Episode 2 Racing the Sahara

running 250 kilometres across six days, it's Racing the Sahara.

Because everyone was about to run 81 kilometres, you would imagine there

was a sense of trepidation, but there was a party atmosphere

People were dancing around, I think people were kind of, to be honest,

masking the fact they knew they had a very hard day ahead of themselves.

I remember Patrick, the race organiser, suddenly saying

someone's not feeling well at the start, at the front.

Only later did I find out that some guy collapsed.

It shows the level that people were pushing themselves to

That sometimes their bodies just said no.

I am a BBC journalist, and I have taken a couple of weeks holiday, and

paid nearly $6,000 of my own money to take on this extreme challenge.

And I am with some very good friends.

Andy is a consultant, who lives in New York.

Kind of perversely excited about trying to run 80 kilometres

Os is a banker and he is from London.

This is three leagues above the most extreme experience I've ever had and

Something is telling me just to keep going, keep going.

The toughest race on earth is run in a remote part of southern Morocco.

We have six days to cover 220 kilometres across the desert,

We and hundreds of other men and women from all over

the world have spent the last three days traversing the Sahara desert,

We have plodded over seemingly endless stretches of Sandy,

We have plodded over seemingly endless stretches of sandy,

15% of those who started the race won't make to it the finish.

The man who created the crazy concept on a solo voyage through the

In the first race, 29 years ago, there were just 23 people.

Half way through our challenge, we are still struggling with the

It is nice to wake up with the sunrise though.

There is a lot of things about being here I am not enjoying.

Rubbish sleep, not having enough tissues to blow your nose.

Dirt under your fingernails, not having really enough food.

Like the water never lasts me at night.

They give you three one`and`a`half litre bottles, but I always finish

The thousand`odd runners need 120,000 litres of water to

The water is rationed, so we pick up our allotted bottles in

the morning and evenings, and at the checkpoints along the race itself.

We also have to carry all our clothes,

The organisers ensure that every runner has at least

But we want our rucksacks to be as light as possible,

So far we have completed 112 kilometres in three days.

But now we face our biggest challenge.

We have to do two marathons in one day.

No`one in our group has run more than 50k in

So, I think there is a sense of trepidation.

The 81 kilometre stage of the marathon will take us up

mountains, over sand dunes, and along dried up river beds.

And near the start, a beast of a mountain.

The desert mountain has a 30% incline in places.

We are 40 or so kilometres through the 81 kilometre Doubleday, and Will

is dehydrating more than most. Good quite dizzy, and I went to the loo,

and it was so concentrated it was almost red. Basically I am very

dehydrated. I will feel better in a bit, hopefully.

This is tough. Our other inspiration was each other. Running in a team

gives you a clear advantage. I hope he is all right. Oz has been running

with a bad knee. Will, Andy and myself push on. On our mind

throughout the morning was the fact Oz had dropped back, he was a

distance behind us, we had no idea how he was, we talked about the fact

that we had gone on ahead and of course we felt a bit guilty about

it. Our team of four is now a team of

three. Oz is nowhere to be seen.

The 81 throrm stage of our desert challenge will take all day, if all

goes to plan, we will be going late into the night. But we still don't

know if Oz is OK. Until Will and Andy arriving at a

checkpoint, have a very welcome surprise. Really really tough. Oh,

yes. Come on! How you doing? Amazing. I think I saw Andy gave him

a big hug and Will and saw Tom, who passed through the checkpoint

already. Probably my best moment of the marathon. The main highlight was

on the long day, when we met up with Oz, who had dropped back, 30

minutes, and we were hoping that he would catch ups, we went sure, we

saw him at the checkpoint. That was the highlight of the week, it was

fantastic, so we will be back together.

Don't have the strength. Yes. Glow sticks for the night.

Reunited we are soon running and walking into the night.

You can only see obviously a few metres in groucht. You have your

head torch on, you rely on the step of the person in front of you. There

were moments of into the night of long day where my body was very

upset with me. And I really had to resist the urge to stop, and sit

down, and lie down for a little nap, for a bit.

Another one of my favourite moments was the end of the long day, round

midnight, when the four of us were lining up, we found some energy to

jog in the last few k and coming out the darkness, seeing the finish line

in sight was fantastic. 15 hours after we set off earlier

that morning, the finish line comes into sight.

Woo! That was fun! Well done. Well done. We did it Well done guys.

Amazing. Sensational. Cheers. You feel like you are drunk, which we

are not. At all. We are tired. You try to trick your body. You tray to

kid your body that it's not tired but it's very, very tired. Yes. It's

not the right word. You feel for the guys out there and they're bedding

down for the night, four or five hours, getting up to do another 30

it's k. `` 30k. It's so difficult to do that. Can't believe that, the

furthest I ever ran was 24 miles, so after 41, which I actually thought

about it was the first time on Tuesday, it was all new territories.

Amazing. Feel brilliant. Now I want some food. The last two hours were

the darkest for me. Tonight was a different experience. It was all

right initially. Obviously, the novelty of temperature dropping was

great, but the monotony of, for example, the last checkpoint, we saw

it, miles off. It looked like it wasn't that far, but it just never

arrived. Because you can't really judge distances in the dark when you

can only see a bunch of lights in the distance. Today there were a lot

of people that were struggling on the mountain particularly with lack

of water and misjudging the heat. I gave one guy some water because he

was just out and there was 5k still to go in the middle of the day.

