Sichel is ultra special

Richard Moore

THE hinterland is all that William Sichel knows, whether the landscape happens to be geographical or sporting. One of Scotland's most remarkable sportsmen might also be included among our more eccentric, possessed as he is of the ability and - even more extraordinarily - the desire to run, and run, and run. And then run some more.

Home to Sichel is Sanday, the lobster-shaped island on the northern fringes of the Orcadian archipelago; 16 miles long, 5 miles wide, populated by little more than 500 people and fringed by 86 miles of golden sand. Later this week he will swap his Orkney idyll for a comparatively featureless park in the middle of the Dutch town of Apeldoorn, the venue for Friday's European 24-hour championship.

And there, on a circuit measuring a little over a mile, fifty-year-old Sichel hopes to cover at least 225km (139 miles), the qualifying distance for the British team for October's world 24-hour championship in the Czech Republic.

It's worth pausing for breath at this point. Sichel is one of the world's top ultra-distance runners, yet he lives in one of the most remote outposts of the British Isles, with only 60 miles of roads. He's 50. And he runs for 24 hours, sometimes 48 hours, with a best of 153 miles in the ‘shorter' event. That's not all; he was an international table tennis player, until he discovered the marathon in 1981, a year before he moved to Orkney. Marathons were OK - to a point. They just weren't nearly long enough. And now he's in the Guinness Book of World Records, too, for his exploits on a treadmill in Kirkwall's Pickaquoy Centre, where he set world bests for 100 miles (20 hours, 31 mins) and for 24 hours (112.46 miles), in November, 2002.

Five years before that he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer, only to return within a month to run in the European 100km championship. He trains wearing a vest weighted down with 3.5kg of sand, or at home on a treadmill beneath 500W heat lamps. And when he's not training, he runs a successful mail order business with his wife, Elizabeth. They breed angora rabbits, originally for meat, but now to turn their fur into angora wool clothing.

How does he do it? Physically, he manages the training by not actually running as much as you might expect - just 50 to 70 miles a week. Indeed, for all the miles he covers in the course of a race, his weekly mileage would not be considered excessive by most club runners on a diet of 10k road races. "Correct," states an assured sounding Sichel. "The mileage is low, but it's intensive, and the effort is very high. When you start an ultra marathon you take it very easy, and it gets progressively more difficult. By the last third you're making a huge effort though you're running very slowly. That's why I wear a weight vest in training, because it mimics the stress on the body and legs."

So much for the body; most agree that the mind is the real opponent of the ultra- distance runner. "In the last few years I've worked with Nils Vikander, a sports psychologist in Canada," says Sichel. "I met him through my coach, David Murrie. Now he's like an assistant coach and he's made a huge difference. One of the hardest things is running slow enough in the early stages, and one of the biggest temptations is to race people too early, so the mind has to control that.

"I imagine being in a long tunnel at the beginning, wearing blinkers, because it's quite demoralising at the start being left behind. When you're a top runner you want to be at the front; it's that macho thing. I talk to myself, using ‘mood' words and positive self-talk. I monitor my breathing and sweating; bodily sensations give you feedback. You can go into a trance-like state, and the mind can wander a little, but it's very important, at the same time, to be in control, especially in the last few hours. But I've never found boredom a problem because there are so many things to think about."

Sichel's age may be considered a problem, though not by Sichel. He says with complete confidence that "I am still improving," and then offers evidence to back this up: "I have two things in my favour. One is that I was a late entrant to the sport, because I only started ultra running ten seasons ago. And second, I chose my parents very well; I look about ten or fifteen years younger than I am. It was a big nuisance when I was 18, but it's very useful now. I've got a few good years left and not many grey hairs."

Cancer didn't derail him, so age isn't going to. "I'd just won a team bronze in the European 100km road running championships when I noticed that one of my testicles felt harder," he recalls. "There was no pain, but I went to my doctor and within eight days I'd had surgery. Later I had radiotherapy.

"The main thing about it was the blow to my confidence," he continues. "As an athlete what you're doing is based on confidence, and it was a blow." As an afterthought, he adds: "And of course if I'd left it could have been fatal."

Sichel does look young and he's as lean as one of his angora rabbits. He looks, therefore, like a long-distance runner, or indeed a table tennis player. Yet there seems very little to connect these two sports, one all about speed and short bursts of power, the other its polar opposite.

"The funny thing with table tennis," says Sichel, "is that I was world class in practice but I could never take that into competition. Somebody once said, very cruelly, that I was fantastic until the umpire said love-all. I found the training very satisfying but the competition intensely frustrating because I knew I was always underperforming. I've found running more satisfying than table tennis."

To which you might ask, why? "Because I've been ranked in the top 12 in the world," says Sichel. "I've won international events and I've regularly been in the British team. After a race you're recovered for normal everyday life after a couple of good nights' sleep. The mental recovery takes longer, but I don't have nightmares - usually euphoria. A good result always leads to euphoria - it's overwhelming; fantastic."