MDS 2009 - Day 3 (message from Dan)

At the start the legs were pretty stiff, so i decided to walk the first 13 kms to CP1 given the distance today. It hurt to walk though, so from 13 to 50kms, Ivan and I pretty much ran and we felt good. The last 40kms were probably the toughest of the race so far. The terrain was brutally harsh. After the 50km checkpoint, it was 15kms of sand dunes. Beautiful, but tough work. The next 20kms were simply unforgiving rocks to navigate through. It was at this point I hit a massive low and the feet were in a bit of a state, but today was the day to make headway in the field, so no stopping. At 78kms I was almost on the edge and just wanted to stop, but you can't. So a hot chocolate later things were great and Ivan and I powerwalked the last 10kms in record time for a 17hr 50min finish. Very pleased with that, given we had around 2 hours of CP stops - deliberately so. Thanks for all the messages, its awesome - just the marathon day to go now. There is a lot of hobbling - I seem OK, i think!