Six month after nearly dying in an accident on Route 66 in Arizona, endurance athlete James Cracknell participated in an ultramarathon in Yukon Territory of Canada during severely cold temperatures, according to an excellent article by Chris Harvey for The Telegraph in London.
The Yukon adventure closed a chapter for Cracknell, who is still dealing with the brain injury that’s affected his short-term memory and strained his marriage. The Discovery Channel will air a trilogy of programs about Cracknell’s ordeal starting later this month.
The Telegraph article details how grave Cracknell’s injury was:
But at just after 5am, in the half-light around sunrise, Cracknell was struck from behind by the wing mirror of a truck travelling at 75mph. His race across the continent became a desperate fight for life. […]
Turning back when he didn’t arrive as expected, the support vehicle arrived at the scene of the accident to find police lights flashing, blood on the road, Cracknell’s helmet cracked in two, and his cycling shirt, which had been cut off, lying on the ground. The truck driver had stopped and called for an ambulance. Cracknell had been conscious at the scene, but drifting in and out. The paramedics had sedated him and taken him to the local hospital, from where he was flown by helicopter to the neuro-trauma unit in Phoenix. […]
Cracknell’s wife, the journalist and broadcaster Beverley Turner, was in America to support him on his ride. Only 24 hours earlier she had been telling the cameras, ‘I just want him to retire and become an accountant or something.’ She was in a hotel room in Las Vegas when the call came, summoning her to the hospital. ‘It was basically to say goodbye,’ Cracknell says. ‘For two days they weren’t sure whether I was going to live, and after that they were convinced that they had to prepare her for me not remembering who she was.’
Cracknell felt recovered enough a half-year later to drive his mountain bicycle in the Yukon Arctic Ultra, a 430-miler over harsh terrain and in subzero temperatures.
He would not reveal too much about what happened in the Yukon event, except that “I wasn’t ready for it and I would have been in the past. I definitely missed home in a way that I hadn’t before.”