Dear friends – I am sitting at the cybertent, and it is around 12:30 pm back in Petra – it is another beautiful sunny day and I am listening to the drums as the last competitors are coming back from the last Stage…the long stage.

What can I say, the long stage was very, very long. We climbed over 2,000 meters (6,000 ft) and covered a course of 86 kilometers from the second desert after WadiRum to the outskirts of Petra.

The scenery was absolutely fantastic, the course was incredibly tough by all standards.

The fastest runners came in 13 hours – they did an amazing job. I managed to do it in 19 hours as I could only run about 15 k.

Janine and I separated right after check point 1. My back was in bits from muscle pain so I could barely manage I slow shuffle. She did fanastic and completed in our originally taHyrgeted time of about 16 hours.

Anyways, I will go and grab one of my last delicious dry meals (yummy!!!!).  I cannot stop thinking of having a pizza, French fries, and steak….

Tim, you are totally right. I will definitely change travel agents!!

Again, so many thanks to all of you for the cheering and your words of encouragement!

First things first…SO MANY THANKS FOR ALL YOUR MESSAGES AND WORDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT. It is awesome and very emotional to receive all your notes and comments. THANKS!!!!

The ‘sahara shuffle’ is working all right. 4 stages down! Just one more to go. Sunny and bright day. Completed stage #4 in 5h55m – Janine and I had a good day. In fact the whole tent did quite well and everyone made it by 6h 30m

Feeling much better today – no stomach cramps. I stayed off the electrolytes and that did the trick

My back is in a bit of pain, but it all gets better whenever I stop and realize how blessed I am to share this experience with my other 199 race-mates. All amazing people!

This is the last day we will have an early night here at the camp as tomorrow is the ‘long’ day, ie 86 klicks. We will likely have dinner at around 4-ish and we will all be fast asleep by 6-ish. Lots of recovery to get ready for this long run. We will finish just outside of Petra and the last stage will be a symbolic 2klicks to take us to the Treasury building inside the Petra complex. Good thing that I did a short shuffle around there to familiarize with the terrain.

After the race, we will head to the dead sea for a dead sea spa experience….this is VERY (EXTREMELY) appealing right now after 5 days of no showers and wearing our stinky dirty gear!!! J

OK, I am going to head back to my tent to continue with my daily prep chores. I will message after completing stage 5.

Lots of hugs to everyone!

Wow…2 sunny days in a row – feeling truly in the desert now J

Today we made OK time, but not as fast as we would have liked to. I slightly overdosed on electrolytes and was a bit weak for a bit of the course. Fortunately, after 3 liters of water and 1500 calories that I chucked down I am feeling back in form again. I cannot believe I’ve made this mistake.

I am really looking forward to tomorrow.

The course was incredible. So beautiful and scenic – We passed amazing rock formations and crossed a huge salt mine. We also passed a camel race course!

As usual we had great laughs and lots of giggles with our terrific tent-mates. David keeps working on his camel jokes while Simon is perfecting the art of giving us funny tips. Shaun and Andy are the quitter ones, but with a great sense of humor.

Hello everyone – greetings from WadiRum. We have now completed Stage 1 and 2 from the challenge… 170 km to go! Janine and I had a good couple of days. We completed each day in just under 6 hours.

Our first night found us with a rainy forecast, in fact raining got us during the night.

The fact is…this is the BLOODY DESERT – I never thought it could rain this hard or for so long in the desert!!!

On the first night, the front row of our tent woke up in the middle of the night with our sleeping bags soaking wet. In spite of the first night experience, the second night wasn’t a whole lot better…was rainy and very cold. Paul, you would have been furious J

Enough with the winning.

Janine and I are having a great time. Janine is full of Confusious sayings like ‘keep the dry stuff dry’, or as we get to kilometre 35 of 40, and getting tired doing a shuffle running, she would say ‘we don’t need to run fast’ – the fact is that we just could not really run fast at that point. We laugh a lot, and we are having lots of fun!

OK, my time is up. Fifteen minutes elapsed, and I am typing slow with the sun on the screen. All the best