Only the name is a source of respect and admiration for cycling and mountain biking lovers. This legendary event is a six-stage adventure through the Middle Atlas and the Moroccan desert in which you must not only fight against extreme elements: heat and cold, heavy night rains, sand… but also against your own survival instinct to achieve the final goal: a challenge within reach of very few people. The Titan Desert 2018 in its thirteenth edition had more than six hundred registered who covered just over 600 kilometers with a 7,500 meter drop, from Boumade Dades to Maadid, divided into six stages in the area of Errachidia, between dunes and mountains of the Moroccan desert geography, fighting against temperatures that exceeded 40 degrees.

In this edition of Titan Desert 2018 they decided to start with the toughest stage of all. A high mountain stage, in a loop, with a great ascent and a stretch that runs through an absolutely spectacular gorge. Most of the traffic will be on tracks in good condition, and the difficulty of the stage lies in the high level difference accumulated, which is the absolute record in a stage of the Titan Desert.

Such is the adventure of the Titan Desert that it is an addictive race for the participants, the more of them Spanish, who do not hesitate to repeat year after year. Because the Titan Desert is not only suffering and harshness, it is prestige and pride for facing the titan of cycling events and achieving the goal of becoming a “legend”. A “legend” is reached when a competitor accumulates more than 3,500 kilometres of evidence, for this purpose it is necessary to finish at least 5 editions of the Titan Desert. With this challenge ahead of us, for many of the riders the important thing is not to qualify but to finish it; it’s not about competing against the rest, but against yourself.

But the Titan Desert’s hardness is not only suffered by runners. It’s a fact that the timing skills of such a peculiar type of race involves many complexities that require a unique type of technology to facilitate this task.

Timer tips for the Titan Desert:

• The difficulties involved in sending the material in advance and the limited possibilities of purchasing it while in Morocco. You need to bring extra equipment for everything you may need: 2 computers, 2 printers, extra timing systems for whatever you may need, extra cables,… all in duplicate.
• The stifling heat tests the timing systems. Fortunately, our timing system TS2 can withstand temperatures up to 80º C.
• Sand in any of its states: wet, dry or wet, is a problem for the reading of chips, here we tell you more carefully
• Always check that the TimingPoints are working properly.
• The passage of the runners through the checkpoints marks how many runners are left in the race at each point, so coordination with the organization is very important to know who has retired and who is still in the race.
• All runners carry a GPS locator to locate them in case of loss.
• The transfers are a peculiarity of the Titan Desert, that is, the start and finish have different and distant points. This means that you have to be ahead of the game in order to reach the finish line on time and connect the live timing.
• The connection is via satellite, both at the intermediate points and at the finish line, so we depend on the people who set up the control points and the finish line for the timing system to work properly.
• The high media coverage of the Titan Desert means that live coverage is followed worldwide (with the responsibility that this involves).