Marathon des Sables: Hong Kong pair prepare for desert race with 42 laps of Repulse Bay before work
- Duncan Swanson and George Darling run monotonous laps of Hong Kong’s beaches to recreate desert conditions
- The pair are raising money for charity Suicide & Co in memory of Swanson’s father
The beaches of Hong Kong are stunning. But after running a half marathon back and forth along the same stretch of sand, they lose their appeal.
That’s exactly what two of the city’s residents, Duncan Swanson and George Darling, are doing in preparation for the Marathon des Sables (MDS), the infamous desert race that is as much a mental challenge as a physical one.
Competitors must tackle 250km over six days, with the longest leg needing runners to do 86km in one day, mix that in with blazing hot sand and sun, and running around the city’s beaches doesn’t seem quite so bad.
The 27 year olds head to Morocco in less than a month for the race, during which they will need to carry their own supplies, sleep out in the desert at night and run on soft sand during the day.
And so, Swanson and Darling are hitting the beaches when they can. One morning they completed 42 laps of Repulse Bay before work, took a swim then headed to the office.
“I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation where we’ve said ‘oh, this is gonna be really boring’. We just need to get used to just going through the motions. We have a saying – just get time on feet,” Swanson said.
Hongkonger pushes through bleeding nipples to finish Great Wall Marathon
On another occasion, Darling did 25 laps of Lower Cheung Sha Beach on his own.
“It was easily the most boring six hours of my life,” Darling said. “I never want to go back to Cheung Sha again.”
The sand works different muscles to running on firm surfaces, which they said was an energy-sapping experience. What’s more, if it gets in your shoes and rubs for dozens of kilometres it could spell trouble.
“Obviously, because it’s in the desert, we need to practice running in sand with our bags. Hong Kong’s fantastic for that,” Darling said.
Swanson has run the Great Wall of China Marathon, and Darling is active. But neither would class themselves as runners. Swanson’s sporting background is as a rugby player for Kowloon RFC.
But after the years of Covid-related travel restrictions, the pair felt a longing to take on something bigger.
“Covid-19 happened and you know, three years nothing really went on,” Darling said. “You couldn’t leave. So that was kind of rubbish.
“After a pretty long day’s work, getting to go out and running in the hills or the trails in Hong Kong, it was a nice relief of what could have been a difficult time.”
The pair are raising money for UK charity Suicide & Co, which supports those left behind.
Both have experience of this, with Swanson losing his father more than a decade a go, while Darling has had friends who took their own lives.
“I think a lot of people, unfortunately, are affected by it. You see it in the news fairly regularly or you hear about friends of friends that it happened to,” Swanson said.
The pair have picked one of the smaller charities in the sector because they wanted to make sure the money was making an impact. They want to raise £25,000 (HK$240,000). When the reached £6,000, the charity said it was the most anyone had ever raised for them, the amount is now double that.
With just under a month to go before the race starts on April 21, the two men are not nervous just yet. They plan to stick together through the MDS and support each other.
“I think we’ll probably look back on in a five, 10 years time and say, what the hell were we doing in the Moroccan desert?,” Darling said
“But I think going through any experience like this, you know, doing 250km in the desert with a bunch of friends, I think is a pretty cool thing to be able to do.”
