In April 2004, I ran the Marathon des Sables, the world’s toughest foot race. This is an account of those 7 days, 240 kilometres, 120 degrees and 28,000 calories of pain and joy. I wrote this just after I’d finished.

You know it’s serious when they throw you off the bus. A four hour ride from the nearest big town had taken us into the desert, but the buses could go no further. We’d already taken them off road for half an hour, and now we were being transferred to open backed Moroccan army trucks for the final 15km to Camp One. We’d be there for two days of acclimatisation and kit checks, getting used to the open sided Berber tents, and learning to live in the heat. The tents are made of old black coffee sacking that didn’t quite reach the ground, and the heat had been imported directly from hell itself. By the end of the week, we’d topped 120 degrees during the day, and been down to near freezing at night. The tents had kept the sun off, but had proven totally useless when it came to sand. But even by the start of the race on Day One, we’d grown rather attached to the things. Tent 62, which I would be sharing with the same seven others for the entire race, had taken on a trench like atmosphere. If banter is a good measure of morale, we would be unbeatable. The medical and kit checks took up the next day, and then, on the Sunday morning, while you were all in bed, we set off for Day One. A mere 30km or so, as a warm up.

Running in the desert isn’t like running on road. Ok, so that’s obvious: it’s sand after all. But the Sahara is not just the classic dunes of The English Patient. There are plenty of those, for sure, but the majority of the running we did was over vast plains of sand, gravel and rocks the size of tennis balls. No shade, no paths, and, frankly, the scariest route I can think of running. Sand I can deal with, soft and crappy that it is, but those rocks frightened me greatly. Without continual concentration, you could easier step on one and turn an ankle or blow a knee. That would not just be the end of the race but, depending on where you did it, could put you in a lot of danger of heatstroke. Blow a knee out on the overnight stage, and you’d have to pull your emergency flare to call the helicopter. Blow it in the middle of a plain, and you’d have to wait for a passing marshal’s Land Rover to pick you up. Worse the continual banging of cross-country running on heat-swollen feet produced flesh wounds that would, for many, result in lost toenails and serious infections. It was only the first day, and people were already being withdrawn by the doctors for foot trauma.

The volunteer doctors on the MdS have a special technique for blisters. Because of the risk of infection from the sand and the general lack of hygiene for the week, the blister is, contrary to usual advice, sliced clean off with a scalpel. It’s covered in some iodine-like disinfectant and then left to dry out. We would tape ourselves up a few hours later. The organisers recommend that you run in shoes one size too big, partly to deal with the effects of the heat, but mostly to leave space for the taping and padding you’ll add over the week. This is controversial advice - many people finding that without the taping and padding in place, their feet would move too much inside their shoes on the first two days and give them huge blisters in the process.

It’s tempting to underestimate the power of blisters, and without the pictures I can’t really show you the extent of some people’s trouble, so I’ll take one guy as an example. He lost all the skin off the base of his heels on the first day. They only got worse: by the end he had no epidermis on his feet at all, and the doctors were checking him at every checkpoint. He was walking on raw meat and exposed nerve endings for most of the race. He finished. English.

Day Two was more of the same, only longer, and we got into a rhythm. Up at six with the sunrise, cook breakfast and pack up, with our tents taken down by a swarm of Berber race staff around seven. Collect our first water ration, tend to our feet, and then kit on and to the start line by 0845. At 9, with the Eurosport television helicopter hovering overhead we would rush off, through the checkpoints for more water and medical tending, then to the end, more water, and slump into the tent. Dinner, and then asleep as it got dark at eight.

Day Three was the dunes. The Dune Day is somewhat notorious. Anyone even looking at doing the MdS hears of it. Usually on Day Two, it’s just shorter than a marathon, but over enormous sand dunes, perhaps 30 or 40 metres high. Vast vertical walls of sand that you have to slog up, and then run or slide down, while making sure you don’t get lost, or fill your shoes with too much sand. With an almost full pack, the prospect of climbing dune after dune is not a happy one, but it’s not dunes all the way. Indeed, they made up only half of the stage in the 2004 route, but they are much more difficult to travel across. I reached CP2, the start of the dunes at the 15.5km mark, in two hours. The remaining 22km would take me another five. Tough going indeed: five competitors were taken out by helicopter after firing their flares in distress. Close to fifty out of six hundred dropped out over the week, almost all on the insistence of the medical staff. Given the state of some of the people who finished, they must have been in a very bad way indeed.

The next morning, before the start of Day Four, we were told that four of the people disqualified the previous day for missing the cut off time had been reinstated. Two because they had stayed with other runners to help them onto the helicopter, and two others because, well, because one of them was blind and was being led by the other. Running those dunes fully sighted was hard enough, but blind? That they didn’t fall off any of them is a miracle.

Day Four was the Long Day. This, along with the dunes, had been the thing to be most wary of. A double marathon is never easy, even when fresh and rested and in more temperate climes, but after the Dune Day? After three days in the sun? With the knowledge of another marathon and a half to go on top of it? It wasn’t so much nerves that had me on the start line that day, but an overwhelming sense of the surreal. Just what the hell was I doing there?

