**Stage 4 • 100km**
*Stage four did not break me in the sense that I gave up. It broke me in every other sense.*
The alarm went off at three thirty in the morning. Nobody was ready for it. You cannot be ready for three thirty when your body has already done three days of desert racing and knows what is coming next.
Before we even got to the start line, something happened on the other side of camp. Medics running. A car following. It sat over everything like a weight that morning, something dark and heavy that none of us spoke about directly.
We got to the start line. The energy was there, people channeling something into that corridor of beginning, and then we walked out into the sunrise. A hundred kilometers of desert between us and the finish. It felt enormous and possible at the same time.
I had enormous respect for the 100k. And somewhere underneath the nerves, a thread of excitement. Different emotions sitting in the same body, not canceling each other out.
The first aid station came quickly. Gary and Derek were there. We talked for a bit until the big dune appeared ahead of us, and then we just made our way toward it.
The dune was monstrous. Steep and long, the kind of ascent where you stop pretending to run and just climb, hands on the ground, all fours, grinding upward. Somewhere near the top I heard my name. Margaux, a friend of mine who was volunteering as a blue jacket on the course, was there. She had been cheering people up, filming, keeping the energy alive. And when I reached her, she turned to me and said: your sister says hi.
I still have to stop when I think about it.
My little sister had seen Margaux posting on Instagram before the race. Had found her profile, texted her, asked her to pass on a message if she saw me. That effort, the finding and the reaching and the asking, is exactly the kind of thing that breaks me open. I feel most loved when people make an effort. And in that moment, on top of a monstrous dune in the Sahara, my sister had made an effort from thousands of kilometers away.
We recorded a short video. I said hi. I said I love her. Then Margaux sent me on my way.
After the descent I teamed up for a while with Vicky and Lisa, two German girls, both from Berlin. We watched the elite runners go past, which was honestly insane to witness. Then I found Paul and Amrita on the course, tentmates, and walked with them for a stretch. Good company, a good conversation. Then the course did what the course does and spread everyone out again.
Around kilometer eighteen, after the second aid station, the pain in my feet came back. Not gradually. Just back, at the usual eight out of ten, like it had never left. I pushed through it, telling myself what I had been telling myself since day one: just keep moving.
It was around kilometer thirty that I sat down at an aid station and found Lisa there, having lunch, quietly taking stock. Seeing her pause made me realize I needed to as well. I took a break. The pain was real and I needed to be honest about that. I decided I would take painkillers at the next station.
Between kilometer forty and fifty, they kicked in. I was able to speedwalk, though still too scared to run that early in the stage. But I felt, genuinely, amazing. The kind of amazing that makes you suspicious because you know it is borrowed time.
At kilometer fifty-two I stopped briefly to reload water and fast carb mixes. Gary and Derek were there. Gary said I could stick with them. I told him they were faster than me and I did not want to hold them back. He said off you go then, we will catch up. So I walked off into the afternoon, still feeling good, wanting to reach the technical section around kilometer fifty-eight before dark.
I made it just as the sun went down. The technical section turned out to be narrower than hard, just a winding path up into the mountains. And then it got dark, and I had been looking forward to this. Not the darkness itself but what it meant: I was going to race through the night. I was going to be an overnighter. There was something in me that found that extraordinary.
At first it was fine. Not many people around, everyone at their own pace. But the ones who did pass me always checked in. Hey Nicole, you okay? It was the same mantra from the days before: I am good, thank you, how are you. And the mind does with repetition what it always does. It starts to believe the story.
Then the wind picked up. Harsh, storming wind. And I started to get tired. Not tired like needing rest. Tired like my eyes were closing while I was walking. Tired like I was moving in slaloms instead of a straight line.
And then, out of the dark to my right, a mountain wall appeared. Enormous. Clean stone, looming over me. My headlamp was not bright enough to reach it properly, just enough to catch the shape of it, massive and close. I felt immediate fear. Not just surprise. Fear. I had the irrational, exhausted conviction that if I looked at it, it would attack me. That if I acknowledged it, it would swallow me whole.
I am still not sure if it was real. I think there is a good chance I hallucinated it, or at least made it larger and more threatening than it was. That is what the desert does at night when you are running on painkillers and no sleep.
