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Sunday, March 13, 2011

MDS and James Cracknell

I was browsing through the Telegraph magazine in a quiet moment after lunch on Saturday and started reading about James Cracknell and his amazing challenges. I knew about his rowing triumphs with Steve Redgrave but didn't know about his entry to the MDS in 2010.

Here's a picture from the Telegraph article;

I looked up his own official web site and found a reference to his MDS Blog and here is an extract. You can see the whole piece by clicking here.


As events go it wasn’t the longest I’ve done but some of the days were as hard as I’ve ever had in sport. I decided to enter the MDS whilst sat in a tent 100m from the South Pole as the race doctor assessed the blisters I’d intelligently let turn to ulcers and another visitor to the pole stuck his head in the tent and said “Call those blisters - you should do the Marathon des Sables”.
I wanted to prove to myself that I could look after my body day after day whilst racing. Knowing blisters are my Achilles Heel or if I’m honest one of my many Achilles Heels I set about making sure I had a strategy to deal with them but more importantly not to avoid them in the first place. I hardened my feet over six weeks with surgical spirit and worked with various taping methods on training runs but more importantly worked on sorting out my gaiters to make sure no sand entered my shoes in the first place.



He ends his MDS Blog with this summary.

Crossing the line wasn’t the celebratory process I was envisaging instead there was the frustration of not being able to run flat out because of the leg and a painstaking wait to see if I’d held onto 12th.

After six days running I’d made it by two minutes. I’m as proud of that achievement as anything else I’ve achieved in sport. It turns out I had broken a bone in my foot – the fifth metatarsal – at least I feel like a proper sportsman now. I’m sure the doctors guessed it was broken but stuck out in the desert there was nothing they could about it and I wasn’t going to stop. Goes to show that what you don’t know won’t bother you.

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