The organisers measure the Long Day route as 76km, although many of the runners carried GPS units that claimed well above that: as the crow flies is a poor measure in the desert, where we were always opting to go around obstacles, or where the route wasn’t entirely clear, not to mention the ups and downs of the dunes. The Dune Day was supposed to be 37km, but many measured it closer to 50 even with out the ups and downs. Whatever the real distance, the Long Day was to be at least two marathons, with 36 hours to complete them both, and a cutoff of 0100 the first night to get to checkpoint 4 - just over half way.

My plan was to get a good quick start, getting to CP4 as soon as possible, and then seeing how it was from there. With two days to do it in, anyone finishing within one would have the second day at the camp free to rest up. Or you could opt to sleep somewhere on the course, although this would most likely drop you a hundred places or more, as people passed you. Common wisdom within Tent 62 matched my own plan: push on through the night and take the rest day at the camp. Just keep going.

It wasn’t like that at all.

My ankle was very stiff from the previous day, but I figured that, as with the blisters, a few miles of running would loosen it up and I would soon forget about it. We started off toward checkpoint one and immediately hit a section of small dunes. Then another, and then another. It’s hard to hit a stride over small dunes, and every weird angle was pushing my ankle to places it didn’t want to go. By CP1 it was still hurting, and after I had sat down to tend to the water I found it seizing up again. Starting again was very painful indeed until the endorphins kicked in, and the muscles heated up. This was to become a rhythm over the next few days: hobble, walk, run, stop, hobble, walk, run, stop.

By the time I left checkpoint three, running just wasn’t happening. It was mid-afternoon, the temperature was reaching 120 degrees, and a sandstorm was coming from my back quarter. My calves started to throb, and then sear, and when I looked down I saw that they were bright red and seemed to be coming up in little blisters. Sunburn, I reflected, was a bloody silly thing to have. It’s pretty much a self-inflicted injury, although I could have sworn I’d put sunscreen on my legs. With the sun setting to my back, and it and the wind blowing directly onto the sorest parts, it wasn’t good: what’s more, halfway to CP4 I started to feel lightheaded. Crap, I thought, I’ve got buggered ankle, and now I’ve got such bad sunburn that I’m going into shock. Six miles to go to the next checkpoint and any minute now I’m going to pass out and wake up in the helicopter. The embarrassment.

But I kept going, reaching CP4 just as it got dark, picking up my water and half falling down next to the medical tent. There was a queue, one guy being put on a drip, another fishing the soles of his feet in chunks out of his socks, yet more having blisters sliced off. I got into my sleeping bag, and sat shivering in the night cold. Shivering? Is that a symptom of heatstroke? How the hell was I going to get to the finish tonight?

I got to the front of the queue, and rolled onto my front for the doctor to see my legs. Not sunburn, he said. Sandburn. The sand had been blown so hard into my legs that it was gone underneath the skin. The little blisters weren’t blisters at all, but looked, under the doctor’s headtorch, like thousands of tiny insect bites. Not content to just run over the stuff, it seems I’d picked up half of the Saharan sand in the backs of my legs. There’s nothing to do, he said, but get rubbed down with antiseptic to prevent infection from setting in. This he did, and then he gave me some salt tablets for the lightheadedness. Ankle freshly seized, legs searing and painted bright red, but with head returning to normal, I dragged myself and my pack over to the rest tents, fired up my stove for some food, and looked at my options. According to the road book, the route between here and CP5, then CP6 and then home, was full of dunes. In the dark, alone, and getting colder, I really didn’t fancy them. At my current pace, I’d get in around 4 or 5 am, but would then probably wake up with first light at 6, as we had been habitually doing all week. On the other hand, it was only eight in the evening, so if I slept now, and got up before first light, I could have a good eight hours kip, and do the rest in daylight and the early morning warmth. I’d drop hundreds of places, but who cared? Finishing the whole thing was more important than destroying myself for the marathon stage the next day. It made sense, and as with all these things once I’d made a decision and had something to eat I felt a lot better.

I woke up at five and crawled out of the tent to find the nearest tree, only to find a camera light, and an extremely surprised looking Ben Fogle, one of my tentmates, and a presenter for the BBC. He and his cameraman Rob were making a documentary on the race, and had stopped at CP4 overnight. Ben was dreading the final stages. His feet, as he’ll testify and you’ll see on TV later in the year, were a mess, and we agreed to walk in together, along with two another Brits, Charlie and Tom, each in their own bad way. The four of us cheerfully hobbled out of Rob’s shot at about half five, looking more like the Dawn of the Dead than elite endurance athletes.

(Rob, I should add, was an absolute star. Chris and Jonny, two other tentmates, walking their way through a midlife crisis and into the realms of the heroic, employed him as their fixer, receiving secret deliveries of Marlboro Lights after each stage. The sight of those guys having one last cigarette before the off in the morning was just glorious. Next time, I swear, I’m taking my pipe.)

