Mandje is an Olympic track and field athlete who competed for Equatorial Guinea in Athens 2004.
Later in his professional career, Mandje competed in the World Cross Country Championships and the World Trail Racing Championships.
But the distance was his first love, namely the 1500m.
That's handy because the politics of his team and most of the other 14 teams were few and often.
Essentially, the preferred tactic for completing 500km the fastest was to swap runners in and out frequently and break the distance into sections of two or three kilometers each.
On repeat.
For almost two days.
In theory, either leg sounded pretty doable. About half a parkrun at a time.
But as Mandje testifies, the Speed Project got serious in the middle of the night, without sleep and already with a day's run in his legs.
Mandje made his living by running the 1500m at top speed and recovering with ice baths and complex warm-up exercises.
While recovering in Chile, locked in the back of a pickup truck and eating cold pizza, he was suddenly forced to walk parts of the TSP route.
“What made it really, really challenging is that you run short intervals and then get in a van, get stiff, get tired, and then jump out after another hour to run again,” Mandje says.
“After two days it starts to wear on you – especially on the legs at night when you're out there with your thoughts and the accumulated fatigue.”
“The most difficult point, somewhere on the second day, was a 30km stretch where I had problems. Every time I got out of the vehicle, I had to start each stage like a shuffle or a speed walk.”
“It was also the point of the journey where you are far from the start, so you can get a taste of the finish, but you also know that there is still a long way to go and a lot of climbs ahead.”
“But the nice thing about it was that there was a difficult phase.”
Long before Mandje's personal crisis, the race itself was entering a major crisis.
This was far more serious than leg pain and was related to the strong arm of the law.
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