4:45 AM, and I was awake a quarter hour before my alarm clock. I rolled over in my sleeping bag to look at my tent ceiling, not twelve inches from my nose. “Oh well, might as well get going,” I thought to myself, unzipping my way into the cold darkness outside. The tent fly zipper stuck for a moment, reminding me of another cold morning in the French Alps when the condensed moisture of my breath had frozen and jammed up the zippers of my tent just as I most desperately needed to heed the call of nature… In the confines of a one-man pup tent I struggled into not one but two pairs of winter bicycling tights, jammed a knit wool cap down over my ears and strapped my bike helmet on top of it,
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