Are You Solving the Wrong Problem?

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Many people training for the Marathon des Sables the Legendary are preparing for the wrong race. What do I mean by that?

They see 250km — or 270km as it was this year — and their brain does one thing: panic.

So they start building mileage. Longer and longer runs. Back-to-back weekends. Months of high volume designed to prepare them for what feels like an incomprehensible distance. Some add a backpack to every run, heavier than necessary, convinced that more is better.

Some of those people never reach the start line. They collapse under the weight of their training regimen. Injured. Burnt out.

Others finish. Not because of this strategy, but despite it. They take that finish as affirmation that this race cannot be completed without putting oneself through months of self-inflicted suffering. And so the cycle continues, because, convinced that their hardship was the key to their success, they tell others their heroic tale of adversity, sacrifice, and survival. The myth gets fed. 

You may even come across coaches who advocate for this approach. Who tell you that unless you arrive at 100-mile weeks your training is useless, or if you can’t simulate the race by Christmas you stand no chance of finishing. This should be a red flag, because it is not true, nor anywhere near sensible for most people. It is a perpetuation of the myth, designed to sell by instilling fear.

One issue that people miss is perspective. In ultra-running, 250km non-stop and 250km split over seven days are fundamentally different challenges.

In the Marathon des Sables the Legendary, apart from the long stage which usually falls on day four, you are running no more than a marathon distance on any single day.

If you have run a marathon, you have already covered the daily distance of MDS. And if you haven’t run a Marathon yet, I am pretty sure that it feels like a more achievable goal than 250km right now.

This knowledge, if used intelligently, can change how you prepare. Not only physically, but it drastically reduces the risk of anxiety and mental overwhelm that inevitably arrives when you get injured, or when you constantly question if what you are doing is enough, even though you are exhausted.

Wise preparation is not the same as running as far or as hard as possible in training. Quite the contrary.

Instead of chasing volume for the sake of volume, purposeful MDS preparation builds competency and efficiency over marathon distance. And then the ability to recover overnight and perform again the next morning. It builds an understanding of pacing and survival strategies across a week, not one continuous push. It builds robustness to endure a harsh environment for seven days and the capacity to thrive while doing so. It does that through sound self-management strategies. Those self-management strategies should be part of your training for two reasons. Firstly, they make the training sustainable and workable consistently as part of a busy life — many people have family, work, and commitments that do not pause because you embark on this adventure. Secondly, if those habits are built before race day, they naturally carry over into the event itself.

So, before sprinting blindly towards what you believe to be true, slow down to understand the challenge properly. Examine it from different perspectives. Everything changes when your time and energy are applied with precision and purpose, rather than being scattered aimlessly at a poorly defined problem.

If you want to understand more about what intelligent MDS preparation actually looks like in practice, I am hosting a free online session on 10th June. You can register here.