Kelly Family" has arrived in the heat hell of Badwater. And the sun takes its toll from the musician. After a short foot-marsh in the burning sun of the Death Valley, he is urgently seeking the shadow spending hallway of the Furnace Creek visitor center.

Together with the German runners Eberhard Fixe, 50, and Uli Weber, 51, Kelly had landed at Las Vegas airport on Tuersday. The race course is known to them only from a map, but at least Fixe and Weber are familiar with the desert-clima, since they have taken part in the Marathon des Sables in Morocco. But that was a stage race, "Badwater is a different story", knows Fixe. "The temperature is a constant challenge. You have to handle it somehow."

The industrial salesman will get the chance to proove that he can do this. The weather report forecasts temperatures of 50+ degrees Celsius (120 deg. F) for the race start on Thursday. "That is what I call extreme", Weber says, a finisher of more than 80 marathons. "The way is the goal, that is programmed into my head."

Weber's motto describes best, what drives most of the long-distance runners: mind-expansion through going past their cowardice. Or, as Joey Kelly puts it into words: "A human being can do more than he believes he can."

The last person, that signed in for the Badwater Ultramarathon, was Doina Nugent. The 39-year-old teacher from the Bavarian town of Ingolstadt, is the daughter of a German father and an Irish mother. Like Fixe, Weber and Kelly it's her first try to master the Badwater race. According to her long-distance race experience, she has good changes to get to finish line. Last December she won a race through the Sahara desert. Thereby she handled 335 kilometres non stop.