**Stage 2 • 40km**
*Stage two felt like being held back. Like wanting to race and being refused.*
I woke up excited. Actually excited, not the performed kind. My body had started to adapt to the sleep, the food, the rhythm of camp. There is something about early desert mornings, the cold air, the light not quite there yet, breakfast eaten in the dark, that makes you feel genuinely alive. I stood on top of a dune before the stage started, grinning into the camera, the sun just cracking the horizon behind me. I meant it. I was ready.
The stage started well. The dunes came early and I ran them, which I think is where it began, though I didn't know it yet. Something in the way you run down sand, the angle, the instability, must have overstretched or overbent something in my knee. But I didn't feel it then. I felt it about ten or fifteen kilometers in, well past the first checkpoint, when a sharp pain appeared on the inner back side of my knee and started giving way every few steps.
I had never had knee problems. Not once. And now, with most of the stage still ahead of me, it was collapsing underneath me without warning.
I was scared. Genuinely scared. I was thinking: I have to pull out. This is it. This is where it ends.
Except there was nowhere to pull out to. No road, no exit, no way out except forward. So I made myself the smallest possible deal: get to the next checkpoint. Just that. Nothing further. One checkpoint at a time.
At every checkpoint there were volunteers in blue bibs coming toward you in the opposite direction, asking: are you okay? And every time, without thinking, I said I'm fine, I'm okay. I said it because I didn't want to admit I wasn't. I said it because I have always played down my pain. But somewhere in the repetition, something shifted. My brain started to believe it. Not because the pain was gone, it wasn't, but because I had told the story so many times that my mind decided it was manageable. That I could carry it. That I was, in fact, okay enough to keep going.
Stage two also had more sand than stage one. Much more. I remember the feeling of working as hard as I possibly could and barely moving forward. Like swimming through something solid. Forty kilometers of it. I wanted to race. My legs wanted to open up. My lungs wanted to be used. And instead I was stuck, grinding, held back by the terrain and the pain and the heat, which was sharper that day, less forgiving.
My feet hurt. Not just the blisters, though those were multiplying, six sites in total by the end of the day, the worst ones right where my foot bends into my toes. It was deeper than that. A full, structural ache that comes from forty kilometers on sand with a ten kilogram pack, where every surface of your foot is involved and none of it is spared. By the checkpoint I sat down and dealt with what I could. I already knew it wasn't going to get better out here. I was just managing.
I emptied my socks at camp that evening and a shocking amount of compacted sand fell out. Not loose sand. Hard, sweat-packed sand that had been sitting between my feet and my shoes all day like a second sole. I didn't find it funny. I found it deeply annoying in the way only something relentless and unavoidable can be.
Somewhere on the course, I met Gary and Derek. Two older Irish men, always with something to say, always a joke ready. Gary reminded me of my father in a way I couldn't quite explain and didn't need to. His daughter, around my age, had also left a small town for a big city. There was something familiar in him that made me feel less alone out there. I don't remember exactly which stage I met them on. It all blurs. But I know they kept my mind off the pain for more kilometers than I can count, and I know they stayed with me in some way for much of the race.
I've thought since getting home that maybe the desert sent them to me. That sounds like the kind of thing I would usually roll my eyes at. But out there, when your body is breaking and the sand goes on forever, you stop being skeptical about comfort wherever it arrives.
Stage two felt like being held back. Like wanting to race and being refused. Like effort producing almost nothing. I was stuck for forty kilometers and I finished anyway.
That counts. I told myself it counts. I still believe it.