This is my second blog about experiences I’ve had whilst training for the MdS – The first one (‘The Day I Cut My Toothbrush in Half’) is here
Despite being a slightly difficult challenge, you can prepare for most aspects of the Marathon des Sables quite easily. One of the hardest to accommodate for is the searing heat. The temperatures in the Sahara desert regularly climb to 40 – 50 degrees and I’ve read that the highest temperature recorded at the event was in excess of 60.
There are a number of problems that this type of heat brings:
- How do you prepare your body to acclimatise to run in that sort of heat?
- How much water and salt will you need to drink whilst running?
- Which sun cream will enable an incredibly pasty, ginger to get a tan that someone from TOWIE would be proud of?
Number 1 and 2 are actually fairly easy to find the answers to. The body is actually quite an effective machine at dealing with heat. The main mechanism to combat this is by sweating. So if you sweat lots, you’re good at cooling your body down. Remember this the next time you’re in the office and you that alpha male with huge sweat marks on the shirt under each armpit and one to match on their back – these guys aren’t disgusting and smelly, they’re actually much more advanced than the rest of us…
It also doesn’t take long to teach your body to become more efficient at dealing with heat by sweating more. By training for just 2 – 3 weeks before an event in hot conditions your body would have made most of the adaptations you’ll need. You don’t really get much more benefit from doing more than this. The main way of training for these conditions is to book sessions at a specially designed heat chamber. I booked 10 one hour heat chamber sessions at St Mary’s Univeristy in Twickenham. I’m currently 7 sessions down, including a 2 hour session
There were two treadmills each with a mirror so you could easily spy on see the other person in your session
The format of the session is like this:
- They last an hour
- You weigh yourself and your full water bottle before and after the session – this is to calculate how much fluid you’ve lost
- The temperature starts at around 32 – 34 degrees but gradually creeps up (the max I’ve had it is 40 degrees)
- You’re in control of your speed and percentage of incline
- Every 15 minutes someone comes in and asks you to tell them how hot you feel on a scale (1 = unbearably cold and 20 = unbearably hot) and your Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE), which is how hard you think you are pushing yourself. Inexplicably the RPE scale starts at 6 and goes to 20, rather than starting at 1. I’m sure a simple Google search would tell me why that is, but I’m standing by the fact that it’s stupid
In all my sessions I’ve had someone else on the other treadmill which throws up some interesting situations. Firstly, you NEVER want to be going slower than them, otherwise you lose. Secondly, you NEVER want to look like you’re suffering more than them, otherwise you lose. Thirdly, if you’re second to shout out your temperate and RPE, you NEVER want to rate yourself worse than the other guy, otherwise you lose.
This means that even if you’re feeling like your lungs are going to explode – that’s a 12 on the RPE scale – or like you’ve taken up residence on the surface of the sun – that’s about a 15 on the temperate scale – you still have to rate yourself lower than the other guy. If they stopped 10 minutes ago and are claiming that they are an 8 and you’re sprinting, gasping for air, it’s your duty to say that you’re a 6 or 7.
It’s also strange that no matter how many increments you put in on a scale, somebody will always need another one. Someone will always say that they are an 11.5 or a 13 and 3/8ths. Of course, if that happens, you’d be an 11.45
In these sessions you sweat. You sweat A LOT.
These sessions can also help you judge how much water and salt you need to take in these sort of conditions, so that helps answer two of the ‘problems’ listed at the start of this article.
Number 3 is impossible to answer. Gingers don’t tan. We burn…
As a side-note (and slight brag), I won my first ever race this weekend. A 5km Parkrun in Fulham Palace. My tactics were to go out hard in the first couple of kilometres and split the field. If it worked in Fulham Palace, it should work in the Sahara.
Check out my victory here
Next time I’ll be writing about ‘The Day I Lost My Toe Nail at a Dinner Party’
I’m raising money for Age UK via Justgiving. Please donate whatever you can by clicking the logo below. Thank you
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