2023-04-22 07:32:36
“Today, I feel good. I took one more step, the sensations weren’t too bad. After a good night’s rest, I’m going to reset the counters to zero. Guy Amalfitano has just finished the 33rd stage of his journey: covering the equivalent of 100 marathons in as many days, all on crutches. The goal for someone who has had his right leg amputated since the age of 17? Collect funds and donate them to charities. “I cross 12 regions of France and each of them has its own association”, relates this Thursday the sportsman whose smile can be heard on the other end of the line. Among those, ” Médoc Childhood Handicap », which brings together parents of children with disabilities in the north-west of the Gironde, or even « It’s a HOPE », which helps Breton families with a child with cancer.
Followed by de camper, his “logistics base” in which he “lives, sleeps, eats and updates son site internet “, Guy Amalfitano therefore surveys the roads to complete a tour of France in the direction of clockwise. With him, eight drivers take turns to accompany him on his adventure. “Currently, I am on my third, this one will take me to Mantes-la-Jolie,” he explains from the bottom of his vehicle.
In total, Guy will have traveled nearly 4,300 kilometers by June 24, the scheduled date of his very last stage. “There I am above the marathon a day,” he says, not without pride. Even if the athlete is not at his first attempt: “I have already done longer, during my last journey, in 2017, I crossed Canada from East to West? It corresponds to more than 7,000 km. It will be shorter, but more intense. And we can easily imagine that these adventures don’t really come close to what looks like a health walk: “That’s what makes them so beautiful”.
“There may be injuries”
Always so optimistic, Guy Amalfitano talks about his difficulties. “At the start, I had huge blisters on my hands, which made me suffer terribly and it lasted for almost ten days, remembers the one who had been forced to abandon a challenge in 2022. triggered tendonitis in the forearm. It took me a good fortnight before I had no sores at all. We had to overcome the pain. »
Nothing very surprising however: “When you start going on journeys like that, where the physical effort is very intense, there can be injuries. “Even if he admits that” in a normal configuration, with less experience and with these pains, we can quickly stop “. And when Guy has finished gritting his teeth, glitches of another kind can sometimes get in the way… “We were crossing Brittany when the motorhome broke down, he recalls . One of the stages took me to a lady whose son unfortunately died and to whom I wanted to pay tribute. And, by chance, it turns out that this lady’s partner works at Volkswagen and she was able to find us a converted van”. It will have been necessary to move the minimum subsistence in a smaller space, but again, not enough to affect the motivation of the Béarnais.
“It’s all about people, relationships”
And when people move along the roads to encourage him, or locate him thanks to his GPS beacon to run alongside him for a few kilometers, Guy “regains strength for the future, for me everything revolves around people , relational.
After crossing New Aquitaine and Brittany, the almost sixty-year-old is delighted with the enthusiasm generated by his adventure: “I’m not asking for an incredible welcome at the end of each stage, what I want is mobilization around the event. And for good reason, the 59-year-old man, who launched a online kitty whose funds he will share at the end of his adventure, derives his income from donations or from the merchandising that he offers for sale on his way.
“For the moment, it’s a success, what I imagined is happening,” confides the always optimistic athlete. From the beginning, there have been big mobilizations in Aquitaine and Brittany, so we will see what happens next. As if to pique the pride of the regions he is about to cross.
#Leg #amputated #runs #marathons #days #good