The Marathon des Sables – A Personal Reflection
Prologue
“The fight is won or lost far away from the witnesses - behind the lines, in the gym and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.”
For over two hours after completing the 2007 Marathon des Sables, I sat on a dune overlooking the finish-line in the small Moroccan village of Merzouga with my friend and fellow runner, David Sutcliffe. We were awaiting the arrival of the rest of our colleagues from Tent 90, the self styled ‘Team Lincoln’, and, during this time, I began to reflect on the past two years. The memories came flooding back of long, grueling training runs in the wind, rain and cold, the time and money spent on buying, rejecting and refining kit, days on the hills experimenting with nutritional strategies and then the final few weeks, where 70-80 mile training weeks were replaced with hour long sauna sessions to taper and acclimatize as best as was possible in a freezing England.
Just then, over three hours since the start of the final 11.7km stage, through the magnificent and imposing Erg Chebbi dunes, the last four members of Team Lincoln crested the ridge in front of us. A week of adventure and endeavor, with new friendships forged in the furnace of the Sahara desert, came to an emotional climax, as Jack, Edward, Vicky and John crossed the line in a whirlwind of tears and celebratory smiles. The question I had asked myself many times during the preceding months – was all this effort worth it? – was answered unequivocally there and then. You bet it was!
Chapter 1
‘What is life if not a great adventure.’
The seeds of my entry into the 22nd MdS had been sown many years before. In the late 90’s and the early days of the new millennia, I had undertaken a number of physical challenges, common to many interested in this field. I had cycled both the Land’s End to John O’Groats and the Coast to Coast routes, walked the 3 Peak Challenge in under 24 hours and ran my first marathon in Prague in 1998. These were all very enjoyable in their own right, but had not pushed me to physical or mental extremes in ways that I thought they might. So I began to look at more testing events and came across, for the first time, the Marathon des Sables. I was instantly smitten with the magic of this self-supported race and the romance of completing a 250km course across the Sahara desert. However the cost of the event at that time, and the fact I was in the process of moving home and relocating to a new job in Lincoln, meant that, for the moment at least, the concept of competing in this awesome challenge would have to be put on hold for at least a short while…..
Some five years thus past before I chanced across the MdS again, whilst reading a race report on the web, although I had often thought of the race in the intervening time. A couple of years prior to this I had sewn the seeds in David’s mind over dinner one night and I decided, in the summer of 2005, to call him up. ‘I’m sending off my entry for the 2007 MdS. The time for talking is over, are you up for this?’ He didn’t need much convincing and, by the end of the week, we were both on the entry list, along with a friend of his from London, Paul Anthony.
Over the next few weeks I began to draw up my training programme for the next eighteen months, which initially would consist of returning to running three or four times a week and include some weights sessions alongside this base level of fitness work. It was to be a long and slow process of building up my stamina levels to those necessary to compete in this most arduous of events.
One evening my wife, Lisa, came home to inform me that she had met, at a work’s function that day, one of the accountant’s from a local firm, a man called Jack O’Hern. He had informed her that evening that he had, along with another colleague, Colm McCoy, signed up for the 22nd MdS as well. The seeds of Team Lincoln were sewn there and then. Within a fortnight we had been in touch and the first social get-together was planned, which included the final member of the team, Edward Strange, a stockbroker from Lincoln, who was a good friend of Jack and Colm.
The next few months were taken up with a gradual progression in the level of training, with my stamina levels slowly progressing. The runs were becoming longer and more frequent until, in the summer of 2006, I was engaged in a ‘half marathon’ style programme. A number of races were entered in order to test out desert kit and to find out where exactly my fitness levels lay in competitive conditions. Stepping up to a ‘marathon programme’ in August of that year was the next goal and I entered the Yorkshireman Off Road Marathon and the OMM, along with Colm, to fully test training status and my developing ideas on equipment and nutrition for the desert. They were both very testing events and many salutary lessons were learnt in the long hours spent on the trails of Yorkshire and Southern Scotland! However they enabled me to shelve some ideas that were not passing muster and to refine and develop others that were, and this period gave me a burgeoning confidence that the preparation was heading in the right direction.
After a small period of tapering at the beginning of November, the final ‘ultra marathon’ stage of training commenced. This was based around gradually increasing the frequency and length of training runs, to a peak of around eighty miles total in a week, and building the amount of weight in the rucksack, which I was running with around three to four times a week. The longest run during this stage of training was a thirty eight mile coastal run, from Skegness to Grimsby, with a friend who I’d met during the Yorkshireman event, Andy McMenemy. He was also entered for the MdS and he proved to be of great support during this gruelling slog.
Included in this final period was a week’s warm weather work in Fuerteventura, at the start of 2007, the focus of which was to give the equipment one last run through under conditions similar to those that would be encountered in the Sahara. Everything was now coming together nicely and with race preparations complete, and a period of heat acclimation work in the sauna undertaken, I was ready to board the flight to Morocco.
Chapter 2
‘Fortune favors the prepared mind’
Arriving at Gatwick early on Thursday 22nd March, it quickly became apparent which was the check-in queue for the flight to Ouarzazate. Never had I seen so many Raidlight packs in one place before and the airport was alive with anticipation and eager faces all suggested that they were looking forward to the MdS challenge. Interminable waits for security and baggage checks were made less onerous by mixing with the other competitors and it was during this time that I fell into conversation with Tom Adams, a young runner from Aberdeen who was to go on and record an impressive 29th place overall and also be the 2nd British runner to finish.
