Running under continuous threat across open ground with no cover produced a particular kind of exhaustion that was distinct from combat exhaustion or endurance exhaustion or the exhaustion of sustained vigilance.
It was all three simultaneously, compounding rather than accumulating, and it operated on a shorter timeline than any of them individually because the body and mind could not distinguish between the immediate demands of active engagement and the sustained demands of maintaining readiness for engagement that had not yet arrived, and so both states drew from the same reserves at the same rate.
The candidates were failing.
Falling like flies in this land of death.
