Welcome

The Project

Cleft lip and palate

The Race

About Peter

Training Schedule

Support Crew

Photo Album

Donate

Sponsors

Newsletters

Press

Contact us

Newsletter March

There was light at the end of the tunnel and things finally started falling into place, at least on the support and administrative side.

Where in February my project had stagnated, in March it definitely had a boost and things were heading in the right direction. Even though this has been pretty much a non-stop travel month, I have been able to train, had fruitful meetings with the Ronald McDonald Children's Charity (RMCC) and with Dr Kim Tan of the Pantai Medical Centre Bangsar who would provide the surgery.

During the meeting with the RMCC, I met with a wonderful dedicated team of people who were committed to help me and support the project to the best of their abilities. The RMCC is involved with numerous charity project s in the fields of healthcare and education aiming to help less fortunate children all over Malaysia. Since 2004, they had a charity called 'Give a gift of smile' whereby 289 surgeries for cleft lip and cleft palate had been performed with some children needing more than one surgery.

During the discussion, I received a full overview of what the project had achieved so far and the RMCC team gave me a complete breakdown of surgical costs, post-op care and miscellaneous expenses like transportation/accommodation for the children. I believe these are important information for the website in order to be as transparent as possible for potential donors. Collaborating with the RMCC through the existing 'Give a gift of smile' charity proved very advantageous mainly because of the existing infrastructure and mechanism. This project already had an established partner hospital and a committed surgeon with a solid track record of successful surgeries. Mechanism wise, selection criteria for potential patients have been refined and a dedicated bank account for donations was in place.

All my questions were addressed thoroughly and I was really happy that I had their full support for my project. They lifted a serious weight off my shoulders. I finally could start focusing on my training and getting stronger for the race.

I also met with Dr. Kim Tan, a real warmhearted doctor from the Pantai Medical Centre Bangsar who will conduct the surgeries and with whom the RMCC has regularly worked with for some time now. He took his time and gave me a really good explanation about the program - what it was about, what he could and what he could not do. He showed me several pictures of past cleft lip and palate corrective surgeries he had performed. Learning about the magnitude of the problem and inherent challenges made me silent, but also more determined to finish this race and get as many donations as possible. With my project, I was hoping to raise about 100,000 USD and give the 'Gift of Smile' to 30 children. That would be 3 children per 10 km that I would run. I know this may seem ambitious, but I believe there is still time and I hope I could persuade more than enough people to get the amount of 100,000 USD together.

As mentioned earlier despite March being an intense travel period, I tried to step up my training a little bit. Yet I was afraid of overdoing it. My right hamstring once again became a constant problem probably because the hotel food did not allow me to follow the special diet that was prescribed for me. Most of the places I stayed at did not really have things such as spelt, buckwheat and flax oil on the menu. Whole wheat pasta was about the closest I could get to the food I needed… so I was back to normal food. Injury wise and on top of the problems with my right hamstring, I also started suffering from shin splints which I started feeling after I resumed training a week after the 64 km Magnétoise. No matter how much Voltaren gel I was putting on my legs, I couldn't completely get rid of the pain. So I had to find the right balance between getting stronger but not overdoing it with workouts and getting immobilized due to injuries. It was a challenge because I could feel myself slowly getting stronger with every training run but without fail at every run, it would be with a certain discomfort and pain in my legs. The pain on the inner side of my shins plus the continuous numbing ache that initially was localized around my right hamstring would radiate to the rest of my leg on longer runs. I wanted desperately to get rid of it… the sooner the better.While in China I had tried therapy with an acupressure-specialist and while the treatment felt good the moment I received it, the doctor could not completely make the pain go away.

The different weather conditions were another challenge to deal with. In Japan, it had been rather cold, windy and rainy; in China, it was nice with fresh spring temperatures and in Malaysia the weather was hot and humid as usual. In Japan and China I did most of my runs outdoors, and it was nice running outside. In Malaysia, it was a whole different story. I ran outside 3 times and ended up completely dehydrated, even though I was running with a camelback and tried to drink as much as I possibly could.

Five months to go- seems like plenty of time, but there is still so much to be done.

APRIL PLANS

Work wise April will be another busy month.

From 1-12 April I will be in Tunis to conduct training for people of our emergency department.

15-16 April I will be in London to conduct more training.

The second half of April I would like to do some mountain and trail work to get used to positive and negative altitude gains.

© 2008