After all the steps and the miles and the ups and the downs, I was only a few hundred meters from the finish line. The relief I craved was in sight. It was the place I had visualized for months.

But that miniscule distance almost undid me.

My running partner and I had gone twenty-four miles on Colorado high alpine trails. It was the last of our three days at a trail running event and the day we were most scared of – neither of us had gone that far in our lives. It had been a good one, though, with rolling inclines and gentle descents and perfect weather (minus two minutes of hail) and meadows and pine forests. The last three miles were flat gravel road and we could see the camp where the entire endeavor would end.

But then, all of the sudden, it felt exactly like I jumped into cold water. My inhales weren’t transforming to exhales on their regular cadence. Sips of air sat in my lungs and my ribs lacked the wherewithal to expel them. After hours of rapid in-out breaths on the trail, my system wasn’t functioning as normal.

I told my running partner that I needed to walk. I could feel her assessment because only minutes before we had been enthusiastically chatting about the end. With a thump, it occurred to me that I might not finish even though I was in crawling distance. It also occurred to me that I might actually have to crawl.

Fifteen steps later, with my eyes firmly affixed on the ground and not the arch or the sponsor signs or any of the other finish line bits, I was finally able to move the stale air out of my lungs. I pumped my arms to pull my body into a jog. My friend and I finished side by side and we raised our hands in the air like so many before and after us.

We bent over, hands on our knees, trying to figure out how we were actually doing now that the adrenaline was beginning to recede. People asked us what we needed – an extraordinary rarity in a mother’s life. We took handfuls of chips to attempt to give our bodies back some of the salt that now coated our skin and ringed the sleeves of our shirts. We finished, and the moment of suspended breath was gone.

But its memory burned. Later, after a shower and warm clothes and a half hour seated in an Adirondack chair watching the rain pebble the surface of a pond, I wondered.

I had choked up at the start line of each of the three days we had done this race, which was somewhat expected. After all that training and anticipating and worrying and planning and visualizing, it made sense that something would leak out of the emotional lockbox. But this was different because it wasn’t a feeling. More like a blockage. It could have brought me down, physically and otherwise. It could have torpedoed what was otherwise a pretty undramatic race.

So I guess I know now that detonations can happen anytime. In sight of the end or otherwise.