There was, however, one remaining complication that I failed to mention previously. The Harricana people weren’t going to let me wander around the mountains indefinitely. There were cutoff times, and after more than twelve hours of increasingly pathetic forward progress, they had become very relevant. I reached the final checkpoint before the climb up the Montagne Noire at 17:58, with roughly 45 minutes to spare. After everything that had happened, I was still officially in the race, but barely.

That changed the equation again. For hours, I’d stopped caring about pace because pace had become a largely theoretical concept. Now the clock mattered again. I didn’t need to run fast. I couldn’t run fast. I just needed to keep moving quickly enough that race narcs didn’t remove me from the course. So I climbed the Montagne Noire in the dark, following that little circle of light from my headlamp, dealing with whatever appeared inside it.

The kilometres started disappearing again. Slowly and painfully, but they disappeared. I reached the top of the Montagne Noire around 19:30, and then started downhill. Somewhere at this point, finishing stopped being an abstract concept and became something I could finally allow myself to think about. I still felt terrible, my feet were destroyed and I had almost nothing left, but I was going to make it before the final cutoff at 21:26.

I crossed the finish line in just under fifteen hours, roughly thirty minutes before the final cut-off. Thirty minutes might sound like plenty of time, but over fifteen hours it’s basically a rounding error. A few more extended puking sessions or a slightly slower crawl over the Montagne Noire and my day could have ended very differently. Instead, after nearly eighty kilometres, I crossed the line running under my own power. Not fast. Not pretty. But officially a finisher again.

Unfortunately, crossing the finish line didn’t magically repair whatever I’d done to myself. When I got back to the hotel and peeled off my socks, I was mortified. My feet looked like they’d been removed from a cadaver. They were swollen, blistered, discoloured, and generally fucking horrifying, and it was pretty obvious I was going to lose at least six of my ten toenails.

To make matters worse, Lu and I had stopped at McDonald’s on the way back to the auberge because a disgusting quantity of salt, fat, and carbohydrates seemed both medically and spiritually appropriate, and I had every intention of eating it. My stomach disagreed. The McDonald’s went into the fridge and I went to bed.

Calling what happened next “sleep” would be generous. I spent most of the night curled into a fetal ball, tossing and turning through weird feverish dreams. Everything hurt and my stomach still felt awful. I’d wake up, rearrange myself into some slightly different version of misery, close my eyes and do it all over again.

At 4:30 in the morning, I woke up and the nausea was finally gone, and I was starving. Better yet, there was McDonald’s in the fridge. I nuked it quickly and sat there eating it with no shame as Lu slept, thinking that after my ordeal from yesterday, this would probably be the most satisfying meal of my life. It wasn’t. The onions were fucking disgusting and I suddenly felt nauseous again.