The Marathon des Sables '99

This is an excerpt from my book 'A Rebel and a Runner' (out of print but sometimes on eBay) written back in 2016 that might provide an insight to the magic of the now 'MDS Legendary'.

Back in 1999, the Marathon des Sables was still a well-kept secret in the running community. I’d read about Chris Moon MBE, a former soldier who very unfortunately became a lower-leg amputee in 1995 when he was blown up by a land mine in Mozambique. In 1997, just two years after this tragic incident, he ran the MdS with an artificial leg. He was, and still is, such an inspirational guy and he's certainly the guy that most land mine amputees looked up to for guidance.

In 1998, after reading about Chris' incredible efforts at the MdS (and realising that we were actually the same age), one of my friends completed the race. I thought, ‘That looks INCREDIBLE!’ Not long afterwards, I was further bolstered by a sports programme I was watching on TV called Trans World Sport. It’s shown on Channel 4 on Saturday mornings and always shows highlights from bizarre sporting events around the globe - the MDS just happened to be featured! I thought, ‘I need to do that. I’M IN!'

By this stage I was a seasoned marathon runner having completed over 100 marathons in the previous calendar year alone. Some of these had been very gruelling indeed, so I knew that I was suitably committed to the task ahead. I often returned from races completely wiped out – I raced hard seeking that euphoria of setting a new PB. Tough and mucky trail runs have always been my favourite - those two magic ingredients that both make you incredibly fit and also make you realise how fit you are. Experience is a major advantage in this sort of a race - even now I spend a lot of time overtaking people half my age, especially in the latter stages of races. There they are, all these running ‘freshmen’ wearing kit that’s not appropriate for the job, and there’s me, the old boy, blasting past. Don’t get me wrong, we all have to start somewhere and that was me many years ago, but it's a bit of fun for the veteran in me!

So, I immediately ‘phoned Chris Lawrence, the UK co-ordinator of the MDS at that time: ‘I've done a hundred marathons this year,’ I said. ‘I really, really want to do this race.’ The reception I received wasn't quite what I was expecting as Chris is a very honest and blunt kind of guy, ‘I don’t care how many marathons you've run in the UK,’ came his reply, ‘This is different. You're running in extreme heat, you're carrying a rucksack with all your provisions for the week and it is really going to take you to your limits!’

‘It's going to test me?’ I thought and smiled. Well, let me tell you, I loved the sound of that. So, with my credit card in hand, I hungrily read out the long number and signed up, there and then.

There was just one tiny problem - I knew nothing about what running this race entailed… absolutely nothing at all. I thought, ‘Hey, it'll just be like running on the beach at Clacton-on-Sea, only a lot hotter.’ I’d run marathons in the height of the UK summer which hadn’t killed me, but not in the overwhelming heat of the Sahara.?

Still, I was very much up for the challenge. So, in my innocence, I went and bought a giant rucksack from my local outdoor camping shop and filled it to the brim with all the different kinds of food I reckoned I'd need together with an assortment of pots and a huge cooking stove. Then I thought, ‘I'll also go in fancy dress, why not?’ After all, I'd run a few marathons in fancy dress up to this point with my friend Big Dave Carter - mainly the big city ones like London and New York City Marathons. We’d had a complete ball – both of our outfits were made entirely from ‘Union Jack’ material by my wife’s sister who was a seamstress by trade - mine was a top hat and tails whereas Dave was a jester. So, for the MDS, I thought, ‘I'll wear a lightweight desert version of that and jazz it up by carrying an 8ft pole with a massive Union Jack flag hoisted on the top.’ I felt sure it was in my range and was pretty gung-ho about doing it, because I was only 37 years old at the time, and super fit. Armed with my costume and enough kit to make ‘Buckaroo’s Back’ break I flew out to Ouarzazate in Morocco.

Well, the first shock was when I got on the plane. There was a whole new audience of people to talk to and find out what kind of running they'd all done prior to the event. It meant I could find out if they were more out of their comfort zone that I was and I could also find seven other people to live with for the week for nine days. Eight people live together in a large open-sided Berber tent, in a large circular chorale of around 75 other tents. It was like picking a football team back at primary school based on joining up people you liked the look of, thinking you could live with them for the length of the race.?

