The MdS is a truly gruelling multi-stage adventure through a mythical landscape, in one of the world’s most inhospitable environments – the Sahara desert. You have to be self-sufficient and carry all your own food and equipment for the week on your back. Water is rationed daily and if you exceed the ration, you get a time penalty.
Over just six days I will run well over 250km (156 miles) through endless dunes, over rocky jebels, and across white-hot salt plains. The sun will be your constant enemy with temperatures regularly reaching 50 centigrade. The sand will be your constant companion, clouds of it under your feet, sheets of it stinging your eyes and lots of it chafing where it shouldn’t. The long stage has become a legend in itself. You will run out of a Saharan morning, into the dusk and then the dark, many not finishing the 80+km (52 miles) till well into the next day. Your feet will swell, crack and bleed under the pressure and the heat.
6 stages over 7 days, 156+miles of running, with a long stage in excess of 52+miles, self sufficient except for water and a communal berber tent.