LONDON (Reuters) - Four months after suffering a near fatal heart attack, intrepid explorer Ranulph Fiennes has announced a new challenge -- running seven marathons in seven days on seven continents.
Fiennes, 59, and Dr Mike Stroud, 48, will start the challenge on October 26 in the wilds of Antarctica and, weather permitting, finish 168 hours later in New York's Central Park.
After Antarctica, the two men plan to complete the 26.2 mile distance in Santiago, Sydney, Singapore, London and Cairo before arriving in New York to join the thousands of runners who will be contesting the city's annual marathon on November 2.
The explorer and former special forces officer collapsed on June 7 and had emergency double-bypass heart surgery, prompting his doctors to set a heart-rate limit for each marathon of 130 beats per minute.
"If the area of the post-op wound starts feeling ominously tight I will just have to slow down," Fiennes told Reuters on Friday.
Fiennes -- who has already survived the torment of gangrene at the North Pole, dodged bullets in the Middle East, trekked across the Andes and canoed up the Amazon -- became one of the first men to reach both Poles on foot on his Trans-Globe Expedition in 1982.
Eleven years later he and Stroud became the first men to cross the Antarctic unsupported on foot.
A briefing note from Fiennes to LanChile airline highlights some of the problems they will face as they try to pass quickly through tight security at international airports in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
"My colleague Dr Stroud will have some medical needles and scissors and scalpels in his hand baggage on all flights," he wrote to LanChile, Chile's national airline.
"Could this please be cleared to go through security in a hurry? Also, because of my heart problems, Dr Stroud will carry a small defibrillator machine which security may think is a bomb. We cannot afford any delay".
The two men will donate the money raised to the British Heart Foundation.
