About the Marathon des Sables

THE MARATHON DES SABLES is known, somewhat dramatically, as “the toughest race on Earth”, running with all your food and kit for 155 miles through the Sahara desert in southern Morocco. You get a ration of water each day and some salt tablets to keep you going, and a tent (a bit of sack cloth with a pole in the middle) shared with 9 other people for the duration of the race.

The (approximately) 155 miles is broken down into six stages ranging from around 8 km (the last day, 'charity' stage), to 82 km on the longest (which they nicely give you a whole 34 hours to do, going through the night if you're me). The route is over a mixture of Dunes up to hundreds of feet high, gravel plains and salt flats, with the odd mountain thrown in for good measure. The temperatures can range from -5 degrees C at night to 50 during the day and while the route is marked at 500m intervals it isn’t possible to do this in the dunes.

As ill-advised (or just plain stupid) as this sounds (particularly having had a heart problem that was fixed less than three years ago*), this was an ambition of mine for several years, though I can’t remember exactly when I heard about it. Anyway, its popularity has soared over the past few years, starting in 1986 with 186 competitors with over a thousand starting in 2014 – so it’s not just me! 

A very sensible question that any normal person would ask is why on earth someone might want to put themselves through all of that pain. Unfortunately that is not really a very easy question to answer.  There is no single simple answer and it is a difficult to explain all the different elements of an answer that I might give if I could. However, I think the thing that stands out the most for me is that many of the people doing it are quite normal people in a physical sense, well they’re not superhuman athletes anyway. They get through the training and the event through will power and it shows how ordinary people can perform extraordinary feats of endurance.  This was an amazing intense experience, everything I'd hoped for, out there in the desert sharing this very intense experience with the other competitors (particularly my tent mates) and getting to know them and the landscape.

You can find more information on the Marathon des Sables at: http://www.marathondessables.co.uk/ and http://www.darbaroud.com/en/

The 29th MdS ran from the 4^th to the 14^th of April 2014 and I suceeded raising over £5,600 for the British Heart Foundation and the Wasdale Mountain Rescue. 

*Don’t worry, the Cardiologist man said it was ok, and I didn't die – I’m just being melodramatic!