6 Marathons in 6 Days? Are You Nuts??!

That's the typical response I get when people discover what I'm attempting, but then running 245kms across the Sahara desert is no easy feat. One of the reasons that I’m taking on this challenge is ‘mid life crisis’ – plain and simple. But there’s another, more relevant reason:

UNICEF is currently working to maintain a number of refugee camp schools to help the 100’s of thousands of children from Darfur that have been displaced from their homes. Most of these child refugees from Darfur have never been to school, living in massive makeshift refugee camps, often having lost one or both parents through violence.” These school perform a vital function and I want to help make a difference by using this opportunity to raise funds and awareness for their maintencance and upkeep.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The Marathon Des Sables Looms Closer

Training this week was pretty decent. For my big run I left my house in Dundarave and ran with a 20lb pack up to the ski lifts on Hollyburn Mountain in Cyprus Park and back again – about 30km and a few thousand feet of elevation gain. I felt surprisingly good through most of it, never felt gassed and never lost my focus. The only tough part was dealing with the road’s caber which stressed the inside of my left ankle. Nothing too major though and so long as I go easy for a few days I should be injury free.

What else is going on? I signed up for the knee knacker – a 50km trail run from horseshoe bay to deep cove with just over 16000 feet of elevation change. It’s one of the 10 toughest rail runs in North America and Canada’s largest ultra trail marathon.

Damn you Chris for getting me thinking about this… But seriously, it seems like a good challenge. It’s coming up in July and it would be a shame to let all this MDS training go to waste. The distance shouldn’t be too much of an issue – the big problem will be covering the distance before the cut off times.

I’m still debating whether or not to do one more big training run, or to start tapering a little early. I’ve reconciled myself with the fact that this will not be my fastest race and am leaning more towards injury prevention in training this close to race day. In less than 4 weeks I’ll be heading out to Morocco and I’ve started working on getting all the details of my gear finalized.

I’ve also got to book an appointment for the doctor next week. I need to find out my blood type, have a physical and an ECG and then have my doctor sign off all the paperwork indicating that I’m fit enough to participate. It looks like the next few weeks will be consumed by the details.

I’ve also heard that there’s a website where you can follow my race progress online, seeing how I’m doing or whether I’ve been DQ’d. You can also send racers email messages that the organizers print off and distribute each night. I’ll try to find the link and post it here in the next few days.
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