About Marathon Des Sables

The Marathon Des Sables (MdS) is known as the toughest footrace on Earth. The distance covered is 243km's in the Sahara desert, run in 49 degrees Celsius heat while every athlete carries his or her own equipment, food etc. weighing in at around 9-13kg's.

This blog is aimed at telling my story. I will record my preparation for the MdS 2013 in detail in the hope that it will help my fellow runners.

Monday, 6 February 2012

Another great week!


"Always train hard and plan with great care"
Sir. Ranulph Fiennes 2007


I had a great training week, clocking 55km’s and running a total of 7 hours for the week. I broke the week down into a long run (Friday), two 10km’s on Monday and Wednesday and three relaxing runs on Tuesday, Thursday and over the weekend. The long run was 19km’s and represents 35% of my week total.

My wonderful wife, and running partner, and I celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary on Saturday. Over indulgence had a price to pay and my Sunday afternoon run was difficult although only 5.4km’s in distance.

Of the 55km’s for the week 15.7km’s was run on uneven cross country terrain so my feet and ankles are getting the exercise needed to strengthen it.

Over the next three weeks the distance will primarily remain the same but I will work on improving my running time per km. At present my average running time is around 8.1km/hour. My aim is to get this closer to 9km/hour.

Living in South Africa has some advantages, (1) I live and train around 1,600m above sea level which means that I am training my body to cope with much less oxygen then a runner that trains at sea level. I also (2) train in summer temperatures ranging between 30 and 36 degrees Celsius. The past week the temperatures hovered around the 31 degC mark.

The final arrangements with the local South African charity are nearing completion. I am very excited about this project and can’t wait to get started.

Good luck with your training and once again thank you for visiting my blog.

Genis




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