Better still, the people I ended up sharing a tent with we're amazing. I was in there with three Cambridge rowers who'd raced in the famous university boat race. There was a printer from Yorkshire who was of a very similar age to me and in a similar kind of lifeboat to me as he was divorced and had three kids. And interestingly there was a lady who had married a Greek businessman who said she was only doing the MDS to prove to him that she could do it. She was super-tough and carried on even having broken a bone in her foot early on in the race. That whole scenario of going against the negativity people impart can impart on others, still fascinates me to this day. She smashed it and proved him wrong all the way to the finish!

So, imagine the scene: we're all there the day before it started, in our tent, chatting, wondering what to do with all this kit and food and all these energy powders we've brought with us, and what we should and shouldn't take. And it dawned on me: hold on: I'm carrying with me 13kg of equipment. Now, when I go, I take half that weight. But it was my first MDS and I had no idea to expect and what I'd need as I hadn't had my baptism of fire yet!

And boy did I learn the hard way. Back then I didn't wear any sand gaiters, which is something everyone at the race now wears. This meant that every 400 metres in the dunes, I’d have to take off my shoes, tip the sand out and then get running again - repeating this over and over again for 150 miles of the race was a totally tedious! However, I soon got quite immune to running with shoes full of sand and the distances before the ‘Tip Outs’ got longer as the race went on.

When I say I ran it, I really mean it: I ran that race! It was so liberating. As races go, it was a total revelation. My world at that moment went from black and white to 4k colour vision. It was the same feeling I experienced when I saw a man land on the moon at the age of seven. It completely bent my mind. There was the incredible desert landscape to take it, the superhot heat, the way it stripped you down to your very core. It didn't matter who you were, how much money you had, what you did for a living, you were completely stripped bare turned inside out and turned back again - and all you had to do was to go from A to B...and survive!?

I’d found my place in the world.

After the day's running and get back to my tent, the people I was living with turned out to be even better than I'd first thought. They were lovely people who were just like me: they were positive, can-do people, and they were there because they wanted to be there. We didn’t get to know the other tents at all. It was just me and my tent buddies. And these seven people became my support mechanism for the week. We shared a special ‘Dunkirk Spirit’. There were foot problems in our tent too. One of the Cambridge rowers completely trashed his feet and they ballooned. He couldn't even get them into his shoes on the last day. On that very morning, one of the guys accidentally trod on his toes. The moment it happened his head practically went through the roof of the tent; he was in pure agony. That was just one of many typical moments that we experienced together in the tent and of course all but two of us pissed our sides laughing.?

However, there were plenty of rules that you have to get used to when you first do MDS, one of which bring you have to, no matter what, carry 14,000 calories of food for the race. But that means you also have to be clever and carry very light weight energy rich provisions. Over time, it's something that I've managed to get down to the 6.5kg minimum pack weight.?

But then you’ve got other things that you might want to take, like a camera, a book, a notepad. All of which are considerations you have to weigh up carefully in your race preparations.

On top of that, you've also got your running kit considerations - what will you wear while crossing the desert. For me, the decision was simple: everyone else up to that point had seemed to compete in their regular running gear so that informed my decision to go in my Union Jack outfit complete with flag. I knew it was going to be tough, but I added my own stamp of toughness to give it extra oomph.

What I was thinking taking that massive cooking pot I'll never know. It was like something a character in Blazing Saddles might eat some beans out of. And then of course there was the large cooker I also took, with huge blocks of hexamine. These days it's considered so dangerous you're not even allowed to take something like that on the plane with you!?

Nothing can prepare you for that heat once you're out there running. The running distances at the MDS are generally broken down into four marathons over four days, with one 50-miler and then a shorter stage to finish. So, for the day of the 50-miler, I ran half of it alongside a guy called Charlie, who owned a milk farm in Sussex. He was running wearing a hat with horns on as a way of highlighting the Milk Marketing Board who’d sponsored him, and there I was with my Union Jack outfit. And it was great, just the two of us bounding along... until the sun set, and we got into the night section of the race. That was when it became a real physical and psychological test - because in the dark you have no idea where you're going, because all you can see is a disc of light on the floor from your head-torch. In reality have any idea at all where you are at all.

