Hi,
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't block my entry. Then the training began.
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'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.
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'll be taking much more than that.
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.
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's very easy and quite magic - http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0yU8nVaVg8NUG8kHhik9dUlYY9zU3Wpz2. If this link isn't a "hot" link, just copy and paste into your browser.
The countdown has begun for me to show type 1 diabetics around the world that we can still live a healthy and adventurous life.
Alex
