Flashdance...What a feeling - Irene Cara

Photo - Ian Corless

Post Traumatic Race Disorder (PTRD) is a serious thing and I believe it’s a definite condition that people can feel following a running adventure. Please understand that I’m not belittling PTSD in any way, but the symptoms have a similarity. Prolonged exposure to multi-day marathons, be it in the desert or on the road, can lead to disturbing feelings of being lost, depressed and can alter the way that a person behaves - the symptoms can last for months after the event.I can remember returning from the Marathon des Sables for the first time in 1999 feeling shell-shocked by what I’d experienced. It wasn’t a negative feeling as I’d had an amazing ‘out-of-body’ experience or rather ‘out-of-normal-life’ experience. 

You see the race came at a time of change for me and opened my eyes to an unknown world of adventure. On my return, I felt lost with an overriding feeling of confusion. I couldn’t explain to those around me what I’d experienced, and it was the early days of email and before social media, so there was little connectivity with those that had been there with me. It made me start questioning everything I’d surrounded myself with in life. Relationships, career, even functioning itself. My brain started to question why simple things such as using a pedestrian crossing on a busy high street was needed, when in the desert such things were unheard of. I spent many minutes looking the lights and the crossing button as I remember.

I'd found out the hard way that life is far too complicated.

I experienced the same feelings following my forty-three days on the road to Lisbon from London in ‘04 and also following my 28 marathons in 28 days for Stoptober in ’13. Following both adventures, and with the MDS in mind, I carefully detrained and detoxed myself back to some kind of normality. In more recent times, I’ve met people undertaking similar feats and warned them of the dangers of PTRD and how post experience the things they were trying to escape and the life-problems they’d stacked up would be there to run into on their return. It happens…

My cure has always been to sign up for the next big adventure so that I get the same euphoric feelings that running twenty-six point two or more can only bring. For those in Team Coleman that were with me at the MDS Legendary, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some or all of the above feelings. It’s only natural. Within my group I know that there are feelings of being lost and some are some are still feeling broken but there are also those that feel empowered and ready for the next challenge after righting the world they left post desert-retreat. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of time to process things in the desert, especially without any connectivity to the ‘outside world’.

That’s the ‘outside world’ which is full of life’s white noise, distraction and nonsense that masks the basic needs of existence. For anyone planning their next adventure my advice is always to consider what you are going to do with what you learn from the journey pre-event, and how the lessons learned during the event will be distilled and filtered back into normal day-to-day life - as well as how are you going to deal with a good old helping of PTRD.

It's a kinda weird feeling isn’t it?

1,215 Marathons - 289 Ultras - 9 GWR - 18 Marathon des Sables - One Life