"During the fifth leg I gave away the victory."

In the second part of our interview, Christian Schiester, who finished third in the 2006 Jungle Marathon, talks about the preparations for the race, why team spirit is more important than winning and how he will remember the Jungle Marathon.

Because of the heat and the difficult terrain you needed three or four times longer than normal to cover every kilometre. How did you prepare for this extreme strain?

I kept an exact account of it: in 48 weeks I ran 9,166 kilometres, cycled 3,074 kilometres – mostly in 45 °C heat and 80 per cent humidity in the sauna -, swam 124 kilometres and lifted 698 tonnes of weights in the weights room.

In the thick of the jungle, orientation was also difficult. Were you left totally to your own devices between the start and end of each leg?

We had a compass with us and used the bearings to orientate ourselves. In addition there were marker strips, but these were hard to see in the gloom of the jungle.

The fifth and longest leg – 87 kilometres – was particularly brutal. What do you remember most of all about those nearly 17 hours?

I was running together with the Briton James Lowe. As we crossed a river in the twilight his head-lamp broke. He was pumped full of painkillers and physically exhausted, but I didn’t want to leave him behind. As I heard him screaming behind me in a panic, because something had touched him in the water, I pulled him out by the strap of his rucksack and somehow dragged him to the next goal. We then found out that we had taken the lead and that I was 12 minutes behind James. But it was more important to me that I hadn’t abandoned him than it was to win.

But you seem to have experienced your worst moments during the last leg ...

I put everything in the balance to regain those twelve minutes I was behind. That was a mistake: completely dehydrated, I suffered a heat stroke and lost a lot of time. In order to cool down I jumped into the Amazon, which softened the skin of my feet so much that all the half-healed wounds on my feet burst open again. I suffered excruciating pain with every single step and took longer to run the last six kilometres than I’d taken for the 18 before that.

You’ve also run through the Sahara and won the Himalaya Stage Race. How will you remember the Jungle Marathon: as the best race, or the hardest …?

As the most painful ...