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I did the Marathon des Sable this year and had rather an adventure - not totally planned! If you are interested then I have put a short preface below and a link to the diary including pictures, what kit I took etc.

Marathon des Sable – from Front to Back by Paul Jenkinson

It was day four and we were not even half-way through the double-marathon stage of the “toughest foot race on Earth”. We were at the back of over 800 racers. It was not supposed to be like this. We had gone from the front of the race to the back during the day and we were now struggling to ensure we weren’t going to be pulled out of the race. Three years of training and preparation had come down to whether Michael (my older brother) and I could make the next checkpoint by midnight. We put on our heavy rucksacks, Michael switched on his head torch but mine wouldn’t work – not a good sign. We set-off alone into the darkness of the Sahara with one head torch as the sand storm kicked around us – we had a cut-off to make but we still had 13 kilometres of sand dunes to cross. We had come so far and yet there was still further to go…much further.

We hit the first major sand dune and I tried to push my sick brother up the climb but with every step I just sank even more into the heart sapping sand. We slowly rose to the top and through breaks in the sand storm could see mile after mile of storm tossed seas of sand – we would normally be in our element, but not tonight. We slowly moved on, my brother weighed down by sickness and I was weighed down by the extra water I carried in case we couldn’t make the safety of the next checkpoint. We checked our compass bearing, we were heading toward 141 degrees – we hoped we were not drifting too much in the storm away from our bearing.

We stopped at the top of the next dune and I gave my brother a breather for 30 seconds, but as time was slipping away the breathers were to get shorter. We pushed on into the storm with one goal in mind, Checkpoint 4, to make the cut-off and not get pulled from the race. But this was no longer a race, for three days we had raced, planned strategy, when to go hard and when to hold back, but now this was survival. As we’d fallen down the pack of runners we had seen the physically strong disappear and be replaced by those physically much weaker, barely able to walk, but who had replaced their physical strength with unbelievable mental strength. The question for me was whether we had the mental strength to get through the night – sickness had robbed Michael of his physical strength so we were now moving on will power alone. We disappeared into the storm, one agonising foot in front of the other; the Sahara had us in its hold now, time ticked by and the sand kicked up, just one foot in front of the other…

For the rest go to http://issuu.com/pnjenkinson/docs/mds-front_to_back