So, the experience of covering all this ground in the dark was bizarre. It meant that the whole time you were relying on the person manning the next checkpoint to tell you how far you've run. ‘You're at 50kms,’ or even better, ‘Welcome to 60kms - keep going!’ But in the dark it feels endless. It's pitch black apart from the lights you can see at each checkpoint ahead. But it's very misleading. You glimpse the lights and think, ‘I'm nearly there!’ An hour and a half later you're still going, ‘I'm still nearly there, only it's not getting any fucking closer!’

That's also part of the ‘Black Magic of MDS’ though. Every 500m there's a glow stick attached to a post, or a rock and they actually shine a green laser from the various checkpoints along the route all the way down to the finish line, which bends with the stratosphere. It's a real spectacle. One year, the moon was so bright the whole deserted landscape in front of me was illuminated and I was on my own running.??It was a bright surreal lunar daylight, so I turned my head-torch off, and with no one visible ahead or behind me, there was just the crunch-crunch-crunch of the gravelly sand beneath my feet, I was alone following the laser and felt peace with my maker. At that moment in time, the peace of the world descended upon me. It was just me, running at ease, at ease with my life, at ease with the world, following the laser, and following the markers. I had found my special place and moment in time. Ouarzazate, Merzouga, Tazzarine. These places in the Sahara Desert may mean nothing to most people - but to me they're the most special places on Earth.

Meanwhile back in Charlie World, his sunburn was really beginning to get to him. He'd gotten severely sunburnt on the back of his legs during the day section, so the medic had wrapped up his legs like a Mummy, all the way from the bottom to the top of his legs. So, throw in the fact that he also beginning to get very dehydrated, and the stuff he started coming out with after about 26 miles was really very strange indeed. At one point he was talking about his death, but I just thought, ‘Well, we're going at about the same speed and he'll do as a companion to get through this section.’ Which might sound a bit callous, but back then we didn't have iPods to keep us going. In 1999 we still relied on CD Discmans and as they weren’t an option, we all used each other to provide some form of entertainment.

But the whole day for me was a breeze ultimately, so when ITV saw me coming over the sand dunes and interviewed me, I said to camera, ‘We came here to party, and that's what we've done.’ And it's true. It was an absolutely party for me.??

There was such a diversity of jobs people had in my tent to learn more about. One guy was a computer expert, and I learnt all about what he did, while another guy in there with us was a lawyer whose main client was the British Government. For me, part of that magic was that it made me feel like I was a planet discovering all the other planets like me in our shared solar system. It was great to finally discover that there were other like-minded people, and here we all were together, having this adventure in the desert.

But then the MdS is always full of memorable characters. That year, there was a blind guy called Miles Hilton-Barber who spent the whole race climbing sand and huge jebels with his guide Steve Cook, it was an amazing thing to witness. Steve would direct him over the sand and the mountains telling him exactly where he should tread and how fast he should run saying, ‘Go up, go right, go left, go slow, mind that rock!’ He had Miles on a leash like a dog for the entire race. Miles got the credit for the completing the race, Steve got my credit for his selfless action as he had to manage and cook for Miles for the entire race too.?

Back in year one of my MdS career, I was likewise bonded with all the other characters there who we're experiencing the same things as me. Plus, you're bonded by the lack of facilities out there. You can't shower, and you have a limited amount of water - the maximum we were allowed to use was 13.5 litres a day. So, there were days when actually I didn't pee much at all because your body is trying to hold onto as much water as possible. I was totally dehydrated at stages. The fact that I was also running in a cotton t-shirt, also didn't help things. Neither did the sub-par socks I was running in. I had to customise my Union Jack Suit and Tails on the run too suit by taking off the buttons at the back with a penknife because it was beginning to rub my back under my heavy rucksack. But making all these mistakes and then not being able to brush your teeth, have a shower or a shave in the desert made running MDS even tougher and even better in my opinion. This was my apprenticeship. I loved learning on the hoof. I've never failed to get to the end of any race, and that was my mentality back then. Throw me in at the deep end and I’ll finish, I knew that.

