The main disadvantage of training up for the MdS in April of each year is having to train through the misery of a cold, wet British winter. As I've said previously, this is traditionally why the British contingent as a whole doesn't fare too well on the MdS.
The big advantage is that Santa comes about three months before the event, which can mean MdS goodies on Christmas Day!
Having been very good over the year I've now got my first piece of compulsory kit: the compass.
But this is not any ordinary compass: to meet MdS regulations (failure of which means being shot at dawn by the French Foreign Legion (the organiser of the MdS is a chap called Patrick Bauer, a former Legionnaire)) the compass must have 1 or 2 degrees of measurement accuracy.
So I now have the Recta DO 390 compass, so I can get lost in the Sahara to within 2 degrees of accuracy of where I'm not sure I am. But hopefully not as lost as Mauro Prosperi, the Italian policeman who, in the 1994 edition of the race, got lost in a sandstorm. He was discovered 9 days later, having covered a few hundred kilometres into a hospital in neighbouring Algeria, having just survived on his own urine and dead bats.
I've also now got a couple of pairs of the Nike Dri-Fit running shorts with flatlock seams to prevent chaffing. There are as many discussions about the ideal type of undergarment for hot desert conditions as there are the different types and combinations of undergarment available.
For me, and in my better weather sessions, I've found these tight-fitting lycra shorts (loose-fitting = friction = chaffing) don't give me chaffing problems, as long as the seams are in the right place, which is the case with the Nike Dri-Fits.
The low humidity and high heat conditions in the desert should evaporate away any sweat so, hopefully, there should be no chaffing caused by moisture from sweat.
I've also got my first sample dehydrated foods to test. I have to get this right: there are numerous stories of competitors' races ruined because of getting the food wrong (the stomach doesn't always take kindly to a diet of dehydrated or freeze-dried food), let alone the D&V that spreads through camp like wildfire after a couple of days . . .
