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.

Thursday, 22 March 2012

What a Run


Heat, sand, distance, and oh yes the wind! 

My training is coming along just fine.I will be doing 86km's this week and 95km's next week. Getting both stronger and faster running with 7kg's of weight on my back. I will have to get to the UK to speak to Rory Coleman, who has done eight Marathon des Sables, about how to keep the race pack weight down.

Below is a photo of my 10km run with 7kg's in 28 degrees Celsius today.



10km's with 7kg's on my back in 57 min and 25 seconds is an average time of 5:45 per kilometer or an average speed of 10.43 km/h.

Tomorrow is 30km's with 7kg's of weight and 2 weeks from tomorrow is a 100km three day training run. It will be a great opportunity to expand my nutrition experiment. I will keep everyone up to date by publishing some details on this blog.

I have also received my new Kestrel Talon TT custom carbon triathlon bike with which I will be doing the IronMan 70.3 in January 2013 as strength training for the MdS.


Thanks for visiting my blog, see you soon.

Genis

2 comments:

  1. Can you give me a brief outline of the different muscles one would need to exercise apart from the obvious leg muscles, to build core strength and what exercising I would need to do apart from running to build the needed strength.

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  2. An excellent article describing how to build core strength can be found in the February 2012 Runner's World (page 56-59). www.runnersworld.co.za

    In short, however, the following muscles are associated with core strength and, if developed, provides stability which translates into improved running performance.

    (1) Abdominal Muscles, 2) Oblique Muscles and 3) Spinal Muscles.

    I will post an article detailing the most appropriate exercises within the next week or two, in the interim the following link should get you started.

    http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/core-strength/SM00047

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