Nick Walshaw on the last day of the Jockey Challenge

One of those jockeys all sharp threads and gold jewellery. Hair a hurricane couldn't mess. Even boasted a sports car with his nickname - "Magic" - stickered down the sides.

Yep, debonair right up until the day he committed suicide.

Which kinda has us wondering what, if anything, we've achieved this week with The Daily Telegraph's Jockey Challenge? Sure, over eight exhaustive days we've starved, stumbled and sweated.

But have we really lived like a jockey? It's a question that truly hit home about 6am on Melbourne Cup Day. When, wearing black trackies and a green garbage bag, I entered that Terrigal Crowne Plaza sauna for the second time in nine hours - throwing myself into an unhealthy procedure many hoops endure three, four times a week.

Within 30 minutes, I was gone. Nauseous.

Adding the experience to those headaches which hit me every afternoon around four o'clock. The dark mood swings that, by day three, had my kids seeking adoption papers.

So tired, hungry and tell-the-editor-to-shove-this-idea-up-his-clacker spent that, when mowing the backyard late on Saturday afternoon, I simply started dry retching.

And this, remember, was in eight days. An experiment where the finish line was always in sight.

There was no going 48 hours without food as some hoops are known to do. No three layers of clothing for sauna sessions over 90 minutes. No rehydrating for the next eight hours on little more than an ice cube, either.

Yes, we ate the sushi and handfuls of cereal. Ran the treadmill and boxed badly. Even have a new yoga mat which, once this yarn is written, will be tossed into my garage beside the Ab Cruncher. But how can anyone truly understand the darkness brought on by the constant drain of wasting? An insidious grind that, in recent years, has been considered partly responsible for more than half a dozen jockeys taking their lives.

"No matter how much people wanna help, they can never understand," Hugh Bowman had warned when we started this madness a week back. "When you have those real dark days, those times when you dunno how you're gunna get through ... there's just no one to help you."

Indeed, according to a 2004 Victoria University study - which spent three years studying the impact of wasting on Australian jockeys - a staggering 13 per cent conceded they'd suffered suicidal thoughts. Think about that for a minute.

Of all the riders currently battling away on tracks around this nation, 13 of every 100 have thought about ending it like "Magic" Mahoney. That brash Brisbane boy who, after a string of suspensions at age 42, was found dead inside his car, a hose running in from the exhaust pipe.

A tragedy that proves Bowman's right.

When it comes to really understanding what a jockey goes through ... impossible.