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Mandje is an Olympic track and field athlete, competing for Equatorial Guinea at Athens 2004.<\/p>\n
Later in his professional career, Mandje raced at the World Cross Country Championships and the World Trail Racing Championships.<\/p>\n
But the track was his first love, and specifically the 1500m. <\/p>\n
Which is handy, because his team’s policy, and that of most of the other 14 teams, was little and often.<\/p>\n
In essence, the favoured tactic for the fastest way to clock 500km was frequently swapping runners in and out and breaking the distance down into two or three kilometre sections each.<\/p>\n
On repeat. <\/p>\n
For nearly two days.<\/p>\n
In theory, each leg sounded pretty achievable. About half a Parkrun at a time.<\/p>\n
But, as Mandje attests, in the middle of the night, without any sleep and with a day’s running already in your legs, The Speed Project got serious.<\/p>\n
Mandje made his living racing the 1500m at top speed, recovering with ice baths and complex warm-down routines.<\/p>\n
In Chile, with recovery taking place while cooped up eating cold pizza in the back of a pick-up truck, he found himself suddenly reduced to walking parts of the TSP route. <\/p>\n
“What made it really, really challenging is you’re running short intervals and then getting into a van, getting stiff, getting tired, then in another hour you’re jumping back out to run again,” says Mandje. <\/p>\n
“After two days that starts to wear and tear on you – especially for those overnight legs when you’re out there with your thoughts and accumulated fatigue.<\/p>\n
“The hardest point, somewhere on day two, I just hit a 30km stretch where I struggled. Each time I got out of the vehicle I had to start each leg as like a shuffle or a speed walk.<\/p>\n
“It was also the point of the journey where you’re a long way from the start, so you can sniff the finish but you also know there’s a long way, and a lot of climbing, to go.<\/p>\n
“But hitting a rough patch was part of the beauty of it.”<\/p>\n
Long before Mandje’s personal crisis, the race itself was thrown into a wider crisis. <\/p>\n
Much more serious than pain in the legs, this was related to the strong arm of the law.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n