And here I am again. Last day of August in Granada, the light going gold on the Palacio de Congresos, the steps full of people who are strangers everywhere else in the world but family here for at least three whole days. I am scanning for a face I know. I want a smile. What I really want is a hug for five seconds before any of this begins.
I stood in this same place last year and knew nothing. I finished, eventually, after a series of massive mechanicals. I had even stopped calling it a race and started referring to it as my Big Escape. I feel a certain kind of confidence now, but at this point I know about the dark places the mind can go, and I stand here no less humbled than I did last year.
I sat at my red dinner table in the last weeks of summer; I could not stop thinking about it. All that applause, for me, for finishing a race that had come apart in my hands. And every time I said it, that it was not only me, that I could not have done it alone, that there had been people along the way like guardian angels, handing me back my curiosity about what might be over the next ridge, I could feel it not landing. They heard performance. They heard suffering. Nobody asked who stayed late, to fix my brakes once again.
So, I let the last training rides go. I shortened them, or skipped them altogether, and spent the time cutting up photos of memories, sketching figures and places I met with. I made them into collages, each one of them reminding me of a person, and by the time I finished, there was no way to keep the gratitude inside any longer.
And then the idea came. What if I do not keep these at all. What if I write to the people who made me come back and promise myself that no matter where this race leads me, the first thing I do, before anything else, is deliver the message. The applause they should have had the first time.
I check once more that the envelopes are all in the ziplock, and as I squeeze them back under the mesh of my saddle bag, we are moving. Up through the narrow streets of Granada, and while working our way to the gate of the Abadía del Sacromonte, the sun coming up over the distant Sierra Nevada. I keep my eyes on the wheel in front of me and I stop talking.
I stand in the centre of the village before I go up. I need a minute. It is vulnerable to arrive somewhere with your gratitude in your hands and no idea what will happen to it. What if they don't remember me at all? What if they are not there this time? Then I am climbing the last rise towards their house, and both are outside, both smiling, with the same care they had for us last year. I give the letter to Mary first. Nico comes over and they open it together, heads bent, in the sun. We hug, all three of us, and I stay longer than I planned to.
On a bench in the front yard sits another rider. He doesn't say anything. He is simply there while this small, personal thing that was never meant for an audience happens, and from that moment he carries a piece of it with him too.
The clock doesn't stop for me, so even though I would love to stay with them a little longer, I got to go. There are more letters to deliver, and I want to do all of it while holding my position in the top ten. It peaks at 50 degrees Celsius on my computer climbing out of the Gorafe desert. But today I want to reach Gor, and stay on the schedule taped to my handlebar, so no way I am stopping here to rest.
After three hours of light sleep on the floor of a bar, and one more bocadillo, I find myself on the climb to Calar Alto, with the descent to Velefique still to come and a plan to reach at least Agua Amarga, riding into the next sunset. I come down to the coast tired. Two days of carrying the heat have taken their toll. The few kilometres from the bottom of the descent to the village tip me into anxiety. I ride uneasy, frightened of nothing I can name.
Last year I came through here with no brakes. I had been walking the descents for hours by then, pushing the bike down loose gravel into complete exhaustion while most of the riders were long gone. I was moving from mechanic to mechanic, and I remember understanding that this was what the race was now. Every bit of progress paid for with a bigger setback. And every single time I decided it was over, that there was no version of this where I reached Granada, somebody turned up. Someone local, someone who did not know me and had no reason to care.
Maybe that is where the anxiety is coming from. The exhaustion arrives like muscle memory, at the same point on the map, a day and a half earlier.
I can no longer work out the maths of how far I am from the village. It is clear by now. I need food and sleep, instead of carrying on to Almería. The first point where I fall behind schedule.
It is still dark when I reach the top of the climb on the coast at Cabo de Gata. The lighthouse is painting its beam along the side of mountains I can see only in outline. Hannah is behind me. I know. I see her headlight. But I need to stop for a moment, to catch this view, and not to forget why I am here in the first place. She stops too. We have a few words before she carries on, and then there is only her rear light flashing in the distance. I will catch you in your sleep, I think. And I turn back towards the Mediterranean, to look at the lighthouse one more time.
Bend by bend, light crawls into our tire tracks. It is the crack of dawn. I yawn a lot. As if the alarm had gone off on an ordinary morning during the week. Another day in the office, I think.
The gap between us holds at a few kilometres all morning, close enough that I keep expecting to see her in every town.
Then the entry to Almería starts counting down on my computer. Twenty kilometres. Ten. I take the last envelope out of the ziplock and ride with it against the bars for a while before I decide anything.
Delivering means a twelve-kilometre detour. I am almost certain it will cost me the place. I think about it for a second. Whether I should race or deliver. Then I turn off.
I find him waiting in front of the shop. He opens the letter there in the street. I came back a year later, and it is the second time these people have got me through this race. Strangers who were never really strangers.
I tell him I will bring it home from here. An overnighter to Granada, and off I go. I want to stop and sleep so many times. But I told him I wouldn't.
Then the messages start coming in. These people, reading the note somewhere in a quiet moment. I can't answer any of them, but I read them all.
I promised Mary there would be no crying this year. And here we are. All crying a bit. What a mess.
I arrive back in Granada around noon. After 77 hours out there, 7 hours behind my plan, with all 6 letters delivered.
People talk like doing an ultra is only about discipline and grand sacrifices. About rationing, the water, the sleep, the hours, the matches you are allowed to burn. And it is, partly. I had a schedule taped to my handlebar and I loved it the way you love something you made yourself. But nothing on that schedule explains why I came back. It was a road dropping down into Gorafe. It was a lighthouse painting the mountains at four in the morning. It was that when I had nothing left, strangers were the ones who gave me back the wanting to see what came next.
Dear Mary and Nico, I am not sure you remember me, but the first time we met, I was crying sooo much that I could barely tell you what was wrong…
And they all remembered.