The 28th Marathon des Sables

Hello everybody! Jakob & Jakob are finally back online after more than a week off the grid somewhere in southern Morrocan Sahara. The Marathon of the Sands has been an absolutely surreal experience, as exquisitely and tear-inducingly beautiful as it has been excruciatingly brutal and painful. We’ve slept on rugs in berber tents, been woken by the first rays of African sunlight (or by our tentmates snoring), cooked our freeze dried food on campfires, cursed over the unbelievable amount of sand in our shoes after each leg, shared dirty jokes in the dark while falling asleep, curled up in our awesome sleeping bags, marvelled at the brigthly shining stars at night, shuffled over endless sanddunes in search of checkpoints, been saving our precious daily water supplies, getting our blisters cut, ingesting 20 tablets of salt per day, singing along to Highway to Hell at the top of our voices at every start, surfed down steep slopes of gloden sand, tripped gingerly over ghostly pale scorpions, climbed vertical djebels and simply been overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the part of Africa known as the Sahara.

View from the Djebel Zireg, around 16,5k into leg 4.

Our adventure has been an absolute privilege and we’ve been lucky to share it with six awesome tentmates: Johan, Marcus, Tomas, Aries, Maunu and Ilkka. Thank you for your company! We only returned to civilisation on Saturday evening, checking in at our hotel at Ourzazate after the final charity leg for the benefit of Unicef Morroco. The WiFi-connection has been poor, however, and has only become a bit more stable after our arrival to Marrakech yesterday evening where the President of our fanclub and his wife (mom and dad) received us with standing ovations and a bottle of chilled white wine, courtesy of the generous proprietors of Riad Saba.

Starting out at 08.30 am every morning to the tunes of “Highway To Hell”.

Rest assured that we will share every single little detail about our odyssey in good time, but we hope that you’ll forgive us the need for a couple of days of convalescence here in Marrekech first. Thank you SO MUCH for all of your support during our adventure, not only in terms of donations to our children’s charity at Saint Francis’ Hospital, but also for all of your kind and enthusiastic support throughout the race. Your e-mails and messages helped us immensely and gave us the strength to carry on even though we’d sometimes rather have laid down and slept from exhaustion.

Dirty but happy.

Loads and loads of love to all of you! And those of you that have waited for us to cross the finish line before giving to our charity, now’s your chance to help us reach 2 500 Euros!

Yes. 99% of all the runners had silly caps like these.

And last of all, our warmest thank you goes to Lisa who blessed us with wind in our sails when we most needed it, especially during the tougher parts of the race.