By checkpoint six, we had to leave Tom to the medics and an IV drip, and we pushed on to the end. The final field of dunes, of the stage and of the entire race, were very high, and as we topped the last one, we saw one of the race marshals get his quadbike stuck at the top a little further along. He was getting no help from us.

The finish of each of the stages was always a curious affair. Given its size, you could always see the camp from a few miles away. On the dune day, the first glimpse came with over six miles to go, giving people hope and then dashing it against another set of dunes. On the marathon day, the last stage was only supposed to be six kilometres - practically nothing - but seemed to stretch on for ever. At the end of Long Day, we were clicked in as usual, shabby, sandblown and reeking, and then passed over to the water-hander-outers. The marshal there, a French woman, was not only clean, but:

“Excuse me for saying this, I don’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but you smell…really nice…”
“All part of the service,” she said, and passed me my nine litres of water ration.

Just then, on cue, a sand storm started up that was to last the entire rest day. Sand got in everywhere, and it was impossible to leave the tent. I fell asleep, only to wake up to a mouth full of sand. Sleeping bags pulled over our heads and drawstringed tight only seemed to annoy the sand into wriggling its way into packs and cooking pots and shoes. For one moment it seemed like the weight savings we were making by eating our food every day would be countered by the amount of fine dirt that would end up embedded in our gear. To this day, back at home, I’m finding yellow dust falling out of things. My sleeping bag, about to go into its second wash, was more stock cube than bedding. As for my shirt, what was once white is now khaki, and the material around the base of my spine has gone hard and creased.

The marathon day was much of the same, if by now distinctly casual. As Chris, one of my tentmates, put it, any other marathon would have seen us resting up for days before, stretching for half an hour, carbo-loaded and ready to go. But for us, on day six, it was more a matter of packing up, throwing on our gear, and limping to the start. I don’t think I saw anyone even attempt to warm up after the second or third day. After the Dunes and the Long Day, the marathon stage seemed almost trivial. Certainly nothing to get worried about. 26 miles? No problem. See you for dinner.

We started, as always, with the Eurosport helicopter doing low passes, and the Moroccan twins sprinting off. (I’d seen them on the long day, where they held the top fifty runners back for three hours. They passed me after checkpoint two, running faster over rocky ground than I can on Tarmac. Truly, truly awesome.) I tried to run, and then slowed to a walk after a few miles - my ankle basically insisted - and finished in about eight hours, my ankle locked stiff, and my back aching from the way my now half empty pack had shifted its weight too low down. Tomorrow, though, we’d finish, and today there were always painkillers. Bless those doctors. I didn’t meet anyone who wasn’t on some form of painkiller by the end: any race that requires the use of heavy medication must be a bit suspect.

Finishing such a race was always going to be emotional. The final stage took us through small villages and into the town of Tagounite. At only 20km, with one checkpoint, it was much shorter than the previous stages, and for the first time we were running down streets. Streets that were, gloriously, lined with the local school children. To even see another person was curious, but to be cheered on after days of almost total silence out there in the sand was a huge boost. That morning I had vowed that no matter how much it hurt I was going to run the entire final stage. I put some Hendrix on my iPod, strapped everything down tight and dug in. By the time I reached the final turn, ninety degrees left on to a tarmac and the sight of the finish line, nothing hurt at all. I crossed the line in two hours and seven minutes, a pace fully twice as fast as the day before, was given my medal, an orange, some water and a packed lunch. Then I sat down and cried.

My placings, compared to the other runners, were quite variable. Because of my ankle, and the sandburn, my results in the Long Day, and the next day’s Marathon, were pretty low down - 533rd on the Long Day, 491st on the marathon. Stopping during the Long Day cost me around one hundred places, but probably saved my sanity. Either way, the final day, with its Hendrix powered sprint, saw me come in 261st.

In the end, I came in 482nd, with a total time of 54 hours 53 minutes and 49 seconds. This meant I took three times as long to finish as the winner. Which, given the heat and the conditions, makes me a great deal harder. Well, I’ll take that anyway. Next time, and I think there will be a next time, I’ll be much faster.

As for my injuries, the blisters are healed and the my legs gave up their sand to the shower over the next few days. I got off lightly there, especially compared to my fellow competitors. Many people had seriously traumatised feet - one guy lost most of the skin from his feet, and many people lost toenails, where blisters had developed underneath and popped them off. A lot of blisters went septic with infections from the sand, and more than a few people had to be wheelchaired off the plane at Gatwick. When the doctors stop their treatment to fetch the video camera, you know you’re in trouble, and when they then ban everyone from getting into the hotel swimming pool, to stop everything from dropping off and floating away, you know you’re not alone.

My ankle, it turns out, was broken. There are ligaments that connect to small bones just above the foot, and somewhere in the Dune Day I had rolled it, pulling the ligaments and taking the bones with them. That’s why it hurt then and it’s still swollen, but apart from some strapping there is nothing I can do but wait. Running the additional eighty miles or so probably didn’t help, but I’m glad I did.

If you’re planning on running the next MdS, you can email me with any questions.