Cobbles, coffee and the climb nobody saw coming

The plan was simple: sit in, save the legs, and see what was left at the foot of the Semmering. Plans, it turns out, don't survive contact with Lower Austria.

Fifty kilometers in, a crash split the bunch on a cobbled farm road nobody had bothered to mention in the race manual. I was on the wrong side of it. The next forty minutes were the hardest chase of my life — through villages, past confused cows, behind a tractor at one memorable point.

By the time I got back on, the race had decided to go up something the locals apparently call 'the wall behind the church.' It wasn't on the profile. It was 18% at the steepest. And it was, in hindsight, exactly what I needed: everyone else was as broken as I was.

I finished ninth. The coffee at the finish was terrible and I have never enjoyed one more. Semmering, we have unfinished business.