Yeah, the wind was blowing hard, and the wide-open terrain offered little refuge. As I was casually making my way to the line at 10:58am I saw a pack of riders approaching. **expletive deleted**. Is that them? I saw my teammates, spun the bike around and clambered onto the back. Where I proceeded to spend most of the first lap. After we turned onto a narrow country lane the pack got seriously stretched out, as you yourself might be stretched out if you got sucked into a black hole.

I deftly made my way up a bit in the crosswind but then struggled to hold the wheels of guys who were struggling to hold the wheels of guys... and then I was alone, pretty close to maxing out, one lap down four to go how... and then a lovely echelon of 5 guys materialized around me, and then we grew to 10, then 15, a nice little chase group of also-rans. We held a brief (but it was really more like 3 hours) meeting of the intergalactic council to determine how best to rotate through the crosswind. Then we put our heads down and did some quality chasing.



After two laps I was feeling better and ready for food and beverages. But. Oops, I took the banana-eating and cytomax-drinking a bit too casually because next thing I knew there was a 10m gap ahead of me and we were about to turn into the headwind. And then it was lights out. No chance of making it back to Earth. Doomed to orbit the roads of Zamora alone.

At the end of the third lap I had decided to pack it in, and then there was Teddy, feeling even worse than me. I suggested we do a recovery lap and he simply hung his head and begged for the car keys. Ok, here you go-oh wait. Where are my keys? I checked all my jersey pockets and the car keys were gone, stone cold GONE, stoopid gone, gone like an errant negatively charged particle hanging out near the event horizon. Of course the car and trunk were locked... shall we hang for another lap? It looked Black Hole Zamora had really sucked us in this time, and we would not be leaving any time soon.