On the morning of his 76th birthday earlier this month, Harry Hunter emerged from a bivouac in southern Morocco to line up with more than 800 other runners in the Sahara.
Bar the chorus of Happy Birthday they greeted him with, there was little other celebration of this milestone, which saw Hunter subsequently become the oldest Briton to complete the epic Marathon des Sables, a 250-km (155-mile), seven-day race through rolling sand dunes and rocky mountains.