I reached the aid station at kilometer sixty around ten PM. I sat down. Took off my shoes. Elevated my legs. Lay on my back and looked at the stars, which were extraordinary, the kind of sky that only exists far from everything. The station was full of people resting, refueling, some of them already in serious pain, lying down. There was a fire nearby. Gary and Derek were there. Derek was struggling and they were going to sleep for a while. I decided I had rested enough and kept going.
Two or three kilometers later I started falling asleep while walking again. I wanted to lie down on the ground right there and sleep for an hour. The only thing that stopped me was knowing that other runners would see me and worry, would stop and not leave me alone. So I kept moving to the next aid station, where there were small yellow one-person tents. I walked into one, lay down on the checkpoint carpet without opening my pack, feet up on my backpack, and closed my eyes.
I was so cold I started shivering. Put my jacket on. Would have to take it off again the moment I started walking. That is the hundred k at night: always too cold when you stop, always too hot when you move.
That was around midnight. I rested until around one AM. Then got up and kept walking.
Around three twenty in the morning the pain in my feet was excruciating. Every stone I hit sent a sharp jolt shooting up through my leg. I was crying. Not dramatically. Just silently, tears running, step after step, because the pain was that constant and because I was pushing myself so hard mentally that there was nothing left to hold anything back.
In my head, on loop, was a meme from Madagascar. Just one line: how long is this going to take? Over and over. How long is this going to take. It kept me company in a way that nothing rational could have.
Around five AM I lay down on the checkpoint carpet, feet up on my backpack. Half an hour. I think Gary and Derek were somewhere nearby.
I woke up not knowing what planet I was on. Completely disoriented, cold, in the kind of pain that only exists after your body has been still and then has to start again. Sixteen kilometers left. About four hours of walking. And in that moment, if there had been a road, a bus, any way out, I would have taken it. I would have DNF'd right there.
But there was no road. There was only the path.
The thing is, a DNF had never truly entered my consciousness during the race. Even in the worst moments I had never actually considered it a real option. But at five AM I felt the edge of it. And then did not step off, not because of a decision made in that moment, but because the decision had already been made before I started. I would finish. That was not something I was choosing in the desert. It was something I had already chosen.
So I got up. And I kept walking.
The path was a single narrow strip of hard sandy ground, maybe thirty centimeters wide, running straight to a horizon that never seemed to get closer. On either side, gravel and stones. Every time my foot missed the path the pain was immediate. So I stared at the ground and placed each step carefully and kept going. People were overtaking me. I was slowing down that much. The sun came up. It got hot fast. The meme kept looping. How long is this going to take.
The last ten kilometers were the bottom. The heat building, the narrow path that never ended, the pain at a level that had stopped being surprising and just become the permanent condition of existing. I cried. I kept going. Both at the same time.
At kilometer ninety-two I reached the last checkpoint. When I saw it I started crying immediately. The volunteers were so warm, so encouraging. I cried. Then I left.
Eight kilometers. I was carrying all my weight on my poles because my feet could barely hold me. My arms started hurting from the poles. There was nothing left that did not hurt.
At kilometer ninety-five, somewhere in my head, the voice of ultrarunner Andrew Glaze: five k left. Your mother can run a five k. I said it out loud, into the camera. I was crying. I cannot run. I will not run. That will not work. But I said it anyway because it was true that there were only five kilometers left and that meant something.
The last three kilometers I got faster. Not because the pain was gone but because my brain had done the math and understood that rest was close. I talked to some Belgians. Then Sarah, a British girl I had seen many times on course, was nearby, running a little, walking a little. We encouraged each other forward.
And then the finish line was there, five hundred meters ahead.
I ran. Feet screaming, legs barely cooperating, I ran through that finish line at nine thirty in the morning. The people there hugged me. I got my water and made my way back to the tent.
The rest day was not rest. A sandstorm came in, violent and relentless, tents collapsing, MDS workers running around reconstructing them while we lay inside covered in sand. I went to the medical tent for my feet. A staff member looked at them and said they looked too good for someone who had just done a hundred kilometers, and I could mend them myself. I felt dismissed in a way that stung when I was that destroyed. I mended my own blisters, shuffled back through the storm, ate two dinners because a tentmate had spare food, and lay down.
We all just lay there. Napping, waking, napping again. The storm went on outside.
Stage four broke me. Not in the sense that I gave up, but in the sense that something came apart. I finished broken, held together inside something larger than myself, the race, the desert, the bowl of it, where the pieces could not escape. I was still in it. Just in pieces.
That was enough.