“I could’ve just kept doing my own race like I had for the first three hours of the race, but that’s not my kind of thing. I’m a racer. I don’t hold back at any point.”

Amberger burned a few too many matches trying to match the pace of Sanders and the rest of the lead group, and then missed his special needs bag after he made the turnaround at Hawi. That was it. He was fried. The return trip to Kailua-Kona would be 50 of the longest miles of Amberger’s life. He spent most of the next two hours riding alone, wondering how he would actually manage to make it to the finish.

“At a race like Kona, the results don’t always tell the full story,”