Other runners out there that year weren't so tenacious or as strong-willed, especially when it came to one guy's snoring. His tent-mates said it was like sleeping next to a diesel generator. So naturally, he became a rare race casualty as his mates getting so frustrated with his snoring took all his stuff and moved it to half a mile out in the desert. I could hear him a few tents up and it sounded like someone was doing some late-night hoovering. The funny thing is, it's always the people who snore who go to sleep first.

But there's no question me spending all that time out in the desert helped make my mind clearer. While I was running, it dawned on me that actually the things we cherish the most aren't don’t have an actual value. I learnt that money isn't important. I learnt that my job wasn't important, that possessions weren't important. You realise that people are important, as are relationships. It's thoughts like these that make MDS my spiritual retreat.??

That first MdS gave me clarity. It makes me want to keep going back to MdS, to recapture that same feeling. I always say that people who do the race are either running towards something or they're running away from it. At my first MDS, I was in the throes of going through a divorce from my first wife. And it eventually led to me quitting my job. It may have been highly paid, but it didn’t give me the satisfaction anymore. I think that's why leading up to my first MDS I gave so much of myself to it. Other parts of my life were falling apart, so I put more effort into the parts that weren't. The collapse of my marriage actually made me a better runner because when you feel shit about situation, going for a run makes you feel a whole lot better about yourself. By setting multiple running world records, as I did in that year before my first MDS, and running across the desert, I was succeeded at something in some very dark times. Running provided the success I needed.?

The MDS has had such a profound effect on me. It does every year yet when I’m back in the UK post event. I always get a strange feeling as it feels like the MDS is an imaginary world like the Enid Blyton story, The Faraway Tree. This is the story where lands revolve around a tree, and the children in the story go to different places for different adventures. I'm here, right now, at my home in Cardiff, but how do I know Ouarzazate is still there? Is the desert still there when I’m here? Have I really done the MDS? It's like running but also it's like having been part of a fantasy too. Even now, when I watch videos on YouTube of the finish of the race for example, it strikes me profoundly, like, ‘Gosh, there I am!’ It's hard for me to explain how that outer body worldliness that MDS creates me feel, but it's also hard to grasp whether it really exists. That's how surreal it is to run across sand dunes in brilliant moonlight with seemingly no one else in the world gets you.

Getting to the end of the race, on the final day, was also like an experience from another world. We ran into a place called Erfoud, into the town square that year. And no matter where MDS finishes, the experience is always the same. As you watch the other competitors come in, it is unlike any other marathon finish imaginable. The finish at the London Marathon is great, but the MDS is electric, literally. You can literally hold your hands up and feel the electricity; it makes my palms feel really hot. It's practically crackling and like holding your hands towards a fire. It is magical. Just even describing it now makes me so emotional I feel like I'm going to well up at any moment. Every day of my working life, clients say to me, ‘Yes, but at the end, what's it like?’ and I can try to describe it, but it's like describing colour to a blind man. You’ll have to see it for yourself. How hot is it? If you've got a fan oven, turn it up to 200° then open the door. It's unbelievably hot. How steep is it? Imagine climbing Mount Snowdon in Wales at over 1000 metres, but doing it three times, while trying to cover a 50-mile distance in one day carrying a rucksack with 6.5kgs in it. It's intense. And that’s why I love it.

That's why it was so difficult for me when I returned home from the race once it'd been done. I suddenly went from that feeling at being at the best party in the world to...I don't know what. What I had I now call 'Post-Traumatic Race Disorder.' Back then we were in the very early days of email, a time when people just used email to send each other jokes. But then one of the runners that did the race sent an email round to each of us who'd been there, and it just said, 'Work is Shit'. And everyone replied to him in complete agreement. Nothing in the UK ticked my boxes.?

?I just spent a month with my feet up on the desk. I didn't want to be back in the real world at all. I just wanted to be back in the desert. There was something deeper about being over there, something more real and far more spiritual.

?I’d been MDSed…and still am 26 years later.

1,211 Marathons - 288 Ultras - 9 Guinness World Records - 17 MDS - 1 Life