Josephine Anselin, a fourth year Engineering student at St Hilda’s, is preparing to compete in Morocco’s “Marathon des Sables,” the self-proclaimed “toughest footrace on Earth,” in which participants will run six marathons in six days.
The annual event, which welcomes participants to its webpage with the line, “Welcome to the world of lunatics and masochists,” began in 1986, and has since witnessed the deaths of two competitors.
The gruelling ultra-marathon will see Anselin run 151 miles, completing an average of one marathon per day. In addition, she will carry all food supplies and a sleeping bag on her back, in temperatures of up to 50°C.
When asked why she wished to participate in such a race, Anselin explained that she has “always been a fan of cross country,” and has been “running seriously since the age of eighteen.” She described the completion of her first marathon, when she was sixteen years old, as aged 16, as “just for fun.”
Anselin claims to have drawn her inspiration to take part in the “Marathon des Sables” from “a close friend who completed it on ten occasions, and won it three times.” She added that the stories she heard about the event “played a large part” in her motivation.
She explained that taking on the ultra-marathon was “mainly as a personal challenge,” but added that she felt it “would be wrong to complete the event without taking the opportunity to contribute to charity too.” She has chosen to run for Médecins San Frontières, a medical charity based in her native France, which she described as an “international, independent, humanitarian organisation that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, healthcare exclusion and natural or man-made disasters.”
Due to the necessity of carrying all supplies, her diet will largely be composed of “different flavoured powders and gels.” The Blues runner commented, “It’s great – you can have porridge flavoured powder for breakfast, which actually tastes like porridge, and you can have a different flavour for every meal.”
She claims she is most scared of “the blisters you can develop whilst out there,” adding, “Your feet don’t get any time to recover so they just get worse.” Nevertheless, she puts this down as another mental challenge to deal with which is “part of the fun.”
Anselin is currently training by running “between 90 and 110 kilometres every week,” and she admits that this has “had an effect” on her social life, adding, “I can’t go out as much anymore!” She explained that she frequently “comes back from a 30K run” at the same time that her friends are “coming back in from a night out.”
Sam Hussain, a fellow fourth year student, commented, “Josephine is ridiculously driven and probably insane; she normally gets back into college from her casual weekly marathon before I’m even out of my pyjamas. This race is for people who find marathons too easy.”
Another friend of Anselin’s, third year student Alice Kent, expressed admiration, describing “the mental strength and independence [required] to sign up for something as daunting as this, without knowing anyone else.”
After Morocco, Anselin plans to “focus on finals exams” and has the aptly named “Diagonale des Fous” (“The madmen’s diagonal”) in her sights; another ultra-marathon, though this time with a gradient as the course leads competitors up and down a mountain side.
