The day is hotter than usual. The desert burns its way up through my shoes to my feet. At each checkpoint, I see casualties. Something tells me that this stage won’t be easy. Surprisingly, I’m feeling OK so far and have a good pace going. “Now the real fun begins” I say to myself as I race across a dry salt lake bed to the 40km mark.

But just as I’m feeling smug about being in the top 50 runners, I feel a devastating nausea take over my body. I must be dehydrated, but the nausea is so bad that I can’t get myself to drink water. I realize that if I don’t drink, I’ll completely dehydrate within minutes and be out of the race. So I pour water into the cap of the bottle and sip, pause, sip, pause, sip. I try to hydrate myself back up 1 cc at a time. But to no avail. I can’t run. I can hardly even walk. There is no shade and no mercy. I’m toast.

Somehow I stumble through the desert, with runners overtaking me on all sides, until evening falls. The desert cools off and my nausea starts to recede. I realize that I took too many salt tablets in the morning and my blood salt was way too high. These are the types of small technical mistakes that can ruin a race.

Slowly my body gathers strength as I breathe in the cool night air of the desert. We navigate from stick light to stick light placed on poles in the desert. Distance is meaningless; only time matters. But time goes by far too slowly. My kidneys hurt. My entire being hurts. I want nothing more than to lie down and rest. But I keep bumbling along. At two in the morning, I cross the finish line and collapse into my sleeping bag. More than half the participants are still behind me, I think before passing out. “Good God,” I say to myself, “they must be hating life right now.”