A rather late start to blogging for the Sahara Race, with just about 2 weeks to the off.  Still, enough time to give a brief synopsis of Team Desert Gentlemen and our buildup to the event thus far.  

The team (Tom Barclay, my brother Alex and I) has been working towards this type of race for some time.  As is often the case with these things, initial plans to conquer the Gobi were drawn up roughly a year ago over a bottle of Jack Daniels in a noisy blues bar, but once training got underway Tom decided that intimately acquainting his jaw with a rather steep and rocky Welsh mountainside at high speed was in order, consequently the Gobi was cancelled and the Sahara drafted in as a replacement.  Running for Pancreatic Cancer (www.justgiving.com/desert-gentlemen) was the obvious choice as Tom's mother had sadly succumbed to it some years earlier.  The "Gents" label was deemed to be the only real conduit to maintaining a sense of decorum and dignity throughout the travails of the Sahara...

Having completed a variety of endurance events we have always felt relatively confident about the physical aspect (even though the knees have recently had a particularly rough time) and so much of the work has been sharpening the mental aspect, which we feel will be the most crucial given the number of unknowns we will face (heat, sand, wind, snakes, ourselves)  Alex and I have fitted most of our running around the working day in London, so that has involved a lot of concrete and only a small degree of riverbanks and parks: far from ideal, but inevitable.  Tom has been out in the hills whenever possible, but then that was also inevitable as there is nothing he likes more than spending several days pushing his body to the limits in remote locations with the best of British weather pounding down on him.  Again though, not ideal desert training.

We're all massively excited to meet the other competitors as well as to getting down to the actual running - that rather twisted satisfaction we all surely feel having conquered a particularly demanding hill, or having elevated ourselves once again out of that "dark place".

One more weekend and then tapering...and the countdown to Cairo!

- Phil

How the devil am i going to fit my golf clubs in my bag????!!! Looks like I'll have to sacrifice the freeze dried food......

Tom -