Crosswind—once again a mental challenge

I had a reasonably good night—at 6 a.m. I had to go to the toilet and got to enjoy the sunrise, one advantage of having the toilet outside. I got up fairly late because I had gone to sleep quite late the night before. With very poor reception, uploading photos and videos took forever.

Before setting off at 11:15, I bought another bottle of water—better safe than sorry. Right then, a gust of wind knocked my bike over in an unfortunate way, slightly cracking the carbon handlebar. It still holds, but it can now move a little. Damn! Still, I can continue riding, and my most comfortable hand position isn’t affected.

What happened on the route itself can be described quite simply: 96.7 km straight ahead in strong crosswinds, then a left turn and with tailwind into a village that seems to have two names—Usturt or Tölep.

The scenery looked exactly like the last kilometers of yesterday: road, power lines, steppe. Blue sky and sunshine like on the Kazakh flag, and pleasant temperatures around 20°C. The biggest excitement was when a house suddenly appeared, a train passed by, or I saw a road sign with an extremely long place name.

The challenge today was the very strong crosswind. The forecast had shown winds of 40–50 km/h from the south-southeast. I thought that would be almost a tailwind, but since I was riding northeast, it was almost exactly from the side. It was still possible to ride, but I had to get used to moving much slower. And that’s mainly a mental issue: thoughts like “I’ll never get there like this” were exhausting, even though they weren’t true. After one hour, I had already covered nearly 17 km—not a bad start at all. I gradually found my rhythm. I knew I had about 100 km to ride, so I divided it like a marathon into three parts.

The first third is by far the hardest mentally because the destination still feels so far away. So I focused only on reaching 33 km first—that I can do, I thought. The second third is much easier; I was confident I could repeat it. Since the first 33 km took about 2 hours, I thought: it’s not that bad—6 hours total is easy. The last third flew by—either I learned to relax and stay in the moment instead of constantly calculating times, or the wind eased, or both.

I felt a bit like I was in a bad late-90s computer game: very repetitive graphics, hardly changing, everything looping. But somehow the experience was still interesting. I could have pedaled on a stationary bike in a gym, but here I was at least moving in real life. Was I really? Well, my bike computer said so—hard to tell by feeling. At least there was no “Game Over,” and I completed Level 055 by reaching my accommodation at 17:40.

Tonight I’m staying with a Kazakh family with seven children—though only six were present. It’s quite lively. The father seems musical; when I expressed surprise at the number of kids, he simply said, “Do Re Mi Fa So La Si”—which actually makes sense ;-). Including three meals, it costs the same as the hotel from the night before last—not bad, even though I’ll probably only eat two of them. I was also able to do laundry—well, actually one of the girls did it for me. I had just asked if I could use the washing machine, and she was assigned to take care of it.