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MDS LEGENDARY 2026 - ARRIVAL AT THE BIVOUAC

I left Berlin with a backpack on my back and a suitcase in my hand and I already felt the weight of it. Not just physically (though yes, also that) but the weight of knowing. Something big is about to happen. Something that will change you. You know it, and you can't unknow it, and there is nothing to do but walk toward the bus. The journey to the Marathon des Sables is not a journey you do in one go. It layers. Berlin to Munich. Munich to Marrakesh. A night in Marrakesh, dinner with strangers who would become something more by the end of the week. Then a four-hour bus to Ouarzazate. Another night. Another morning. Then six hours deeper into the desert on a bus that felt like it was slowly erasing the world behind us. I watched the landscape change the whole way. City at first with its noise, green, the familiar mess of human life. Then mountains with snow still on them, which surprised me. Then the green started to thin. And thin. And then it was just rock and dust and the kind of silence you can feel through a window. I turned quiet too, somewhere in those mountains. I didn't notice at first. I just stopped talking and started watching and I think that was my body preparing itself for something it understood better than my brain did. I felt excitement and underneath it, something older. The deep knowing that this will change me for life. I wasn't afraid of that. I was just aware of it. I also felt like an imposter. I need to say that clearly. There are people on this race who are crazy athletes. People with records and sponsors and the kind of quiet confidence that comes from doing insane things many times. And then there is me, the girl who sometimes struggles with a 5k. Who started running not that long ago. Who is here because she just... kept saying yes to things. I felt small in the middle of all that. And at the same time, I felt completely equal. Both things were true at once and I held them like that the whole way there. When the bus pulled up in front of the bivouac I felt that bump in my chest. The one that happens when something is real and your body knows before your head does. Everyone got a bit hectic around me and I just sat there for a second taking it in. Then I got off. The first thing I noticed was the rocks. Everything is so rocky. Not soft desert like the Sahara of postcards but just hard, ancient ground that doesn't apologize for anything. And everyone was in such a good mood. That surprised me too. There was this collective energy that was almost electric. Like everyone had arrived at the same conclusion at the same time and were relieved to finally be there. Then I saw the tents. More than 190 of them, big and black, arranged in circles. Staff tents. Medical tents. The whole infrastructure of a temporary city that exists for a couple days, disappears and appears at our next finish line again. The scale of it hit me. This is a real thing. This is happening. I walked through the path lined with staff who were cheering and dancing and the sound was enormous and I thought: this is the point of no return. I am here now. Whatever happens next, I am already in it. And within all of that noise, the energy, the hundreds of people, I felt completely lost. Not in a bad way. Just... small. There are so many loud and excited and professional people here and then there is just me. But meeting my tent mates helped. We were all so different and somehow completely the same. There were other Germans wandering around trying to find the German cluster, which made me laugh at that very German instinct to locate your people in an overwhelming space. My tentmates and I were polite with each other at first, careful, still figuring out who everyone was. I watched how each person found their rhythm in that small shared space. How they arranged their things. How they prepared for sleep. There is something intimate about sharing a tent with strangers in the desert. You skip the small talk pretty quickly. That first night my air mattress broke. Just gone. Flat. At the end of the world in a tent with strangers and no mattress. Someone had a spare. A participant I had only just met handed it over without making it a big deal and I thought: this is already teaching me something. You cannot carry everything. You will need people. Let them help you. That mattress probably saved my race. I don't say that dramatically — seven nights on hard rocky ground without it would have finished me before stage one. The days before the start are their own strange thing. Long. Slow. A medical check, a technical check with hours of sitting, waiting to be called, everything in French which I don't speak. At some point I realized I had forgotten my ECG chart. I just forgot it. A document I needed. Which meant a trip to the medical tent, lying there surrounded by people speaking French, getting a new ECG done, paying 200 euros, and receiving a one-hour time penalty before the race had even started. I could have spiraled. Months of preparation and I'm already penalized. But I didn't. I just lay there in the medical tent and thought: okay. This is part of it too. Time moves differently out there without a phone, without music, without the usual noise of a life. The waiting felt long and also weirdly okay. I noticed it slowing down and instead of fighting it I just let it move at whatever pace it wanted. The last evening before the start, I watched everyone around me repack their bags obsessively. Over and over. Checking, adjusting, starting again. I had packed once. Everything was ready. I felt oddly mechanical about it and calm in a way that felt almost dissociated, like some part of me had already accepted whatever was coming and the rest of me was just waiting to catch up. I wasn't zen. I wasn't fearless. I was just ready. And readiness and calm are not the same thing, but in that moment, they felt like it. The next morning the race would start. Six stages. 270 kilometers of desert. Everything I had trained for and everything I couldn't train for. But that night, I just lay in my tent and listened to the desert and let it be the last quiet moment before everything changed. It was enough.

Move & Meet

·April 13, 2026