We were soon aboard the charter flight and it was a good chance to make further acquaintances with fellow passengers, all of whom were bound for the desert, and swap stories of training, racing, kit choices and other aspects of the MdS. During the trip the remainder of Tent 90 came together, with David and Paul bringing onboard Vicky Ryan, a PE teacher from Bristol, who was to provide a civilizing influence to the team, and Jack introduced us later to John MacPherson, an ex-Army officer currently working for Goldman Sachs in the City. During the first evening’s stay at the Hotel Berber Palace, the team bonded and gradually the final arrangements began to fall into place.
Friday saw a long and tedious coach ride into the desert and it was during this time that the MdS ‘roadbooks’, detailing our full itinerary for the race, were distributed amongst the passengers. The coaches, previously alive with animated conversations, fell silent as the competitors began to leaf through the six stages and the reality of what we were about to undertake started to hit home. The first stage looked tough, both in terms of distance and terrain, and we didn’t need to look much further to feel the first waves of anxiety sweeping through the competitors.
But, before all this, we had to contend with two nights in the bivouac, where we began to get a feel for race conditions and it gave us a final chance to make our last decisions on what kit to take and what to discard. We were all immediately struck by how cold the nights were and thermal layers and extra clothing, which we had hoped could be left with the rest of our luggage, quickly became regarded as essential items by the runners.
Team Lincoln, it quickly became apparent, was approaching this race with a mixture of views as to what were ‘necessary’ items. The debates that night raged around calorific content of various foods, powders, gels, etc., items of clothing deemed essential or luxury and what materials were required to keep us comfortable and hygienic in the evening’s bivouac at the end of each stage. Poor Vicky’s baggage came under particularly heavy scrutiny from David and me, as we applied a ruthless zeal to axing what we felt to be unnecessary paraphernalia!
Even after all this checking and re-checking, many of the tent’s occupants still had sufficient kit for a month’s expedition, but each of us had to feel at ease with what they had for the long week ahead. As the extra baggage was handed in on Saturday afternoon, there was a palpable sense of finality among the runners and a vain hope that you’d made all the right choices and would not come to regret the decisions made in the days ahead. Medical and kit checks by the various logistical personnel followed and we then bedded down for our last night in this location, before the race finally began the following morning.
Chapter 3
‘Go my sons, burn your books, Buy yourself stout shoes. Get away to the mountains, the deserts and the deepest recesses of the earth. In this way, and no other, will you gain a true knowledge of things and of their properties.’
The first stage was 29.3 km long and, looking again at the roadbook the previous evening, had revealed a real variety of terrain. Hills, mountain passes, dunes and dried river beds were the order of the day and, with a rucksack weighing in at nearly 10kg, it looked as though it would be a real eye opener for the week ahead. Indeed several runners who had competed before in the MdS remarked, at the end of the stage, that this had been the hardest and longest first day in their memory.
Talk the previous evening had revolved around race tactics and various ideas had been bandied around Tent 90. Some were looking to walk, others to run and a few were to perform a mixture of the two. It was fairly obvious that a steady approach on this first day was needed and I decided to work, using my heart rate monitor, at around 140 beats per minute. I knew, from my hours training with this piece of kit, that this would result in a comfortable and sustainable pace and hopefully it would allow for a reasonable time to be recorded without draining essential reserves of energy for the week ahead. The overall strategy was to take the first couple of stages steadily, whilst the pack was at its heaviest and the body was unacclimatized to the heat, and then hope to step the pace up as the race progressed.
One major area of concern for me, as with other competitors, was how the feet would stand up to the demands placed on them by the combination of heat, sand and difficult terrain. In November 2005 I had attended an MdS seminar in York, where a previous runner, Dave Annandale, had discussed at length his approach to foot care. He had completed two previous MdS races without suffering a single blister and advocated a policy to foot care which included the use of moisturiser twice daily, a sandboard to remove tough calluses and, during the event itself, two pairs of socks. These he would change at regular intervals of around 45 minutes and the spare pair dried over the belt and sand shaken free in the next 45 minutes.
This strategy appeared sound and, during the build up to the race, I had followed his advice religiously. The first stage saw me changing socks at intervals of around an hour, but it was during this time that it struck me what was the first major issue over the ‘Annandale Approach’. Removing gaiters, shoes and socks, cleaning the feet down and then putting all the footwear back together was a lengthy operation and, during this stage, had cost me about 50-60 minutes overall. I was also developing my first blister, so the strategy was proving, for me at least, to be less than foolproof! It was clear that, if you wanted a quick time, and to be as competitive as possible, this approach was not going to work. Although the feet did appear to benefit from the wash and change, it was just too slow a process and had not fully prevented blisters from appearing.
In the bivouac that evening, after coming in 225th out of 750 finishers, I began my first evaluation of the race approach. Certainly the pace had been comfortable, but there needed to be a rethink on foot care and, also, my mental and physical approach to dune running, as this had been far too slow and demanding. I decided, overnight, to stick with one pair of socks for each stage and to work harder in the dune sections and on the hills. Observing more experienced runners around me on the first stage, I had noticed how, on the soft dunes, they had tries to operate in the footsteps of others, achieving almost a ‘slipstreaming’ effect when the sand compacted and made life much easier for those following close behind. In contrast, in the harder, more compact, dunes the runners tried to find a virgin line of sand, where the going remained firm and they avoided the previous runner’s footprints. I learnt quickly to mimic the experienced runners and so dune work became much easier.