Mandje is an Olympic observe and area athlete, competing for Equatorial Guinea at Athens 2004.
Later in his skilled profession, Mandje raced on the World Cross Nation Championships and the World Path Racing Championships.
However the observe was his old flame, and particularly the 1500m.
Which is useful, as a result of his workforce’s coverage, and that of many of the different 14 groups, was little and sometimes.
In essence, the favoured tactic for the quickest technique to clock 500km was incessantly swapping runners out and in and breaking the gap down into two or three kilometre sections every.
On repeat.
For almost two days.
In principle, every leg sounded fairly achievable. About half a Parkrun at a time.
However, as Mandje attests, in the course of the night time, with none sleep and with a day’s working already in your legs, The Velocity Challenge bought severe.
Mandje made his residing racing the 1500m at high pace, recovering with ice baths and sophisticated warm-down routines.
In Chile, with restoration happening whereas cooped up consuming chilly pizza at the back of a pick-up truck, he discovered himself instantly decreased to strolling elements of the TSP route.
“What made it actually, actually difficult is you are working quick intervals after which getting right into a van, getting stiff, getting drained, then in one other hour you are leaping again out to run once more,” says Mandje.
“After two days that begins to put on and tear on you – particularly for these in a single day legs whenever you’re on the market along with your ideas and accrued fatigue.
“The toughest level, someplace on day two, I simply hit a 30km stretch the place I struggled. Every time I bought out of the automobile I needed to begin every leg as like a shuffle or a pace stroll.
“It was additionally the purpose of the journey the place you are a good distance from the beginning, so you possibly can sniff the end however you additionally know there is a good distance, and a whole lot of climbing, to go.
“However hitting a tough patch was a part of the fantastic thing about it.”
Lengthy earlier than Mandje’s private disaster, the race itself was thrown right into a wider disaster.
Way more severe than ache within the legs, this was associated to the sturdy arm of the legislation.
