On April 3, almost 1,500 entrants will tackle 250km of the Sahara in the Marathon des Sables, one of the greatest tests of willpower and endurance on the planet.
About 1,490 runners from 46 countries will gather in Morocco on April 3 for the 30th Marathon des Sables, a gruelling, 250-kilometre foot race through the Sahara Desert.
The race is run over six stages on successive days. Each competitor must carry their own food, water and sleeping gear and, judging by last year’s race when about 10 per cent of the field succumbed to the harsh conditions and pulled out, not all of them will make it.
More often than not the Marathon des Sables is won by a Moroccan – 19 times in the past 30 years – although winners have also come from France, Russia and Jordan.
The MDS, as the regulars call it, is not a race for the faint-hearted. Will-draining heat, strength-sapping sand and disorientating winds take their toll.
In 1994, for instance, a sandstorm engulfed competitors halfway through the event and Italian Olympic pentathlete Mauro Prosperi became seriously lost. He was missing for nine days, having run 299km in the wrong direction and over the border into Algeria.
The 39-year-old policeman survived by snacking on passing reptiles and insects, and drinking the blood of bats he found in an abandoned shrine. By the time he was rescued he had lost 18 kilograms, and drunk enough bat blood to last a lifetime.
Undeterred, Prosperi returned to the MDS in 1998. Once again he failed to finish, but this time the cause of his retirement was less dramatic – a badly stubbed toe.
So what’s the big attraction?
One man who has a pretty shrewd idea is Rory Coleman who, having run 12 of the beasts, is not only more familiar with the Marathon des Sables than most but has also knocked off more than his fair share of “ordinary” marathons – 896, to be precise.
Everyone who signs up for any marathon, let alone the Marathon des Sables, “is on a journey”, says the Cardiff, UK-based performance coach – and he means figuratively as well as literally. “We always say you’re either running away from something or you’re running towards something else.”
Coleman, now aged 53, was certainly running away from something when he ran his first marathon at the age of 31 – himself.
“I was a 10-pint drinker, 40-a-day smoker, and one day I just changed it,” he says. “I felt really ill and tired of being this awful person. I looked at the mirror and thought, ‘I hate myself’.”
He quit drinking and smoking and bought some running shoes.
“I didn’t set out to run a marathon. I just went for a jog and I got about 100 paces. But I haven’t looked back since.”
He certainly hasn’t. With a dozen Marathons des Sables under his belt, Coleman has become an ultramarathon coaching guru. This year he has prepared 100 of the entrants, including 47-year-old Lesley Jones from Dubai, who as part of her tough training schedule for the MDS ran January’s Dubai marathon in a swift 3 hours, 28 minutes.
His star client this year is without doubt Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the British adventurer who, with Coleman at his side, will be taking on the Sahara at the age of 71 and aiming to add £3 million (Dh16.4m) to the £16m he has already raised for the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity.
Coleman attributes the success of marathons, and ultramarathons such as the MDS, to the modern need to define oneself as an individual in an age of increasing globalisation and homogeneity.
“Your typical MDS runner is a 40-year-old accountant who works in the city, and they’re trying to do something that’s just for them,” he says. “They’ve got to 40 and suddenly they realise they are looking at life in the rear-view mirror, that there are fewer tomorrows and more yesterdays.”
For many “ordinary” competitors for whom the MDS will be the greatest challenge of their lives, the event serves as the ultimate test of self and character – a wild gamble that they are more than they appear to be. As the organisers of the MDS noted after last year’s race, “on a human level, all of the finishers won their crazy bet”.
That whiff of existential panic was certainly the inspiration for Jim Fixx, an overweight, 35-year-old journalist who in 1967 decided it was time to quit smoking, lose some weight and start running.
When he did, he fired the starting pistol on what has become a modern phenomenon – jogging and the marathon, the pedigree behind the MDS and the other extreme ultramarathons that are growing ever more common.
The notion of the marathon stems from the legend of a Greek messenger who in 490BC supposedly ran about 40km from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens, bearing news of a Greek victory over the Persian army.
By rights, marathon running should have died there and then – the legend also has it that, having delivered his good news, the messenger promptly dropped dead.
Nevertheless, the marathon was introduced as an event at the first modern Olympics in 1896, but it wasn’t until London hosted the tournament in 1908 that the quirky distance of 26.2 miles (42.195km) was set – reportedly to accommodate a regal request that the event finish in front of the royal box.
But in 1967, the marathon remained an elite event, untrammelled by the participation of the masses. Boston hosts the world’s oldest annual marathon, run ever since 1896. This year, about 30,000 will line up for the start on April 20. In 1967 there were just a few hundred, and it was Fixx who helped to change all that.
In 1977 Random House published Fixx’s The Complete Book of Running, a mix of practical and near-spiritual musings on running that went on to sell over one million copies in the US and inspired a generation of baby boomers to follow in his footsteps.
Once again, the marathon would survive a hero’s death. On July 20, 1984, Fixx, by now 52 and the bestselling inspiration for millions of joggers around the world, dropped dead while out for a run.
An autopsy showed Fixx had been living for years with arteriosclerosis, increasingly blocked arteries, and that finally his heart had been fatally starved of blood. The condition was, perhaps, a mixed legacy of family history and his earlier lifestyle. He could have died at any time, and running had neither killed him nor saved him.
Fixx’s impact lives on. Today, millions run for fun and health and many think nothing of taking on the marathon.
And here, I should declare an interest. Inspired by Fixx’s book, I too followed in his footsteps and rebuilt myself, discovering in the process why they call it a “personal best” (3:17.32 since you ask, set at the 1994 London Marathon).
These days, says Coleman, “doing a marathon just isn’t enough. If I’d said to people 20 years ago, ‘I’ve just done the London Marathon’, they’d go, ‘Wow, that’s amazing, incredible!’ If you say it now, they just go, ‘And? What do you want? A medal?’”.
But it’s not about the medal. For Coleman, the true legacy of Fixx and the others who started the running boom is that, thanks to them, millions have discovered and exploited their full physical and mental human potential.
Those who pass through Coleman’s hands are, he says, “searching, looking for themselves. They want to do something significant, for and by themselves”.
In the process, “they might get to be the fittest they’ve ever been in their life and they go through a real change – down from 100kg to 70kg in 12 months. And I’m talking couch potatoes, people who might not have ever run before”.
The secret, says Coleman, is that “deep down, everybody who comes to see me is elite”.
And while many may turn to running in a bid to outrun the fate that shadows us all, finding one’s inner Lemi Berhanu is about far more than simply raging against the dying of the light.
Every outing in running shoes – from that will-powered 5am pre-work jog to the world’s toughest ultramarathon – is essentially the definitive solitary event, during which each runner must reach deep down inside themselves.
Yet it is also one of the greatest expressions of the human spirit and need for community.
Every runner, whether they are lining up for their local 5km fun run or heading to Morocco this week for one of the toughest races on Earth, will suffer alone.
But they will do so as part of a literal human race, taking part in one of the few mass gatherings of people that bring together vast numbers not in anger, protest or politics, but in a pure celebration of what it means to be alive.
And Jim Fixx would be proud of every one of them.
newsdesk@thenational.ae
