Jersey woman hopes to run 156-mile Marathon Des Sables

A Jersey personal trainer is running a six-day 156-mile (251km) ultramarathon in the Sahara Desert.

Beth Rainbow, 25, will be taking on the Marathon Des Sables next week.

The race is widely regarded as the "toughest foot race on earth" and is the equivalent of running six marathons in six days.

This is Ms Rainbow's third attempt at the race after it was cancelled in 2020 and rescheduled in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

She said: "I'm just ready to do the race, mentally. It's taken a long time to come round so it's been living in my brain rent-free for two-and-a-half years. I'm just excited to get it done."

Every participant is self-sufficient, carrying all their food and equipment on their back.

Ms Rainbow said the hardest part of the race would be the fact she can only carry 3,000 calories of food a day but will burn roughly 6,000 calories a day.

She said "the unknown" was her biggest source of nerves leading up to the race.

"Not knowing what the weather's going to be like - if there's going to be any sand storms. It's going to get up to about fifty degrees in the daytime and then at night it drops down to as low as five.

"Last year the race was in October and it was the toughest conditions yet. It had something like a 52% dropout rate because so many people got heatstroke and had to pull out, so hopefully it's a bit cooler this year, but it's so unpredictable, who knows what the weather's going to be like."

Ms Rainbow said she had been doing hot yoga to acclimatise to extreme heat. She recently took time off work to travel to Spain and practice running with a backpack and on sandy trails.

"Running in the sand is not easy, no, it's really difficult - there's such a technique to it," she said.

"When you're in the desert you are actually completely shut off from the world," she added.

"You don't have any signal, you don't have a phone, the only thing you can get is email. You can give your family and friends your race number and they can send an email a day to you and you can send one back, and that's all I'll be able to get from the outside world for seven days."

Ms Rainbow said she "can't wait" for the race to begin.

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