**Stage 1 • 35km**
*The first stage was not survival and it was not fun. It was something more uncertain than both.*
The alarm went off before the sun. Five in the morning, headlamps cutting through the dark, that particular mix of hurry and stillness that only exists before something real begins. People packing. People eating in silence. I recorded myself on my phone as I walked to the start line. Smiling, saying "This is so exciting, it's about to start" and I meant it completely. I was also walking into something I had absolutely no idea how to do yet.
My backpack weighed 10.4 kilograms. Dry. Without water. I had trained with a pack before, but not enough, and not heavy enough. As I put it on before leaving, I immediately felt that this was going to cost me something. I said to myself: it's fine, I'm fine. Which was both true and not true in the way most things are when you're running a very long way in a desert.
We walked to the start line in the dark, music already playing somewhere, the energy of 1500 people channeled into that narrow corridor of the beginning. The sun just starting to come up over the rocks. I thought: I am not going to start too fast. Every briefing, every person who had done this before said the same thing. So I walked to the first checkpoint. I was disciplined about it. I also said it's fine, I'm fine slightly too many times, because my neck was already hurting like hell and the stage was thirty-five kilometers long and we had barely started.
The neck pain was sharp at first and then it got worse and then, somewhere in the early kilometers, it went numb. My body just adapted. Decided it wasn't going to keep screaming about something that wasn't going to change. I didn't do that consciously. It just happened, which I found out is something bodies do when they have no other option.
What I was not prepared for was the sand. The first dunes appeared after a few kilometers and I hit them like I had never encountered the concept of unstable ground before. I had not trained on sand. My stride fell apart. Every step took double the effort for half the distance. I watched others move across those dunes like they were running on a track while I was barely moving forward, grinding through it, telling myself: it's only the first stage. I'm not here to win anything. I'm here to finish and that has to be enough.
I told myself over and over, not just that day but throughout the whole race: I can do hard things. I can do this. Mantras exist for exactly this: the moment your brain needs something to hold onto when the body is already committed.
After enough kilometers of dunes and the complete humbling of realizing I had no idea how to move on this terrain, I filmed myself saying I cannot see sand anymore, I don't want sand, it's only day one and I am already done with sand. Which I meant. Then the course moved onto a rocky path, hard, flat, unending, no shade, and I filmed myself again saying give me sand, give me dunes, anything but this. I had completely forgotten how much I had hated the dunes two hours earlier. The mind just does that. It finds the nearest available contrast and calls it better.
It was hot and windy. The beauty was real and constant and had absolutely nothing to do with how my body felt. The sun coming up over the desert was genuinely extraordinary, and my neck hurt, and my feet were starting to talk to me, and both things existed at the same time without canceling each other out. That was something I hadn't quite expected. That it could be beautiful and hard simultaneously without one softening the other.
I finished as one of the last quarter. I had made peace with this before I started. My tentmates were almost all already back when I arrived. I wasn't hurt by it. I had known this would be my race, slower, longer in the field, and I had decided before the start that finishing was the only metric that mattered. I still meant it.
What I felt, arriving back at camp, was relief. And a small, quiet version of pride.
I went to the medical tent to deal with the blisters. A big open tent, low tables, dozens of people sitting on the ground doing damage assessment together, the whole private ritual of it made communal. I had one blister on my heel, not catastrophic but in a position that mattered, and I was scared to treat it wrong. I classically didn't feel entitled enough to ask for help, quietly unsure whether I was handling my own feet correctly. I did my best. I would find out later whether it was enough.
Back at the tent I collected my five liters of water and ate my dinner from a plastic bag. I had left my cooking pot behind and let meals soak in the sun instead, which turned out to be completely fine and one fewer thing to carry. One of my tentmates was already in serious pain with her IT band, struggling to walk. I watched her and felt the specific fear of witnessing someone else's body start to break down, the what-ifs it opens up, the awareness that there is so much that can go wrong and so many stages still to come.
We talked. We ate. Everyone was relieved and tired and a little raw in the way the first day of something hard always leaves you. I took my melatonin, got into my sleeping bag, and listened to the wind pick up. That night, like every night, the desert came in while we slept, a fine layer of sand finding its way through the tent gap, into everything. Relentless in that quiet way the desert has. Just keeps going regardless of what you think about it.
Stage one was not survival. Not pure suffering and not pure joy. It was cautious. Baby steps into something I didn't understand yet. Testing not the course but myself, watching how my body responded, what broke early and what held.
Tomorrow would be harder. I didn't know how much harder yet. That night I was just glad to be horizontal, glad to have thirty-five kilometers behind me, glad to still be in it. Sleep came fast.