Run the Marathon des Sables
The stage lengths are printed on a card you get the night before, and the jump from 30km to 80-plus km never stops feeling unfair. You carry six days of food from the first step, because nothing else is coming except water at the checkpoints. People obsess over shoes and blisters, but it's the food bag that breaks you — too little and day four is misery, too much and every dune is a small betrayal. Entries fill more than a year ahead, so by the time you're standing at the start in the Moroccan heat you've had months to dread this exact moment. What you remember afterwards is the smell of your own bag, unopened, on the flight home.
Practical
- Cost
- $4,000–5,500
- Best time
- April, before the Sahara heat becomes extreme
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Time it takes
- Six days of racing, plus a year of training and entry lead time
- What people get wrong
- People overpack food for comfort and pay for it in weight by day three; others undertrain for heat and sand rather than distance, and underestimate how much the long stage (80km-plus) breaks people who haven't run through a night before.
- With
- Alone