For context to give you an idea of the race distances: I came 461st out of 752 finishers (783 started, meaning that 31 DNF – giving a 96% finish rate) with a total elapsed time of 42 hours, 53 minutes, and 42 seconds.

To aid your navigation, water consumption, and generally planning for the distance, you’re given a comprehensive manual on the pre-race admin day - this is invaluable to your planning.

From this, you can commit the general route to memory so that you know roughly how long it is between each checkpoint (for managing your water consumption and breaks).

I used a combination of a Garmin Fenix watch to track the distance, the travel speed (i.e., 3 kilometres per hour on very sandy terrain), and the book to build an estimate of how long it would be between the checkpoints so we could ensure water wasn’t consumed too quickly, but that you’d also not arrive at the next one carrying water unnecessarily (notably, there were always hundreds of full or semi-full bottles of water at each CP when we tackled it in 2019 – however this clearly may not be the case in hotter years).