Choosing your food for the Marathon des Sables
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Food selection for the Marathon des Sables is a hugely personal choice (as you might expect), however, is also a delicate balance between hydration (i.e., not taking too much dry or salty food), morale (because the race is hard work, if you hadn’t already realised), and weight (well, obvs).
As a larger runner (I’m 6’ 2” / 188cm and was 97 kilograms at the time), my strategy for what I chose to eat was based on the meal and what I was likely doing at the time.
Breakfast
The first meal of the day is clearly an important one as you want it to be slow-release energy, taste good, and give you a little morale. You’ve slept for as many hours as you can, so your energy levels are already likely to be low before you even get to the start line.
Every morning I’d start the day with an instant 3-in-1 Coffee (either cappuccino or latte), which I’d sometimes mix with a hot chocolate for extra carbohydrates and a little sugar to make me more mentally alert.
Some of the boiling water would also be used to make my breakfast, which would be pre-flavoured porridge oats, another slow-release carb-heavy food source. A few of the mornings would also see me have a few chunks of dried mango as well, but these were more of a morale boost used strategically for when I thought I might need a treat.
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Lunch / Snacks
My ‘lunch’ would consist of snacks eaten throughout the race time, usually spaced out for when I would reach each aid station so as to drink water with it. I used flavoured peanuts, oat bar flapjacks (not high protein versions as my other food article infers) beef jerky, cranberry or raisin ‘trail mix’ (nuts with a little dried fruit), so as to keep my blood sugar and sodium levels as stable as possible and reduce the risk and mental burden of ‘bonking’!
Whilst the days can sometimes feel long, the time between breakfast and dinner isn’t actually all that long so I kept my lunch snacks pretty much restricted to what would fit in my front bag pouches for accessibility.
Dinner
My dinner every day consisted of a dehydrated meal cooked using the dried wood and scrub that can easily be found blowing around the campsite. As you can see from my diet and nutrition article, dinner was between 600 and 830 calories, which I would occasionally pad out with some dehydrated noodles) for nights when I thought I might need extra calories or moral (if you’ve done other adventures, you’ll know how much morale some hot noodles can bring when you’re questioning your choices!).
