592. Mad Victorian Sport

Some years since, the feat of walking 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours was considered next to an impossibility, but here we have to record the wonder doubled. This has been accomplished on the Surrey cricket ground, Kennington Oval, by Richard Manx, whose feats have walked Present instances of the capability and endurance of the human frame altogether unparalleled. Manx commenced this feat on Friday, the 26th of last September, but, being suddenly attacked with diarrhoea, he was compelled to give up on the Monday following, after having walked 129 miles. His surgeon ordered Manx to rest for a time, to recruit his health and strength.

This the pedestrian reluctantly yielded to, and for a fortnight he remained under medical treatment. On Friday, the tenth of October, he recommenced his great task. Starting for the first mile at four o'clock in the afternoon, On he went, full of spirit, completing his first hundred miles at forty three minutes fifteen seconds after five o'clock on Sunday evening, the twelfth of October, his second hundred miles at forty four minutes ten seconds past seven o'clock on Tuesday, the fourteenth of October, and finally, After completing another seven hundred and ninety nine miles, going for his thousandth mile at half past eleven o'clock on Friday morning, October the thirty first, Manx has been heard to declare that never again will he attempt such a frightful feat.

So that was the Illustrated London News, November 1851. And Tom, it is recording one of the supreme feats in the history of sport, a triumph over adversity, over adverse conditions, over the landscape, and over diarrhea. It's a feat that deserves to live in the legends of sport, but sadly has been almost completely forgotten. Tragically, it has. And uh I like to think that the rest of history is nothing, if not a vehicle for resurrecting great sporting feats that have been forgotten.

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