Wind doesn't bother me much.

Hills used to bother me a lot, but I'm getting better at them ... climbing isn't bad and I'm working on the descending.

Bad roads are annoying. I'd have to say they bother me more than wind or hills. Roads with potholes are fine because I can just dodge the potholes, but I'd have to say that the ones which bother me the most are the ones with the very regular cracks where you're bumping over a jarring crack every 2 seconds. I paralyzed both hands on a 600K on roads like that once.

Going off course on my own is frustrating, but when it is my fault, I've got no one to blame but myself, and so I look at it is as a chance to ride a few more miles.

But the one that irritates and discourages me the most is when I do an organized ride, and the ride organizers give me an inaccurate map and cue sheet. There I am, in a part of the world I've never been before ... with a map and cue sheet that don't match anything going on around me.

I did a ride like that in 2005, and DNF'd because I'd had enough. I struggled through the ride because of various organizational errors, and finally ended up standing at an intersection with my map and cue sheet in hand wondering where in the world I was. Nothing matched. Just then one of the SAG vehicles pulled up beside me and asked if I needed help. I showed him my map and cue sheet, and asked where I was. He looked at them (and it appeared as though it was the first time he had seen the event map and cue sheet), handed them back to me, and said, "These are based on how the road system through here was in 2001 when we last ran this event. Everything has changed since then." He was kind enough to point me in the right direction ... but I pulled out of the event at the next control. It was just too discouraging to know that I could be heading out into the Californian desert at night, by myself ... with inaccurate information.