NOVEMBER RAIN

When Emma Lewis took on a Mexican medio fondo, the conditions weren't exactly what she'd imagined...

- Emma Lewis

I couldn't be any wetter if I were in the adjacent Caribbean Sea. My sunglasses, packed for their primary function, are being deployed to help keep the worst of the deluge out of my eyes, but water is still running down my face, forcing me to blink forcefully, as my sopping hands and saturated mitts can do nothing to alleviate the issue. I find myself smiling though. Why? Because the rain's warm, I'm warm, and I've escaped the cold, dark drudgery of UK November and headed to Mexico to take part in a cycling event.

There's also no hint of the fabled killer sidewind on this 'King of the Wind' section of the 2024 GFNY Cozumel medio fondo course on the island of the same name. It's early November, and the empty, white-sand beaches and turquoise water on the eastern side of the island - which sits an hour's drive south of Cancún, just off the Yucatán Peninsula - look beautiful, while the closedroad course is flat, straight and, obviously, at sea level. I'm still enjoying myself.

Half-an-hour or so later, as I stand wringing out my saturated mitts and wiping the rain from my sunglasses with kitchen roll, at the second feed station two-thirds of the way around the island-looping course, I see the rain as a blessing. There's none of the energy-sapping, bidon-emptying intense heat and humidity that I'd wilted in on yesterday's sightseeing tour in the south of the island, I muse, as I munch on a banana half and a pot of salted peanuts, and swig plenty of liquid. The Mexican youths who are helping out look on in amusement at the succession of bedraggled riders trying to sort themselves out.

Seeing clearly