Breakfast was provided by the organisers and again was a marvel of logistics. We were in the middle of the Moroccan Sahara, yet AOI still managed to feed 600 hungry athletes fried eggs, ham, cereal, bread, jam and coffee.
After breakfast I faced my first desert toilet experience. For 600 runners, the organisers had provided a couple of chemical type toilets, supplemented by a few holes in the ground. I was told that after an hour or so, both of these were overflowing and so like most others I ventured off for a few hundred yards into the desert to find a nice secluded spot. The trouble was however, that when you did find a suitable location, someone seemed to have always been there before you and left their calling card. Oh well. These �morning walks� as they became known, got shorter and shorter each day, to the point where you would wake up some mornings and find that some mongrel had been for a crap right outside your tent.
Most of the day was spent carrying out final kit checks, as in the afternoon the remainder of our belongings would be taken away from us. What we chose now would accompany us (on our poor backs) for the 226km through the desert. There was a definite sense of foreboding as we lined up at the organisation�s tents with all of our kit, ready to hand most of it over for safe-keeping and ready to face the scrutineers. Once in the tent, I was passed from table to table like a hot potato. Eventually, they got round to the medical questions, which really baffled me:
�....�ave you put anyzing on your feet?�
�Yes, two pairs of socks�
�Non, iz you putting ze vaseline on your feet?�
�No�
�Ooh la la......�
Which did not fill me with confidence.
Emerging into the sunlight from the tent with just a small rucksack and the shorts and t-shirt I was wearing, I was suddenly struck that there was now no turning back � we were all on the verge of a big adventure, and in less than 24 hours we would be struggling over the first (and probably easiest) day, which was only 26km long.
That evening was spent resting, hydrating (and peeing) and talking of what was to come. We had our last meal, again provided by the organisers, (with wine), and a rambling and laborious speech by Patrick Bauer, the Frenchman and Race Director who had started the MDS 17 years ago. I would soon come to realise how much the man loved his own voice.