02/04/2009

01/04/2009

31/03/2009

30/03/2009

29/03/2009

28/03/2009

We don’t look like Desert runners, we look better like dipped Touaregs … We’ve got two days of intense raining in the desert.

Yesterday already we were on the verge of not being able to continue Ouarzazate’s trip to the camp through the fault of a river exceeded (In the photo a truck of the organization crossing it). Ultimately we find the zone where we should have passed the night  absolutely flooded, meeting obliged to sleep in a Hotel in Erfoud. But during the night it has continued raining, and today on Saturday also it will be impossible to stay in the camp.

So seriously it is the situation, which the organization, for the first time in his 23 years of history, has seen bound to annul the first stage foreseen for tomorrow on Sunday.

This way so, this 24 Edition of the ” Marathon des Sables “, it will have a stage less this year. They have annulled the first one and, theoretically, easier of the foreseen stages; but now what worries is the factor dampness.

The organization is worried because if next days it turns the Sun, since it’s foreseen, with the intense rains of these days, there will be a relative very high dampness and it can endure a too high hardness for many participants in the race. The years in which there have been more cases of abandons, always it has been for the fatal combination of these two aspects: A lot of heat and many dampness.

In some edition, even they have had to cut stages away because the people were falling as flies as consequence of the strongest dehydration provoked by the high dampness.

Meanwhile, we do not still have any more option that to be having patience and to wait for events in the Hotel where they have installed us. We consume the time doing these writings, checking for umpteenth time the material, doing some tea in the terraces of the village (like you see in the photo), and explaining adventure stories some to others.

In any case, nobody is satisfied with this cancellation, since what we want all is to start already running. And now, though it seems that we have to meet benefited by a cut of miles, we see clear that we will be in a very delicate conditions to be able to support an intense heat simultaneously that the highest dampness.

28/03/2009

27/03/2009

24/03/2009

Within all the activities that we have done during our life, this one has been the occasion in which we have needed to be more meticulous on preparing the rucksack. In motorcycle, in bicycle or, even, climbing or doing trekking in the mountain, always there is a bit more of margin of mistake as for the material or weight to going. But here, when you have ahead more than 240 km of race by foot, for 7 days, in extreme conditions and with total autonomy, you must measure exactly each of the things that you will take in the back, so much in their functionality, as in their size, as especially in their weight.

Nothing can be missed and neither nothing can exceed.  All that you need and do not take, can be a key mistake along the race; and all that you take in excess will suppose punishing the knees and the back for free during many hours in the desert.

For months we work the list of material, and already for two weeks we have everything that we want to take with us distributed on a table at home, with an electronic scale of precision to the side to be measuring it to the detail.

It is difficult not to manage to obsess; but the truth is that also it supposes one of the inducements of this hard and complicated race.

The result of what we will take you can verify in the definitive list that we attach. Only there is absent the detail of the food, the first aid kit and the toilet-case, that they are apart. The food consists basically of lyophilized and different food (as approximately 250 grams of ham packed to the emptiness and 200 grams of dried fruits), up to totalizing more than 16.000 Kilocalories. The first aid kit contains principally things to treat the feet and to do tapings, cremates of massages and some basic medicines (Fortasec, Ibuprofen, collyrium and ointment for irritations). And in toilet-case we only take the brush and the dental paste, and a small lime of nails.

Material List.pdf

Albert Bosch

19/03/2009