Willem Avenant sipped on a coffee with bruised and calloused hands and a big smile, one of profound accomplishment.

He munched on a pastry, a remnant of the sweet tooth he picked up from eating protein bars every day during his recent time competing in the 2025 Dakar Rally. On a cold snowy morning in downtown Concord, the tall ginger-bearded man with a South African accent recounted his journey through the Saudi Arabian dunes of the Abu Dhabi desert.

He completed the treacherous journey on Jan. 17. Many months after the Monitor first wrote about his story, and after years of work between running multiple businesses, training, time and effort on Avenant’s part, he fulfilled his lifelong dream of finishing the most rigorous and challenging rally in the world.

His journey lasted two weeks, traversing over 5,000 miles, and he spent 120 hours, 49 minutes and 36 seconds on his bike racing to the finish. Unlike any other motorsport competition in the world, this was a true marathon of mental endurance, physical fortitude and sheer determination to do everything possible to just make it to the finish line.

He faced sickness, a broken radiator, falls, sunburns, lungfuls of dirt, broken fingernails, dehydration and hunger. At one point, lost in the middle of the night, he was led back to the trail by Saudi Bedouins, desert nomads.

“You live multiple lifetimes in one day, and you don’t think it’s possible. In the span of one day, so much can happen,” he said. “It’s like there’s no more problems in your life after you do Dakar. It’s just – that’s not a problem, it’s just simply an inconvenience, but it’s not a problem.

“But then at the other point, you get very bored, really easily, because I think that’s the problem with sports that push the limits. There’s always the ‘what’s next?’ The guy that I did the marathon stage with, he did Everest and he’s like, ‘If Dakar is a 10, Everest is a 3,’ and I was like, ‘Bloody hell.’ ”

The rally of a lifetime

The sickness was the first challenge. He got a common cold over the holidays in New Hampshire, and in early February he still had it.

“I started sick. I left here and it’s never actually left me, and I was fairly disappointed because I’d worked the entire year to be as fit and as strong as possible,” Avenant said. “And then I leave sick and I get there sick. And I think being in the race, the adrenaline, it actually suppresses the sickness. But then after 14 days, your body just gives in.”

The next was the radiator and the dirt.

His bike, a Husqvarna 450 Rally Replica motorbike, worked great except that a radiator issue in the second stage cost him a chance to place higher. Going behind early in this long rally makes a huge difference, because the motorbike competitors race alongside trucks and cars, so after they go through the route, the terrain becomes more and more difficult to get through.

“The biggest problem being in the back is that you have the cars and the trucks and the dust, so I was coughing up like soil. Chunks of soil came out of my lungs with blood, and I’m just like, ‘This is Saudi soil, it’s not dust,’ ” Avenant recalled. “I wish I could explain to somebody: It’s a wall of soil.

“It depends on the terrain, because a lot of the times their wheels go so deep that, even in the desert, when you ride behind them, you smell moisture because it’s like they’re plowing the ground. And once you’re in it, you can’t get out. … And the problem of that is you’re going 70 to 80 miles an hour and then a car comes, which is really, really difficult.”

The competitors use collections of maps known as roadbooks to show the distance to waypoints, which they have to go through to avoid penalties. But when you fall behind, you’re funneled through these already well-trodden points in the terrain. At night, this becomes even more difficult; with low visibility and freezing temperatures, racers can easily get lost off-track or stuck.

Often, many racers will follow someone in front of them, which can yield great results. Other times, the person they’re following is just as lost as they are.

Avenant only got off-track once, but it was a dangerous mistake. Stuck in deep ruts along a riverbank in the middle of the night, he had to find solid ground and get out of the way of cars and trucks that could potentially hit him if he stayed stuck.

He went off course for his safety and ended up going in the opposite direction of his target waypoint. He said he encountered two local Bedouin men at a road crossing and attempted to communicate where he was trying to go, but after following them he still was not making any progress. Eventually, he was able to spot the waypoint lights in the distance and make it back on track.

A total of 45 bike competitors withdrew from the race, mostly in the middle stages. Whether due to a broken bike, injury or a multitude of other factors such as getting lost and calling for aid with the satellite radio — which results in disqualification — it’s a serious feat to just finish the Dakar.

“Once you’re in the back, you can’t come back. Every day the guy you rode with in the morning is gone the next. I went through because I rode slowly,” Avenant added about the grueling mental aspect of the race and how many people don’t finish.

Avenant finished in 82nd place, and he will carry that with pride for the rest of his life.

What now for Avenant?

“Now I know where I rank in the world. Then it becomes a question of, ‘Do you want to improve on that?’ Then the next question is, ‘Well, what would that matter?’ Avenant said. “Because the level of competition in Dakar is so insanely high. Even if I train for a year, another year flat out, I would probably only be able to increase my position to 20 places maximum.”

The next race in the World Rally Championship is very soon, and he would have to sink another $20,000 in to make it. He said that he achieved his goal, and despite not placing as high as he would have liked, he is looking forward to enjoying time with his family and doing business as usual.

“Now I know I can do it, but I don’t know what’s coming next. I do a lot of training camps and schools, so I’ll probably expand on that a little bit,” he said. “We are planning to do a roadbook thing, again, in New Hampshire. We did one last year, just like a fun day, intro day, just to get them to feel it. We’ll do that in the summer.”

To learn more and get involved in roadbook camps, lessons, rallies across North America and to keep up with Willem Avenant’s work, you can find him on Instagram and Facebook, at @willemavenantracing, or on his website, wravenant.wixsite.com/rallyracing.

Alexander Rapp can be reached at arapp@cmonitor.com.