The new plan is to dope. Completely legally. I’ll be prepared, but I won’t leave it to chance: I’ll use my own bacteria to stay alive while I implement my new idea.
I am no longer a long distance runner and I have never been an ultra one. But just as you can enhance performance with EPO, you can also improve performance with microbiome transfer. Tarragona-Barcelona distance is roughly 93-94 km, that’s more than a double marathon, and the number of my years twice. After my previously months-long planned route had changed significantly in the last few weeks, I wanted to find a challenge that would fit in well with the current situation.
There’s little chance that I can imagine this being accomplished, but that’s what the old Persians did: if a horse didn’t run fast enough, they would transplant some horsepower from a well-performing competitor.
We are still working on the details, but one thing is for sure: I want to prepare half as much as the literature suggests for such a distance, and the rest I will try to do with the help of science and colleagues, by 15th of June 2024 at the latest. That is exactly 300 days from the 20th of August. It is crazy, no doubt…