How to plan for and cover the daily distance on the Marathon des Sables
For context to give you an idea of the race distances: I came 461st out of 752 finishers (783 started, meaning that 31 DNF – giving a 96% finish rate) with a total elapsed time of 42 hours, 53 minutes, and 42 seconds.
To aid your navigation, water consumption, and generally planning for the distance, you’re given a comprehensive manual on the pre-race admin day - this is invaluable to your planning.
From this, you can commit the general route to memory so that you know roughly how long it is between each checkpoint (for managing your water consumption and breaks).
I used a combination of a Garmin Fenix watch to track the distance, the travel speed (i.e., 3 kilometres per hour on very sandy terrain), and the book to build an estimate of how long it would be between the checkpoints so we could ensure water wasn’t consumed too quickly, but that you’d also not arrive at the next one carrying water unnecessarily (notably, there were always hundreds of full or semi-full bottles of water at each CP when we tackled it in 2019 – however this clearly may not be the case in hotter years).
Get 8000 words of our first-hand knowledge in our digital guidebook:
By way of an example, this is the daily distance and broken down between the checkpoints.
Day 1
Total distance: 32.2km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 1: 11.4km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 2: 21.1km
Maximum time to complete: 10 hours
Day 2
Total distance: 32.5km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 1: 13km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 2: 26km
Maximum time to complete: 11 hours
Day 3
Total distance: 37.1km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 1: 10.7km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 2: 22.7km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 3: 31.7km
Maximum time to complete: 11 hours
Days 4 and 5
Total distance: 76.3km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 1: 12.7km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 2: 25.6km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 3: 37.7km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 4: 50.7km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 5: 61km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 6: 71.1km
Maximum time to complete: 31 hours
Day 6
Total distance: 42.2km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 1: 12.4km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 2: 23.3km
Distance from start line to checkpoint 3: 32.5km
Maximum time to complete: 12 hours
Day 7 (charity day)
Total distance: 6.1km
The wear and tear the desert takes on your body - blister management is a big part of the MdS!
