The whistling of wind; the hiss of spray kicked up from mud-covered roads onto hollow down tubes; the light crackling sound of hail smashing into helmets; the honking of blown noses, clearing both spring sickness and mud; a hacking cough piercing the air every few minutes; and the worst sound of all: blood-curdling yells, followed by the inevitable sound of metal on pavement and snapping carbon, and more yells, and then probably some unsavories not fit for print. Yep, those are the sounds of “spring” in northern Europe. Repeat that sequence for six hours and you’ve got a bike race.

The weather part, well, that’s easy to explain. We’re pretty far north, and the weather patterns come straight off the Atlantic. Cold. Rain. Hail. Check.

What is worth elaborating on are two other components: the blowing noses and coughs, and those damn crashes, otherwise known as luck. They’re some of the most important components of spring racing and get little to no coverage of consequence.

It’s inevitable. At some point in early season racing everybody gets sick. Sometimes you’re sick by yourself, quickly removed from the mix and quarantined. But often that doesn’t happen quickly enough and an entire eight-man team goes down together. This is what happened to our guys at Paris-Nice this year – almost the same group of guys hit two weeks prior at the Tour of California, a race where inevitably about half the field ends up sick each year. It’s the first big stress on a rider’s system, and at the same time you have riders coming from all over the world and eating at one giant buffet – a recipe for trouble that no amount of Purell can battle.

One of my season goals this year, and I’m serious here, was to not get sick. That quickly changed to only getting sick once. If you manage to make it through the first few races, what I’ll call the “Tour of California syndrome,” you’re still racing in more cold and rain. The small roads of Europe criss-cross farms, and that cold rain washes manure and fertilizer from those farms onto the roads, directly into your mouth and eyes. And if you make it through that, at some point, somewhere, somebody sick will be introduced into your circle and the bug will spread. Watch riders closely in the spring and you’ll notice a lot of elbowing of elevator buttons, waiting for somebody else to open the door, and the best, the Dave Z master-trick: the “wrist shake”. Somebody comes in for a handshake, but instead, Dave goes for the sly slide forward and shakes wrists instead. The look on the fellow wrist-shakers face is priceless.

Say you make it through the spring with one round of sickness, which you keep from turning into bronchitis by stopping in time and not trying to race through it, as many of us do. You end up with only a slight setback - a week of rest, no real training, and maybe a few missed races. No biggie. If it goes bronchial that setback is compounded and can wreck a month, which is serious, considering the density of so many important spring races. Lesson here: Take care of yourself and be smart when sickness attacks. Most of us fail miserably. Those both smart and lucky don’t have that setback and are that much stronger come the important races. Notch number one in the “steps to a successful season” column.

And then comes crashing. The common wisdom is “stay at the front and avoid the crashes,” but up north you never know when or where they will strike. One of the biggest stacks this past Sunday at the Tour of Flanders (taking down a number of favorites) happened 20 riders back when a rider struck a cameraman. Three seconds later 40 of us were sprawled across the road and the ditches on both sides, bikes everywhere. On the tiny, winding roads of northern Europe, pockmarked with “road furniture,” crashes are simply a fact of life. Head down, pinned to the gutter by a harsh wind off the Atlantic, and completely blind of what’s ahead, you’re riding on blind faith in those in front of you. Eventually that faith fails you. If you’re lucky you just get held up; if you’re not, the outcome is far worse.

Often when looking through results after the race if you don’t see your pick for the race up front he was tangled in a crash, maybe even just delayed at the wrong time. If the race is on full gas that’s enough to take you out of the hunt. The real issue here, however, big picture, is when you limp away with a real injury. Like sickness, an injury plays a pivotal role in the shaping of a rider’s season.

A broken collarbone, a fairly common injury in cycling, has a standard treatment and recovery protocol. But then there are the lingering issues. A joint gets smashed in a crash, you push through it, all of a sudden tendinitis appears and, well, good luck with that. One more time when the smart and lucky come out ahead. If you make it through the whole spring without one of these, mark a notch in that success column. If you are smart enough to not push through something and let it develop further, a half notch. If you push it and then end up in recovery mode for a few weeks, take away a score of notches, and perhaps a lesson learned.

Unfortunately, we’re a pretty hard-headed bunch when it comes to taking time off, always hoping for the best and trying to push through, and it often takes years for a rider to figure these things out. Even as I write this I’ll admit to trying to push through a cold and flu earlier this season, trying to will it out of my system. Didn’t work. One week turned to two. But maybe I’ll remember that next time. Maybe.

In the sport of cycling, where races over six hours can be decided by centimeters, it’s amazing what an element both sickness and injury play. And having barely survived the last week up north, I figured they could use a bit of attention. With Paris-Roubaix, the focus of this whole block for so many, coming up this weekend, take a minute to appreciate that the riders up front have managed to make it this far healthy, and that alone is a minor victory in itself.

Only in the north is it a victory just making it to the starting line in one piece – and then comes the 265km of racing.