http://diabetes-exercise.org/forum/tags/marathon-des-sables Diabetes Exercise and Sports Association Tag: Marathon des Sables - Recent Topics en-US Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:59:08 +0000 http://bbpress.org/?v=1.0.1 q http://diabetes-exercise.org/forum/search.php http://diabetes-exercise.org/forum/topic/the-marathon-des-sables#post-45 Sun, 20 Dec 2009 06:22:44 +0000 alex_of_oz 45@http://diabetes-exercise.org/forum/ <p>Hi,</p> <p>People may be interested to know that I am competing in the 2010 Marathon des Sables across the Sahara desert in Morocco. It took a month of phone calls to England and Paris just to ascertain that they wouldn&#39;t block my entry. Then the training began.</p> <p>That was May 2008 and the training has been full-on since then. Due to my age, the danger with the diabetes and injuries from past running (when I didn&#39;t know what I was doing), I am walking the event, not running. So for me it is entirely an endurance event, not a race.</p> <p>For those not familiar with this event, it is a 7 day, 250km race across the Sahara desert carrying all of your food and gear in a backpack. There are many parameters, such as a maximum pack weight of 15kg and minimum weight of 9kg. Each competitor must have a minimum of 2000 calories in their pack for each day of the event, but I&#39;ll be taking much more than that.</p> <p>The course is carefully planned out, but kept secret until starting day, to emulate a famous run performed by a French adventurer many years ago. So the days follow the pattern of approximately 26km, 35km, 32km, 80km, 42km, 25km. The 80km section is followed by a rest day before the marathon section.</p> <p>My training has reached a high pitch with less than 15 weeks to go. My last training walk was yesterday, when I covered 62km of wilderness here in Australia at a huge national park called Wilsons Prom. I started with a backpack weighing approximately 14kg. Due to the magic and power of modern technology and the web, you can see exactly where I walked and the times I took by going to this link, which is a tracking page for a satellite tracking device I have. It&#39;s very easy and quite magic - <a href="http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0yU8nVaVg8NUG8kHhik9dUlYY9zU3Wpz2" rel="nofollow">http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0yU8nVaVg8NUG8kHhik9dUlYY9zU3Wpz2</a>. If this link isn&#39;t a &quot;hot&quot; link, just copy and paste into your browser.</p> <p>The countdown has begun for me to show type 1 diabetics around the world that we can still live a healthy and adventurous life.</p> <p>Alex </p>