Paris-Brest-Paris, 2011. I was somewhere between Tinteniac and Loudeac entering the first night (I had left at 5 am that morning). It was already dark, so it must have been after 9 pm, with Loudeac aother couple of hours or more down the road. I was ridng by myself on a broad plain, when serious rain started to fall, so I pulled to the side of an intersecting road to dig out and put on my rain jacket. The rain was coming down quite hard, and I could hear another rider across the road, hidden in the darkness underneath some trees. We traded greetings, and I could hear thunder off in the distance, along with flashes of lightning, but counting the delay between flashes and thunder, I knew the lightning was too far away to affect me.
I got back on the bike as the rain started pelting down, hearing occasional thunder and seeing occasional flashes. I got to a main road with arrows showing a left turn as the rain abated, and before too long I saw a group of lights coming from the opposite direction. It was the group of leading riders with pace car and escort motorcycles, about 20 or 30 riders still at this point, on their way back to Paris, heading into the broad expanse of open terrain I had just completed, the thunder beckoning in the distance. They had left the previous day at 4 pm, so they would have been around 30 hours on the road, with another 15 or so hours to go. I wished them well and continued to my first night's stop in Loudeac.
Luis