On the fourth and longest day of the race, he was placed seventh and was starting to wonder if he had a shot at winning.īut he didn't realise a monster was headed his way. Prosperi covered 96km of sand dunes, salt beds and rocks in three days. He promised her the worst thing that could happen to him out there was a little sunburn. Prosperi said he had to sign a form with instructions on where race organisers should send his body should he die: back to his wife, Cinzia, in Sicily. "I love a challenge, so I started training immediately, running 40km a day, reducing the amount of water I was drinking to get used to dehydration.
The race is monitored from two helicopters, with 45 medical officers nearby and 120,000 litres of drinking water provided at checkpoints along the route. These days, up to 1,200 people compete in the Marathon des Sables, all of them carrying GPS beacons. 'There's this amazing marathon in the desert' This is how a 39-year-old Italian Olympian says he survived 10 days in the desert - and why one man insisted it was all a lie. I repeated to myself, 'Do not surrender'." "Every thought, every movement of my body, was devoted to surviving. "While I was out there all those days, wandering alone, I became like an animal, a desert creature that lives by the rules of the sun and behaves entirely on instinct," Mauro Prosperi would tell Men's Journal four years after that fateful race.
However, only one man can say he lost his way during a sandstorm, veered almost 300km off-course and emerged a week later with an incredible tale of survival as well as a new nickname: The Robinson Crusoe of the Sahara. This year, 47 per cent of runners dropped out before the end of the race.įor those who do stumble across the finishing line - blistered, dehydrated and sometimes hallucinating - they can proudly say they completed one of the toughest endurance races in the world.
That's like running six marathons in a hot oven, with 10 kilograms of food and gear strapped to your back. To understand the intensity of the Marathon des Sables, we need to look at the numbers: a six-day race, winding 251 kilometres through the Sahara Desert, with a midday sun that can push temperatures as high as 50 degrees Celsius.
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