Marathon des Sables

At this footrace, billed as the world's toughest, even the stoutest of competitors couldn't avoid getting Saharan sand kicked (and blown) in their faces

His left eye fused shut by sand, sweat and tears, and his right eye barely functional behind his sand-shielding sunglasses, Doug Gallaher was suddenly without tracks to follow as darkness fell on the Sahara on April 10, the fourth day of the 17th Marathon des Sables. "The wind was howling, I could barely see anything, and I was all alone surrounded by 300-foot-high dunes," recalls the 33-year-old Web developer from San Francisco. "Up to that point the race had been ... I wouldn't say a fun thing, but a challenging thing. Suddenly it became a serious thing that could have much bigger consequences than I had imagined. That's when I had my little insanity breakdown."

Almost everyone who attempts the weeklong Marathon des Sables (or the Marathon of the Sands) has one eventually: That moment of truth when the blistering heat or the blinding sandstorms or the steady diet of freeze-dried food drives him to the edge of despair. It is one of the reasons Patrick Bauer, a former concert promoter from Troyes, France, who concocted the event in 1986, proudly bills the MdS as "the toughest footrace on earth." Bauer's inspiration for creating it came in 1984, when he walked 200 miles alone across the Algerian Sahara. He found the experience so harsh and clarifying that he realized he could create a similar event in which people would pay to participate.

The resulting annual ordeal, which begins in the middle of the desert, four hours from Ouarzazate, Morocco, and ends in the small Moroccan village of Foum Zguit, requires its 600 or so participants to run the equivalent of more than five marathons in six stages over seven days. The exact course and conditions vary, but typically there is one marathon stage of 26.2 miles and one 50-mile leg that runners have 40 hours to complete, as well as one "dune day" that includes roughly 14 miles up and down large walls of sand. All told, participants cover about 142 miles running, walking or hobbling over rocky plateaus, dried lake and river beds, village streets and sand dunes, often in punishing sandstorms and heat that can reach 120°. Race organizers provide nine liters of water a day and spartan Berber accommodations (nine to a burlap-sack tent) at night. Every other necessity, such as a sleeping bag, a distress flare, an antivenom pump (in case of snakebites) and food for seven days, must be lugged by the runner. Though some medical aid is available, any racer who requires more than one IV is disqualified and must suffer the humiliation of having his or her name added to the QUITTERS list posted outside the bivouac headquarters.

The only requirements for entry are $2,600 (including a mandatory "corpse repatriation fee") and evidence of a recent electrocardiogram and medical exam. (Evidence of a recent psychiatric checkup is, apparently, optional.) While many of the participants are accomplished endurance athletes looking for a new challenge, some are regular folk with an adventurous spirit but little idea of what they are getting into. Nevertheless, only one participant has expired en route -- a Frenchman in his 20s died of a massive heart attack during the 1988 race -- and only one has been lost for more than a day. In 1994 Mauro Prosperi of Sicily got lost in a sandstorm and wandered the desert for nine days, living off captured bats before being found 125 miles off course and some 40 pounds lighter. Calling the experience both "terrible" and "great," Prosperi returned to compete in 1998, only to be felled by a severely stubbed toe.

Gallaher, an experienced marathoner and triathlete who had signed up for the MdS as part of Team Clif Bar a year and a half ago as a way to forget a failed love affair, would have better luck than Prosperi. Alone among the dunes on that bleak night of April 10 (in a stroke of cruel genius, event organizers had made dune day part of the 50-mile nonstop stage) and weeping sand from every crevice and orifice, Gallaher backtracked until he met up with some other racers, with whom he traveled until the dunes were behind them. When he finally staggered into the race checkpoint around 9:30 that night, Gallaher was focused on a single task: fashioning nighttime goggles out of a scarf and a cut-up water bottle to keep the infernal sand out of his eyes. "I was crazed; I kept thinking, I ... must ... make ... goggles!" says Gallaher, who would finish the race in 23rd place. "Then the wind picked up and blew my whole project away."

With the wind at a constant roar and the temperatures never breaking 90 in the day and plummeting to the 40s at night, this year's race was strangely devoid of the furnacelike heat for which the event is so famous, yet it arguably had the most adverse conditions in MdS history. "The story of this race was sand and wind and cold," says Gallaher. "We were braced for sweltering heat, but we didn't get it. I had no pants, no jacket. We didn't bring stoves because we thought we'd be able to cook stuff directly in the sun. The best we could do was half-cook stuff. I ate a lot of crunchy pasta."

Some of that crunch was sand. Gallaher and his Team Clif Bar teammate Stephen Houghton, a Web manager and office raconteur at Clif Bar, the Berkeley, Calif.-based energy-bar company, had wisely spent a month and a half before the race designing and testing gaiters to keep sand out of their shoes. But they didn't have much success keeping it out of anything else. The sandstorms were so relentless that racers were occasionally envious of the eight Brits who took turns wearing a 20-pound rhino costume on behalf of the London-based Save the Rhino foundation. In addition to providing some additional protection from the blowing sand, the rhino costume established the race's minimum standard of achievement among some runners. "People would say, 'At least I beat the rhino,' or, 'I thought I was doing well until the rhino passed me,'" says Gallaher. Team Rhino finished the race, a big improvement over the 2000 performance of a fellow Brit who raced in a full bunny costume for less than three days before he abandoned it and whatever cause he was promoting and joined the quitters' list.

Day 5, an off day for those who had completed Stage 4 the night before, offered up the worst of the week's sandstorms. To avoid a continual blast, Gallaher passed most of the day zipped into his sleeping bag inside the sievelike tent he shared with Houghton, teammate Kory Helean and six others. "Everyone was miserable," says Gallaher. "Just facing a trip to the bathroom [primitive squatty potties of which the short privacy screens had been blown away by the wind] was a horrible decision to make."

That day Gallaher mustered the courage to visit the medical tent to tend to a blood blister, another horrible decision. When a medic mercilessly jabbed a scalpel underneath his second left toenail to pop the blister, he unleashed a bloodcurdling scream. "It was agony," he says. "My toe throbbed for days."

Even so, Gallaher was relieved when Day 6 and its marathon-length run rolled around. After painfully slipping into his running shoes -- which were, as recommended, a size and a half bigger than his usual shoes -- he briskly set off straight into the same head wind that had been torturing him for the previous four days. "It was still windy, but after a day of being trapped in our tents, we were finally doing something, and it was like we had a new lease on life," says Gallaher. "People ran really fast. It felt like a real marathon; it was by far the most competitive day. If you could finish that, you knew you'd finish the whole thing."

After Houghton crossed the finish line on a paved street in Foum Zguit after the final 12-mile run on Day 7, one of only two days when the sand didn't blow, he cried a little. "On one hand I thought that day would never come; on the other, I was already mourning the loss of the whole adventure," says Houghton, who came in 299th. "I'd do it again in a heartbeat, though probably not next year. I think I have enough stories for the watercooler to last me awhile."

Issue date: April 29, 2002

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