I had to catch up on sleep. After 42 sleepless hours overall that was my greatest wish. One tends to get frugal.

But now, the actual point of interest:
Extremely anxious - about the events that would transpire soon - I was alread awake at 7am on Saturday. Wide awake. Even thoughts of sleep were pointless. I loaded up the car and got ready to go, but my family demanded that I perform a few tasks first - which was completely within their rights - and so, at noon, I finally got into my car and drove off toward Brühl / Cologne. On the way, I picked up a friend, assembled a new racer bike and got another set of tires. You definitely shouldn't show up to a 373m/600km Brevet with shoddy materials. It could get ugly.
Of course we showed up way too early and could afford ourselves the luxury of starting up the grill on the banks of the Rhine and eating until we couldn't move. After all, we had made plans to meet up with a few buddies with the purpose of filling our carbohydrate reservoirs to the brim.

At around 6pm everyone was so excited that we couldn't stop ourselves from making our way to the start. After all, we still had to pack and modify some stuff. What should I take on this trip?

At 9pm, coinciding with the start of the ride, it started raining buckets. Figures. Why should you hope for good weather when you're planning on riding 373m/600km in one sitting. We were drenched in seconds. Luckily, it wasn't very cold and so the rain was tolerable.

After riding in the lead group for about 12.4m/20km, I looked around for my friend Guido, who was usually out front, but he was nowhere to be seen. After another 6.2m/10km, I pulled over to the right and got out my phone. Where was he? Waaaaay in the back, no motivation, mopish, useless and completely demotivated. So, I waited for him and after 10 minutes he finally showed up. I could see it in his eyes: total listlessness. Not the same person that I had started out with 1.5h ago. So, I pulled out all of my psychological tricks to pull him out of his hole. After another 10 minutes the second starter group passed us and we joined them so that we wouldn't have to ride through the night alone. At least that's what I thought, but right at the next stoplight, he had disappeared again. He flew the coop and threw in the towel. Taking the horrible weather into consideration, I can completely understand him. The temptation to join him was incredibly great and if the second starter group hadn't passed us, I would have probably caved pretty quickly. The rain was ankle deep and what didn't drench us from above was soaked by the spray from the guy ahead of you.

Somewhere in Plettenberg, at a stoplight, long before the first control point, but after about 2 hours of cycling in the pouring rain, someone asked me, why we were riding through the night in this horrible weather. What a question. There really is no answer. I didn't even try to come up with a plausible explanation, because there isn't one. Strictly speaking, we really shouldn't even ask ourselves that question. We do it because it's fun! Not many can comprehend this, I confess.

Everyone that I talked to up front, told me that I could give up any time. But seriously, once giving up becomes an option, it won't be long before it becomes the solution, which means that giving up was NOT an option, ever. The only option is : go, go, go!

We stayed together as a group pretty well that night and once it started getting light out, we started riding in each others' slippstreams. Energy conservation. I was fighting sleep that night and from time to time I had the feeling that my eyes were falling shut. So, I was extremely happy to see dawn come about around 4:30am. How glorious!

We reached the second control point in a larger group, some of which chose to stay and recover some of their strength. The rest jumped back onto their bikes and so a small, but competetive, group of us covered the flat distance between the Sauerland and the Weserbergland. However, once we reached the foothills of the Weserbergland, there were only three of us left. The three of us finished the ride together.

We crossed the Weser, saw the Porta Westfalica in the distance, turned around and made our way back. We took advantage of the rest of the day and reached the foothills of the Sauerland in the twilight. Just one more night!

I will spare any further details and so I'll never tell you what it feels like to be lost among the hills, all alone and extremely hungry at 1am. Actually, I don't remember myself anymore. What a great provision within the human brain. The process of information suppression works just great.

A short note: there comes a point in time where your legs just don't want to function anymore and that's when the thing that is so appealing about long distances. You start riding with your head. The mind against the body, the sleepiness, the exhaustion.

** 404m/650km ** 36 hours on the road ** rode for 2 nights and a day ** 42 hours without sleepf ** burned about 15.000 Kcal ** rode about 6 hours in the pouring rain ** one fall ** 10 energy bars, 2 gels and countless sandwiches ** coke, water, juice by the liter ** Hunger ** overwrought achilles tendon ** crutches ** no strain, doctor's orders ** bring on the PBP!!!

Bloody greetings,

Andreas

P.s.: The mindful readers will have noticed that the pictures that are part of this article have absolutely nothing to do with the content. This is where I respected the Captain's suggestion that this letter-heavy text needs some loosening up. However, I am of the opinion that the average intelligence of a Pirate is higher than his/her rep. So all you Pirates, attack your keyboards so that the articles of the future consist of more than just picture captions. Prove me right.