Well, I’ve done it! Last month I set off from Gatwick, on the morning of Friday 5th of April, on a special charter flight. I started to recognise fellow Marathon des Sables runners right from the airport, as they were all in their running gear. The flight went smoothly, taking us to a tiny airport in Morocco, where the “cafe” was a trolley with some drinks of water and a few cans of Coke.
It should have been a 6 hour bus journey from the airport to the bivouac. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of being one of the first to get on a bus. Then, as we waited for all the buses to be ready before we set off, I sat on that bus for an hour before we actually left. En route to the bivouac we were delayed, because our support vehicle had a puncture. In the end it was pitch dark by the time we arrived at camp.
First off, we formed into groups of 8, with each group set to share a tent for the duration of the ultra-marathon. In my group were Dara, Rebeca (who I’d met previously at MyRaceKit, where I bought all my gear for the expedition), Derek, Simon, Nils, Ivan and Fred. Ivan turned out to be something of a celebrity. He is Ivan Castro, a US special ops veteran and Army Special Forces Green Beret, who was able to tell us some very interesting bedtime stories. He told us of the time he changed shirts with Prince Harry at the first Invictus games and also about his experience of running with the bulls in Pamplona. Ivan is blind, and Fred was his guide on the trip.
We were in Tent 62. The tents were open-ended and not very high. It wasn’t possible to stand up inside them. When the wind got up, our tent would lift off the ground and in fact it collapsed on us a couple of times. Since it was rather tricky to get out to go to the toilet at night, especially for Ivan, he used a bottle to pee in. I became the keeper of the pee bottle – my job was to make it available to Ivan when needed (and to make sure nobody drank it by accident).
On our first day we went through all our safety checks and had our bags weighed. Mine weighed 10.5kgs. Our next job was to learn how to cook our own food. Despite having practiced this at home, I found it more difficult than I’d expected. Heating water to prepare the food was far from simple, and I seemed to always end up with sand in it. I actually found it rather difficult to eat. This problem increased as the days went by. I ended up eating more sachets of peanut butter, which Fred had brought with him, than anything else. Those were a life-saver.
As the first stage began, the organisers played “Highway to Hell”, the traditional starting track for the ultra-marathon. . This was emotional for me because it was one of Janice’s favourite songs. I found the first stage not too bad, except that I suffered with cramps. I eventually had to increase the number of salt tablets I took, to deal with this problem, from around 6 tablets to 15 each day! Stage 2 was when things started to get really difficult…
The second stage involved the longest dune stage that has ever been included in the Marathon des Sables. There were 8 miles of sand dunes. I heard one man say it was the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life – it later turned out that he was an ex-paratrooper, who had done two tours in Iraq. If he found it hard, I think it really must have been. Dunes are difficult because you are always struggling to get purchase on the ground with your feet.
My feet started to really hurt after stage 2. I had some blisters, which I dealt with myself, but the following day, during stage 3, I found that I was suffering a lot of pain in one foot. Afterwards I needed to see the doctor, who removed some dead skin from a hot spot on my foot with a scalpel, and treated the area with iodine. Hot spots happen due to friction on your skin, which causes the skin to die off. All this was bad enough, but the next day was the long stage.
I ran all day and into the night on the long stage. This was incredibly tough. Once it got dark, I could only see green glow sticks marking the way. I paired up with a fellow runner called Annabel, and we supported each other through this stage. For a while, we ran with another woman too. She was having terrible problems with her feet, though. She had to have the side of her shoe cut because her toes was so swollen they could no longer fit inside it. We decided to wait with her, while she decided whether or not to continue with the stage, but after half an hour she realised she would have to stop.
Annabel and I carried on but of course, my own feet were a problem too. Because I was so tired, I fell twice on the route, getting my feet wet in a “wadi” (a kind of small desert stream). I stumbled into camp in the early hours of the morning and collapsed into my tent.
The next day I got some much-needed further medical attention for my feet. Two hot spots were treated this time. I had also been needing to take care of my back each morning before setting off for several days now, because it had been rubbed quite badly by my backpack. It was really difficult to keep track of all my first aid supplies, and do all my maintenance every morning, taping up my feet etc.
Thankfully, I had some time to rest before stage 5. This stage was marathon-length, and far from flat. It contained steep hills of up to 25% gradient, which you needed to climb with the assistance of ropes. Despite this, stage 5 was my best day. The pain in my feet seemed to disappear. It is amazing how you can keep going through pain.
It wasn’t just me. The man in the tent next to me had damaged his achilles tendon and had his leg all strapped up. He was a doctor, and you might expect that he would be more cautious than some, knowing the risks of exacerbating injuries, but he still managed to run and finish the marathon stage.
I don’t know what happened that day. Perhaps Janice was helping me, but I felt the best that I had done through the whole event. I ran for a while with the elite runners (they started after the rest of us and when they caught up with me I found, to my surprise, that I was able to keep pace with some of them for a while). I also managed to pass one of the Morroccan runners (who were much better acclimatised to the conditions than I was) on the way up a hill. T
I made up around 110 places in stage 5, finishing in around 470th place (which is pretty good going if you take into a account the time I spent waiting with another runner on the long stage and a one hour time penalty I incurred because I didn’t have a medical certificate at the start).
As a group, Tent 62 agreed to do the final “charity” (10k) stage together, and I had the honour of acting as Ivan’s guide for part of it. I’m lucky to have met such amazing, inspiring people, and I’m immensely proud that I, a normal bloke from Grimsby, managed to complete this challenge alongside them.
If I did the Marathon des Sables again there are a few things I’d do differently. I would take walking poles, to help me through those sand dunes. I would also bring some different food: more snacks, maybe some of those peanut butter sachets! I think I could do better if I returned, having learned from mistakes the first timearound, but I’m not sure that I ever will.
However, since I got back, I’ve done a half marathon, and was pleased to find that I ran better than I have for years. I’ve now signed up for another ultra-marathon next year, this time not so far from home. Cape Wrath Ultra is in the far north of Scotland, and I think several of my Tent 62 friends will be joining me. Watch this space for upcoming adventures, and thank you so much for all your support.
John's Ultramarathon 