16th Marathon Des Sables April 2001 - Part 5 - Page 1

Bru keeps me highly entertained until CP3. He too likes to take it at an easy pace...otherwise his gets terribly sweaty, and “all that constant sweating is so bad for the pores, darling”. By the time we have negotiated fields, a dried-out lake, and summitted a Snowdonia-type dune (so tiny in comparison with yesterdays dunes, thank goodness!), we have covered most essential subjects including the best anti-ageing face creme on the market; the new summer and autumn colours from the Paris collections; what beauty treatments we are both going to have if we leave Morocco alive; who is the handsomest doctor on doc trotters medical team; which competitor looks the cutest in lycra...

We decide that next year, in remembrance of the mds, we are going to meet up for a week-long stage event at a luxury spa....

At CP3 Bru meets up with the rest of his team and I continue on with my music for company. By now, after three solid days of listening to the same 10 one-hour discs, I am getting a bit sick of them. Have loads of trance and house music, but my pace doesn’t really match the beat, so it’s starting to get on my nerves. It does however seem to block out focusing on the pain of my backpack and my weary legs and sore feet. So I select ‘Euphoria-A Higher State’ (I don’t think so....) and on I go. This last stretch to the bivouac site is shorter than most. Only 4.5 km. But somehow the last bit always seems to take the longest. The bivouac site can be seen in the distance and it seems to take an eternity to get to it. Today has been hot and tiring, but was much less challenging than yesterday. It is now dusky, so this might be a rare occasion that I see the site in daylight!!! Tomorrow is the longest stage, 82km. Intend to keep going through the night and finish in the early hours. That will then give me most of day 5 to recover and re-charge my batteries.