A storm blew in.

Morning thoughts at a bike race.

A storm just blew in over night. The wind has been throwing great fistfuls of rain at the window of my austere hotel room high up in the Apennines, rushing at the rooftops of this village, whooping around the chimney stacks and church towers and careering on down the valley.

Only with dawn gradually forcing a tiny slither of grey light through the gap in the shutters did I start to emerge from a profound sleep; the first time in a week or so on the road that I have woken feeling truly refreshed. I padded across the tiles of my bedroom and let in the day. The huge peaks that surround Roccaraso, like the mighty Monte Greco, were lost to the cloud that was sent whipping through this mountain world. The flags outside the hotel; Abruzzo. Italy, Europe (in that order) were straining to fly loose from their masts and screech across the wet sky.

And with this entirely changed aspect, everything about the Giro d’Abruzzo is suddenly altered.

Two days of summery sunshine have given way to this powerful reminder of April’s precarious point in the year, its fragility. Winter has not in fact left this mountainous land. Like a partisan army it has simply retreated to higher land, only to come roaring back down the Fosso Rasine with a ferocity that sends the townsfolk of this remote resort scampering for cover.

Today is the queen stage of the four day stage race. After two days of racing which have ended in pretty hilltop finishes, with finish lines set in beguiling boulevards and next to welcoming paved piazzas, whose light red stone has been warming in the sun, the course heads into the terrifyingly empty Maiella National Park today, over ever longer climbs, until the final ascent to the ski station above Roccaraso. At 1600 metres, we are expecting it to be close to freezing later today, and for the rain to be falling as snow.

While the storm rages on outside my window, and a maddened dog’s bark catches on the wind and is blown around the town, I check the race WhatsApp group to see if there is any talk of shortening the route or otherwise mitigating against the weather. There is none. The riders will have to get on with it.

And so, the same peloton that we have studied so closely for the last two days will reshape, wearing the same numbers on their backs, on the same bikes, surrounded by the same teammates. Overnight, their place in this mobile world will have shifted. Some, like the new race leader Filippo Fiorelli and new King of the Mountains Samuele Zoccorato, will have risen in stature. Others, such as Alessandro Covi, will have taken a step back. That realignment repeats itself throughout all 120 riders, the pack has been shuffled all the way down to the very last.

Some riders will have shaken off an infection, while others might just be incubating a cold. Some will be wondering with trepidation how the knee they banged on yesterday’s race will hold up, or whether the wrist they sprained will do its job. Others will be thinking of their journey home, their next race, their parents, their siblings, their children. They will be missing home, or perhaps even dreading their return, using the races as a way of turning their back on real world woes.

Yesterday they were all the same people, but the weight of all this detail that their lives contain was differently distributed. Minutely, or perhaps even significantly, everything has changed. Today it will again. And tomorrow morning when they pin that same number on once more, they will take their place in a world that looks much like it did the previous day. But it will be entirely new.

The sequence of days in a stage race mirrors the human experience of waking to a more or less familiar world, moving and acting in it for the duration of a day, and then following a well practised sequence of habits that prepare us for sleep, to close off a day we think we understood. Wednesday may have looked, felt and sounded much like Tuesday, but it wasn’t the same. It left a fingerprint on the memory, however opaque, that was unique in time.

In the same way each stage of a race mimics the structure of the last, seems to follow a pre-ordered pattern, and yet is itself an entirely original event, or manifestation of infinitely interacting micro-events.

The peloton is the world, the riders are the actors, the duration of the race is the day. And one day follows the next, and the next.

It takes a storm blowing in overnight to break the spell.