The next day is a rest day. Time to deal with the effects of a double

marathon through the desert. I'm losing a nail. Doesn't look

nice. For others, it's time to reflect on the brutality of the

challenge. I'd been running already 18 hours and I knew I had three to

go. My feet were so painful, I could only hobble. I had blisters

everywhere. I could feel the blood in my shoes. At that stage, you know

you have three hours, it's a long, long time when you're in such pain,

but a running partner came along, we joined up together and then three

hours later it was done and we walked through the dawn and over the

finish line. Time to think about some of the desert stories of

inspiration, like Mike who we share a tent with. The story is summed up

in an e`mail I got this afternoon from my occupational therapist who

saw me after I'd been knocked off my bike training for another event and

I had a fractured skull and a stroke which meant I lost use of my left

arm and left leg and I couldn't walk 100 yards. Her task was to get me to

walk 100 yards in three months. I said, that's not quite what I had in

mind" and here I am, 16 months later, done 220 kilometres. Last

February, I was diagnosed with a form of leukaemia, I had to start

chemotherapy, so each night I had to take chemotherapy tablets which kill

off the red blood cells which makes me unsuitable for endurance events,

so the doctors say! Our only contact with the outside

world are the e`mails from friends and family which are printed off an

brought to our tent every night. By dog this challenge, we are also

raising money for two charities, one works to fight cancer and the other,

Parkinson's disease. My dad has cancer, so does Andy ie

fiancee's mum and his mum has Parkinson's. You link it to th other

things going on in your life, to people that are undergoing treatment

or have bad news and you start to convince yourself that you're

running for that. My wife was amazing, sending me three or four

e`mails a day and she constantly said how proud she was of me, so

when I'm running, I'm thinking, I'm making my wife proud and that makes

me happy and wanting to push on more. Even my dad from hospital was

sending messages from the rest of my family, getting messages from them

was hugely important. It made you realise that even though you were in

the middle of the desert doing something crazy putting your health

at risk, you knew there was a load of people back home thinking about

you and rooting for you and basically with you.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE 32 hours after setting off, the last

runners emerge from the desert. Everyone turns out to welcome them

in. The final day. Just one marathon

left to run. And today, we change tactics. Just before the start on

the last day, we kind of said, shall we stay together, can we go off on

our own pace. Andy and I said we wouldn't mind seeing how fast we

could do the final marathon stage. On the last day it was nice to have

solo time as well. It was very different, you against the world,

running as fast as you can go. After running so far over several days,

running a marathon through the desert suddenly doesn't seem too

bad. Obviously the fact my dad is really

ill at the moment with cancer. It's been an additional motivation. I've

seen him battling his illness and like the courage and the kind of

determination that he's showing in really kind of adverse

circumstances, at times, and of course I've drawn strength from

that. He's had a second operation which thankfully went OK and I said

to my dad, you know, you're amazing, like, well done for going through a

second operation again on your spine, a serious thing. He's pretty

ill. He's doing amazingly, battling every day. What my dad's going

through is ten million times harder than running the marathon.

Will Andy and O z are still behind me and it's Will who is suffering

the most. `` Oz. Pain in my left ankle, right knee, blisters are all

ripped apart, it's just red raw skin. I've got blood in my urine.

There's something telling me to just keep going, don't stop. It's harder

today without the guys. But you just have to go at your own pace. This is

the hardest thing I've ever done. Definitely. I thought the long day

would be the hardest. But actually, it just gets harder and harder and

harder. Andy is also struggling. On the last day, I started to get a

little bit emotional. Which was quite strange. I think partly the

body was very tired and I was running as fast as I could and it's

a bit silly because it's only a run. My bag started breaking so my bottle

started falling out my bag. It's funny when you're so tired how

upsetting things like that are. It crushed me that I had to stop and

change my bottles. Did you cry? I almost had a little cry. Then I had

to have a word to myself and say, pull yourself together and sort it

out, it doesn't matter. My fiance wrote a note for each day that I was

going to read before I left for each stage of the race. I left that final

note until I'd finished the race, so I kind of read that and I kind of

thought about her and her mum and Tom's dad and my mum and had a

little cry at that moment which seemed to be quite common, as people

crossed that line. I surprised myself finishing 40th in the final

day. Then the moment we'd been waiting

for. All four of us reunited at the

finish line of one of the toughest races in the world.

As soon as I saw Oz I was like, OK, I can hang tonne his ankles and get

dragged. It was a struggle. We got there in the end. Thank you so much.

Awesome. I'm looking forward to my kiss. It's taken us around 40 hours

for running and walking 220 kilometres across The Sahara with

several kilos of food and kit on our backs to reach this point.

We were joking when we said we should return and tell our other

halves to we'd signed up for something else. Crazy. I'd never run

more than five`and`a`half kilometres. That satisfaction of

completing something like this, a massive challenge, with some close

mates. You can't get that sense of achievement and feeling in many

things in life. Doing it again I definitely won't, but I don't regret

it, it was a great experience. I've taken a lot away from it. I'm very

happy that I'll never have to do it again. There's nothing extraordinary

about me and this is one of the whole things, I was wanting to do

something that was extraordinary to do.

Woo! Yeah... Good evening. We have been tracking

the weather system that will bring us some awful weather for over a

week. Here is Hurricane Bertha. Short`lived but since which it's

been pushing across the Atlantic. It's been modified by cooler seas

and mixing in with the area around it to