Mongolia · Orkhon Valley · 20–26 June 2027

What the Gobi March is

Six stages. Seven days. 250 kilometres across the Mongolian steppe on the edge of the Gobi — with every calorie you will eat that week carried on your own back.

A race that gives you water and little else

Most ultra marathons hand you something at every aid station: food, a chair, a drop bag, a crew member with dry socks. The Gobi March hands you water. Everything else for seven days in the Mongolian backcountry — freeze-dried dinners, breakfasts, bars, electrolytes, sleeping bag, spare socks, first aid kit, headlamp, knife, signalling mirror — goes into one pack at the start line and comes out at the finish.

That single rule is what makes a self-supported stage race a different sport from road ultrarunning. The rules set a floor of 14,000 calories — 2,000 a day that you must carry and that medical staff can check, plus an evening meal for the night at Camp 1 before the race starts. The average pack leaves the start line at about 9 kilograms. It gets lighter every day as you eat it. The runner who packs an extra kilo of comfort carries that kilo for 250 kilometres. The runner who cuts too much runs out of calories on the long stage and pays for it two days later.

Where it runs

The Gobi March is the founding race of the 4 Deserts series, first run in 2003 and now one of four 250 km races the organiser RacingThePlanet stages across the world's harshest landscapes. It began in the Chinese Gobi; since 2018 it has been held in Mongolia, and the 2027 edition is the 21st.

This is not the sea of dunes people picture when they hear "desert". The course crosses the Orkhon Valley — a UNESCO World Heritage landscape on the edge of the Gobi — and finishes at Karakorum, the former capital of the Mongol empire. Underfoot it is open grassland, sand and dunes, rocky mountains, river crossings, gravel tracks and old forest, between roughly 1,015 and 1,765 metres of altitude. Herders' gers and horse and yak herds appear where you would expect nothing at all.

Late June is dry but not hot by desert-race standards: daytime highs around 21–25 °C, and nights that can fall to −2 °C. That night-time figure is why the mandatory kit list specifies a sleeping bag rated to 0 °C and why the sleeping bag is not optional weight.

How the week is shaped

The structure is the same one every 250 km stage race uses, and it is deliberately cruel in a specific way: five ordinary hard days, then one enormous one.

Stages one to three are each roughly a marathon, run on consecutive days. Then comes stage four, the Long March: about 80 kilometres spread over two days, with an overnight checkpoint partway where you can sleep and get hot water for a meal before going on. After that comes another marathon-length stage, and finally a short run to the finish line. Checkpoints sit roughly every 10 kilometres — up to 30 of them across the week — and each one is where your water ration comes from.

The "2027 course" column is the organiser's published stage breakdown. The "mapped track" column is what the recorded GPX tracks on the interactive route map actually measure — stage boundaries and exact lines shift between editions, so treat the map as the shape of the race rather than a survey of next June's course. Ascent there is smoothed with a 3 m threshold; the organiser publishes about 4,461 m of gain for the full 2027 course, so expect the real number to be higher than the tracks suggest.

Camp life

Between stages there is no hotel. Camp is a cluster of shared tents on the steppe — and at some camps traditional Mongolian gers — with runners sleeping on the ground in a tent they are assigned to and stay in. You arrive, you take your shoes off, you deal with your feet — blister management is a genuine competitive skill in this race — you use the camp's hot water for a freeze-dried dinner, and you talk to a handful of strangers who are having exactly the same day as you. That shared misery is, by nearly every account, the part people come back for. Tents are mixed by nationality on purpose; the field comes from more than 40 countries.

Who does this, and why

The field is not made of professionals, and it is small — the 2027 race is capped at around 100 competitors. By the organiser's own count, roughly 20% run the whole course, 60% mix running and walking, and 20% walk every step of it; total finishing times spread from about 24 hours to 70. Finishing is the goal for the overwhelming majority, and finishing rewards patience far more than speed: the ability to eat when you don't want to, to look after your feet before they become a problem, and to get up and do it again on the fourth morning.

The training that gets you there follows from that. Long back-to-back days matter more than fast ones, walking counts as much as running, and from a few months out no long session happens without the pack on.

The 2027 edition

Gobi March 2027 runs 20–26 June 2027, the 21st edition, with Ulaanbaatar as the meeting point before competitors move out to the first camp. Summer is the only sensible window — the Mongolian winter puts the steppe far below freezing — and even in late June the nights are cold enough to matter.

This site is a preparation log for that race: the route mapped stage by stage, elevation profiles from the GPX tracks, and the gear and training notes built around them. Race dates, the mandatory equipment list and entry details all come from the organiser, RacingThePlanet — check there before booking anything.

See who is entered for 2027 — the full start list, kept in step with the organiser's competitors and results page, which also carries the results of every past edition.