AT THE FIFTH CONTROLLO—and my fourth lunch of the day—I noted a higher percentage of English-speaking riders. The Italians were smoking us Anglophones like so many salami. The consensus, voiced with good humor, was that we'd fallen hopelessly behind shed-yool. We of course toasted this development.

Back in the saddle, my quads protested vehemently; a slow burn traveled from tailbone to skull. Every sinew stretched tight, I vibrated like a tuning fork. Still, I reeled in one rider, who turned out to have a badly taco'd front wheel, then crept past a young American who told me we weren't going to beat the deadline.

Whaddya mean "we," compadre? I still had something left in the tank.

The climb to Radda siphoned that off. One moment I'd been a mystic of the wheel, endlessly pedaling, remembering no other way of being. I'd even thought of the great French sailor Bernard Moitessier. In 1968, he'd abandoned the Sunday Times Golden Globe, a race to become the first man to circumnavigate the earth solo and nonstop—only to keep sailing. He ended up traveling the distance of one circuit and three-fourths of another. Why stop at the finish line?

The next moment I was just a desperate doofus about to bonk.

And soon it was dark. Planetarium dark. Below, those three red taillights arced across the blackness. The only thing missing was the Pink Floyd. Yet through the phenomenon of persistence of vision, the lights left lingering streaks that showed me the contours of the turns. It was purely conceptual riding, ridiculous at high speed. I held on through the first curve and the next, but rather than gaining on them, as I knew I must, I fell behind a little each time. And then they were gone. I couldn't see past my handlebars. Slowing way down, I could just make out the difference between road and not-road.

A car came roaring up behind me, flashed its brights, hit the horn. My pulse shot up. On I rolled, piano, piano.

Half an hour later, I was still in the dark, in the cold, in the forest, creeping along, wondering what a night out would do to me. Up ahead I saw a light, a couple of buildings—surely the outskirts of Gaiole—and what looked like an ice cream truck. I pedaled up to it, shivering, and tapped on the window. Inside was a woman in green scrubs.

An ambulance, a sag wagon if ever there was one.

"Do you know which way is Gaiole?"

She pointed back the way I'd come. I'd kept on going all right—right past the finish line.

But I wanted that finish line. I turned around and began to creep uphill, near to grieving. I was grinding along, beginning to shiver convulsively, when the lady in the sag wagon pulled up next to me.

"You want a ride?"

To give up the cobblestones, to leave the thing unfinished, was like an amputation. I'd like to tell you that I declined, asked her to lead the way as I retraced my tracks, found the turn I'd missed, and made my own little triumphal entry. But I did not.

A moment later, the EMTs were treating me for hypothermia. Lola sat in the back.

I tried to explain: It wasn't as if I'd bonked; it was just that I was lost, see? I lurched off the stretcher and switched the odometer to total distance: 212 kilometers.

Seven over the top. But, alas, past seven o'clock—and far from the finish line.

"Non capisce," said the lady, trying to get me to settle down.

Soon the ambulance pulled into the piazza. I climbed out the back, wrapped in a blanket, and the organizers clustered about me, murmuring words of sympathy and concern. I tried to tell my story again. The broken light! The missed turn! Duecento e dodici! Not a bonk! No bonk!

"Ees very far," someone said, "but good you try!"