I was going through. I wanted the company, and I wanted to finish, but how could I force anyone to enter into this madness?

Luckily, Joaquin wasn’t really asking, and Erika—who had in the morning taken second in the half-marathon—was up for the run. So they came along with me, helping me keep my mind off pain and exhaustion by talking about all sorts of inanities.

“We’ve been eating like birds all day,” Erika mentioned. “I’m hungry.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Joaquin replied. “Birds eat a lot. They eat their body weight in a day. There’s no way we’ve eaten our body weight.”

“It’s a saying,” she said. “We’ve been stopping, eating, running, stopping, eating, like birds.”

“Tt doesn’t make sense,” Joaquin continued, explaining in detail how much birds eat on average and how that would translate to hundreds of pounds in human weight.

All the while, we continued running up and down the trails, occasionally stopping and walking because my legs just wouldn’t run.

Then I would pick it up again, trying to get the legs moving one more time, and they would follow.

The mating call of birds and people

We were in a rhythm, and they were still talking, now going on about animal mating calls and how we humans have them (‘‘Hey, baby, can I buy you a drink?’’) and how in Mexico the piropos are more romantic versions of the same. And then I accidentally kicked a rock as we started to wind downhill, at around mile 40.

“My ear feels good, my pinky is fine, and my left elbow feels good, too,” I announced to no one in particular.

“Huh?” Erika asked. “What are you talking about?”

“T just hit a rock with my toe. Excruciating pain is shooting up my foot and up my leg right now. But I can’t think about what’s wrong.”

“Ah,” she said. “So what’s right is your ear, pinky, and elbow.”

“The left one,” I added. “The left elbow feels pretty good.”

And on we went, sometimes running, sometimes jogging, sometimes walking. A few of the other racers passed us. By this time, I didn’t really care about my time or place in the race. I just wanted to finish. At mile 43, a woman who seemed to be doing a very fast walk passed us.

“How far do you think we’ve got to go?” I asked her. “We must be getting close.”

“We’re not close at all,” she said, almost angrily.

“Ah, give me something, some hope, to keep going.”

“No, I’m not going to lie to you,” she replied sternly.

I muttered under my breath: “Be that way.”

And we kept moving, just running slowly, me with all the strength I had to muster a 13-minutes-a-mile pace.

But then, something almost magical happened. I don’t understand it, but all of a sudden I got a burst of energy. I could run again. And I picked up the pace, ran harder, faster. I heard Erika’s GPS watch beep and asked her the pace.

“We’re now down to 9:30-mile pace,” she said.

I picked up the pace more and more. And then I passed the angry honest lady. And then the guy from Arizona who had passed me a half hour earlier. And then a friend from southern New Mexico, Louie Telles, who is a tremendous ultramarathoner in his own right (but who had piled on the miles recently . . . another story). And Erika announced we were now running at eight-minute miles.

It just keeps getting better

I didn’t get it; I just knew I had to keep going. One thing pushed me on—the finish line. I knew I was getting close, knew we were near the 48-mile mark, where Erika and Joaquin would leave me, and I got giddy. The pain started to go away, and I was able to run harder, to the last aid station, where I got some Gatorade and water and just kept striding.