Thursday Feb. 19th 2026 I ran the low-key Nouakchott Marathon in Mauritania. Find below my full race coverage from this event and a few tourist impressions from and around Nouakchott.
Nouakchott
Nouakchott is a city with two very large neighbours: the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Sahara on the other. Sand is everywhere — in the streets, in the markets, on the football pitches. At independence in 1960 this was little more than a village; today it is one of the biggest cities in the Sahara. Mauritania is an Islamic republic governed under strict Sharia law, and I will be honest with you, as I always am in these reports: unless you are collecting marathon countries, I see no particular reason to travel here. Rarely have I been so happy to fly home.
That said, we did get out and we did see things that made an impression. The National Museum (Musée National), founded in 1972 and built in cooperation with China, shares its building with the national library and a centre for the conservation of old manuscripts, and its archaeological and ethnographic rooms cover everything from prehistory to the great Saharan trade routes and the lost caravan cities of Koumbi Saleh and Oualata. We passed the Assemblée Nationale on Avenue de l’Indépendance with its pale yellow façade and arcades, the Presidential “grey palace”, and the Saudi Mosque. And then the two markets: the Marché Capitale in the centre, where I frankly felt unwelcome, and the famous fish market on the coast, where the boats come in and the tuna are the size of a man. Both are photogenic and both are loud with poverty — you do not leave them cheerful. The beach by the Atlantic sent my thoughts straight back to Dakar and the Marathon du Sénégal 2025.
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Nouakchott Marathon 2026
This was a small, specially arranged marathon held inside the walls of the new and genuinely very fine Sheraton hotel — roughly one kilometre per lap, so plenty of laps. Easy, flat route, nothing technical about it at all; the difficulty was entirely the 22–30 °C, the sun and the humidity. Some runners chose to start in the evening and run through the night; I went out in the small hours myself and finished in daylight, in 6.53.07 — an extremely poor performance by my own standards, but this was my second marathon in four days after Tunis, on top of not having run a single metre for three months. I will take it.
Fastest on the day was young Marcin Guzik of Poland in around 3.45, big congratulations. Also present was his countryman Wojtek Machnik, soon to reach 200 marathon countries, plus Thomas Bentsen, Dieter Elster (Germany), Peter Friis (Finland), Arianitta Gil and Sally Shreeves. A special thank you to young Mohammed, who ran the aid station and counted our laps for hours on end, and above all to Parvaneh Moayedi for arranging both Tunis and Nouakchott.
Marathon country no. 97, and no. 10 in Africa. The country went into the book — and that, on this occasion, was the point.
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See or relive the Nouakchott Marathon 2026 below (and in Arabic)
