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MDS LEGENDARY 2026 - STAGE 3

Stage 3 • 29km It wasn't one thing breaking. It was everything, all at once, with no off switch. Twenty-nine kilometers. Twenty-five degrees. Cloudy. By MDS standards, a gift. A few of us said it out loud in the morning, quietly relieved: at least it won't be hot today. That was the bar we were working with by stage three. Not good. Just: less bad than yesterday. I got up and tested my knee. The night before I had gone to the medical tent and told them about the pain, and they gave me a cream to massage in. It had helped. Not gone, still there, but noticeably better than the day before. I accepted that. Nothing I could do about it now except keep going carefully, and that is what I did. The blisters I had drained the evening before had come back overnight. By stage three they were burning, and as the day went on and my feet slowly began to swell inside my shoes, the burning shifted into a deep throb. I didn't know it yet, but the swelling would only become a real problem during the 100k. For now it was just one more thing on the list. And the list was long. Blisters burning and throbbing. Knee still present, still requiring care. Neck pain from day one, never gone, a sharp pulling pain that ran up through my neck and into my head. Sore joints, tendons that needed coaxing. Headaches. Dehydration to manage. Nutrition to stay on top of. My body wasn't catastrophically broken. It was just covered in small things, each one manageable alone, all of them together relentless. I took it slow. On hard ground I could speed walk and pull ahead of people. On sand I slowed to almost nothing, and everyone I had just passed would drift past me again. That was stage three: a constant shuffling of the same faces, forward and back, no one really pulling away from anyone. I tried to run a few times. The knee made that complicated. Somewhere in those attempts I developed chafing on my back. One more thing added to the list. That was what made me tired. Not any single thing. The accumulation. The constant tending. The mental load of tracking and managing and talking yourself through it, over and over, with no end in sight. It wasn't numbness. It was despair. I could see the point of continuing. I just wished, more than once, that I could give up. It would have been so much easier. But there was nothing in me that would actually do it. After stage two, a DNF wasn't an option anymore. So I pushed. I hated it. And I pushed anyway. I looked for animals along the way. I wanted to take photos for my nephew. I thought about my family. About some of my friends, imagining them out there with me, dealing with the same sand and the same pain and the same burning feet. Not to compare, not to wonder who would do better or worse. Just to feel less alone in it. It was neither comforting nor isolating. They were there but not there. Somehow that made sense. Everyone came back to camp a little quieter that evening. The 100k stage was the next day. We all knew it. We took care of our feet quickly, didn't talk much, went to bed early because the alarm was set for three-thirty in the morning. But before that, they laid carpets out in the middle of camp. A woman led a yoga session for anyone who wanted it. A friend of mine, one of the blue jacket volunteers who had been helping us through the race, assisted her. I went. My joints and tendons were so stiff it felt like pulling on a very dry, very thick rubber band, and through breathing and movement, slowly, they began to loosen. Just slightly. Just enough. The yoga didn't fix anything physical. But it shifted something else. It cleared my sight. It let me breathe in something from the ground, something grounding and still, and remember what was ahead. The 100k. The goal. Not the pain, not the list of small things, not the despair. The goal. I went to bed with it in front of me. Three-thirty came fast.

Move & Meet

·April 16, 2026