The flight from Johannesburg to Windhoek is packed with participants for a 100km ultramarathon called the MDS Raid in Namibia. I had signed up for this madness with my friend Paul months before.
While boarding the plane, the other event participants were easy enough to spot. They almost all had the signature MDS running backpacks, and they all looked rather young, thin, and generally fit. I decide to hate them for no apparent reason. One guy even had his bib from a previous event pinned on his pack. The equivalent of a neon sign that screams ‘this ain’t my first rodeo’. I suspect he doesn’t have many friends.
All of the other passengers are pale and haven’t seen the inside of a gym in years. Probably on a bus tour. Too bad, I could definitely outrun them.
This was the very first event organized in Namibia by MDS (‘Marathon des Sables’). The route was almost 100km across the Namib, an unrelentingly hot desert landscape with high dunes reaching several hundred metres above sea level. It is also a place of spectacular beauty where the dunes drop into the southern Atlantic Ocean like the edge of a cliff.
The format for the event was clearly dreamed up by a descendent of the person that invented golf:
- participants have to run / walk the four days with everything they need to survive in their pack apart from water (food, cooking stove, change of clothes, sleeping bag, mattress, toiletries, etc.)
- participants are given 5 litres of water on arrival at the bivouac which has to suffice until you arrive at the first water station the following day
- one night is spent sleeping covered in sand (or ‘under the stars’ as they put it in the brochure)
In retrospect I should have read through these details before signing up. I might have decided to attempt something easier like the summit of Mount Everest.
Paul and I both finished the race, and we didn’t come last.
Where is Graham? 