Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon

Heading to the Kalahari Desert Tomorrow!

Jackie Windh / 22.10.2015

It’s going to be a hot one! Day-time temperatures for the 16th running of the Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon are forecast to hover around 40°C (around 105°F). We had been warned about very cold night-time temperatures here, so my husband Dave and I both brought our down jackets. However, with these hot days in the forecast, nights are now expected to drop only to around 20°C.  Oh well - can’t go back to Canada to select different gear at this point!

This is one of the oldest staged ultramarathons running. I had dinner with Lisa de Speville - former SleepMonsters reporter, ultrarunner and AR racer - last night here in Johannesburg. She ran some of the earliest editions of KAEM, back when there would only be 15 or 17 participants. This year’s event has 71 racers entered, 34 of them from South Africa, and the remainder (just over half the field) coming from around the globe: elsewhere in Africa, the Middle East, a great number from Europe, three from Canada (including Dave and me) and one each from Australia and the USA.

There’s been a huge amount of discussion on the race’s Facebook page lately about pack weights. This is my first time running a self-supported race. Figuring out nutritional needs - packing enough, but not too much, not to mention the right balance of foods - is a challenge. I’m carrying enough for close to 3000 calories per day, which may end up being more than I need. However, I would rather err on that side, than go hungry at the end of a tough week in the Kalahari Desert!

Some runners have their packs down to around 7 kg dry weight. I think my pack will come out to more like 9 kg dry, but I am okay with that weight. Aid stations are 8-10 km apart, and we are provisioned with 1.5 l of water at each, so we don’t need to carry more than 1.5 kg of water on top of that dry weight. 

I’ve only been training with the weighted pack for 2.5 weeks (I ran a three-day mountain ultramarathon 4 weeks ago, so until then my focus was steep routes and going light). I think I would have been better training with the heavy pack a bit longer than that, as it does put a different type of strain on your joints and your feet - but overall, I feel pretty good. I’m a mid-pack to back-of-the-pack runner anyway, and I’m not aiming to win anything. My goal is to finish healthy, and to enjoy this fantastic way of getting to know the Kalahari Desert!

I will be writing daily Kalahari Augrabies Extreme Marathon race reports for SleepMonsters, but I am not sure what access I will have to post those reports. I’ll sent them out from the field if at all possible. If you don’t see anything, please check in in a week or so because I will post as soon as I can, to find out how the run goes!

Find out more about the race at www.kaem.co.za

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