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How Mahasweta Ghosh completed the toughest ultramarathon in barren Sahara
Updated On: 21 May, 2023 11:56 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
How Mahasweta Ghosh became the first Indian woman to complete the toughest, hottest ultramarathon in barren Sahara
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The race terrain is unrelenting with rocky mountains, intense sandstorms and miles of high sandy dunes
It was the 2019 Netflix docu series, Losers, that inspired Mahasweta Ghosh to brave the brutal Sahara desert. The fifth episode in that series was on Italian Olympian Mauro Prosperi, whose attempt to finish a desert endurance race in the arid Moroccan landscape turned into a nightmarish battle for survival, after a sandstorm took him off course. “He was found nine days later... in Algeria,” Gurugram-based Ghosh, 44, says over a video call. Prosperi had chosen to run the most daunting of foot races in the world—the Marathon des Sables (MDS) or Marathon of the sands, a six-day 250 km-long ultramarathon, which is said to be the distance of six regular marathons, and among the toughest races in the world, with one of the highest attrition rates.
Ghosh, a Boston-qualified marathoner, wanted to experience first-hand what it meant to race on such a perilous trail. The pandemic upended her plans briefly, until she decided last December to take the plunge.
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