RatN – Day 5 – The Morning After

Ferwert to Lelystad, 170km or 106 miles.

I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread

Bilbo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring

You and us both, Bilbo.

I was just too tired to even put a thought together, yesterday. It wasn’t any harder but the cumulative strain is building up.

It was alternating warm and cold, headwind, crosswind, tailwind as the wind along the coast shifted around. We were down to our summer riding gear alone at one point, with my schizophrenic Wahoo temperature gauge reading 31 C at one point. It was definitely in the mid 80’s F.

It’s a good time to be honest about how things are going with a simple status report.

I’ve been battling a cold since we started. Picked it up on the plane or airport, surely. Now it’s hanging around in my chest and I’ve got a soft, unproductive cough. Sleeping on my back seems to make it worse. I’ll try some decongestant today.

The cumulative fatigue is… accumulating. I’m prone to night sweats under normal circumstances, but these are on a whole ‘nother level.

It’s one of the ways our bodies are telling us to stop already!

Liz’s knees are doing amazing! That was a huge worry for her going into this event.  I suggested, prior to the start, that if her knees stayed about the same they would feel great relative to the other pains! She’s got a doozy of a saddle sore developing, so she rode a lot of yesterday a bit askew. This had the side effect of giving her some lingering numbness in her toes and hands on one side. She’ll try a blister bandage today.

Last night we were charging our phones, but when we switched the bedside lamp off at the wall switch, it turned off the charger too. 🤦‍♂️Today we’ll do a little powerbank shuffle today to keep the phones juiced.

We didn’t bring any utensils for eating. Hasn’t been a huge problem, but we bought a small peanut butter container yesterday and we’ve no way to spread it. We’ll try using the other end of our toothbrush to spread peanut butter today.

Oh and our bikes are covered in sheep shit. Probably not just the bikes, to be honest.

One bright note! Yesterday while getting liquids in Lemmer, another dot watcher named Jan came to find us. It was very fun to chat with him. His daughter did the race in 2019 solo and he’s been a dot watcher ever since. As we are the last riders on the road, we have a certain celebrity or maybe it’s more accurate to call it a conspicuousness. For better or for worse!

After Jan left we packed up and headed about 200m just as a drawbridge lifted to block our route. And there was Jan again!

Another good thing from our stay in Ferwert:

Today we should cross the halfway point in mileage, later in the ride. We’ll also pass through the east part of Amsterdam. We’re at about 840km of the route covered, but more mileage actually traveled of course. It also marks our halfway point in available riding days, with five days gone and five remaining.