“Winds of up to 30 miles per hour” was one of the many sentences in the background noise fuzz that resonated the night before stage 3 at the North Star Bicycle Festival.

Somehow the dullness of my muscles appears to correlate with similar mental circumstances, and that piece of information about the wind was lost in my hypoglycaemic fog.

The goal of stage 3’s 154km road race was to protect Peter’s best young rider’s jersey, and for some of the guys to try to sneak into a breakaway. The race started with a neutral section, followed by a short gravel section. In hindsight, this miniscule gravel/dirt section accurately foreshadowed how the rest of the day would go. You could say that the proverbial shit was hit against itself in the large hadron collider.

Needless to say, crashes happened, and the only positive thing to come out of that event was this fabulous Facebook status update by Yuri:

Big crash on the gravel section. Luckily my nose broke my fall, and a few guys landed on top of me for good measure. Other positive notes were medical vehicle had no water or antiseptics to clean my cuts. Did not bother to get out of the car and told me they only had bandages. If your that ill equipped at least have cake to hand out as a consolation.

Shortly thereafter, we came up onto a plateau where the crosswinds decimated the peloton into five or more groups. I found myself with Peter in the third group of only seven riders, less than 30 seconds behind the front group. We chased at 50kph for an HOUR to close the gap to them, finally making the junction as the distance compacted when the race made a turn into a headwind.

Peter and I were elated to have made the junction, his white jersey seemingly safe, until about 90 seconds later when the Optum team decided to make a second attempt at the Manhattan Project.

Unlike myself, Peter was able to ignite his legs one last time, trying desperately to glue himself to the leaders, probably because he has a little more Tinder testosterone at his disposal than I do.

In the end he lost contact, and half an hour later the both of us were joined by Anton, Brandon and the rest of the grupetto. We were in good company though, with the reigning and former US Pro national champions also having lost out.

Lessons of the day:

1-      Stay near the front when the wind kicks up

2-      Don’t assume that just because you brought a gun to a knife fight, you’ll come out on top… These Optum boys brought enriched Uranium to Minnesota.