Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
honduras
sePtember 1
My alarm went off at four o'clock this morning, and I spent the next
hour and a half preparing my body for the stresses ahead. I am strug-
gling at the moment. In the mornings, I'm stiff and rigid, like a robot.
It's taking longer and longer to loosen up each day; I need a massage
or physio but there's none available. There is no other way to say it:
my body is a mess. I am at the stage where I have multiple injuries,
and I don't know which one is going to cause the most problems each
day. Sometimes it's my toe, sometimes my knee, sometimes my hip.
My right knee, which I banged at the North Pole, is giving me tremen-
dous pain. My feet are in terrible shape. The nails on three toes of my
right foot, including that of my big toe, and two toes on my left foot are
bruised, black and bleeding. I'll lose them all soon. My big toe is expel-
ling large quantities of pus, which sounds awful, but it's good because
it's relieving the pressure and making the pain less. At the end of each
day's run, I take off my shoes, peel off my bloody socks and dress my
wounds. Next morning, I pull on a clean pair of socks and ease my feet
into my shoes. It hurts when I run, but pain has become a companion.
One look at my feet today told me that my toes were going to be caus-
ing me grief, so I cut the toe box out of my shoes.
Yesterday I was so happy, and I was on schedule, but today the
whole lot fell apart. I started at sunrise in torrential rain, running
through water that was up to 8 centimetres deep on the road. I could
barely see a metre ahead through the downpour. The lights on Bernie's
van and the police escort were but a dim glow through the rain.
And then we got lost. One of the cops in our police escort gave
us a bum steer, and I took the wrong track up a mountain. I ran to the
top, realised I was off course and had to run all the way down to the
bottom again. It cost me seven hours and 70 kilometres. Added to that,
