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Patxi was very smart at the beginning. “I realized straightaway that you knew what you were doing,” he told me. “You ate well, your weight didn’t fluctuate much, you had a strong constitution that didn’t need a lot of attention. Most of all, you’d won a shed-load of races without ever having a coach.”

I liked him. He let me get on with it.

“The training plan I worked out with you at the start was just so we had something written down, really,” says Patxi now. We’re all sitting around remembering these days in the Sierra Nevada where BORA-hansgrohe is doing our customary February training camp before the start of the 2018 classics. It’s after dark, it’s freezing outside, and the Wi-Fi is terrible, so we might as well sit and talk. “It was clear you had an accurate understanding of your body. I saw my role to support that rather than dismantle it. If you told me that you’d only done one hour instead of four because you felt shitty, I’d know it was the right decision. It was easy.”

With Patxi as my coach, I slowly began to relax. In my head, I was already done. I started to think about what was important: health, happiness, being myself, having fun. It’s good to have a plan because it points you in the right direction, but you can’t expect it to work 100 percent of the time. That’s not racing. That’s not life. Say you have a plan to be in the first 10 riders with 7 kilometers to go in a race because there’s a narrow bit of road and a little hill up ahead. But a hundred other riders have that plan, too. That’s 90 people who are going to be disappointed, but what are they going to do? Get off and walk home? You have to adapt. Find another way. Accept what is in front of you and find another way. There are some things that you just can’t change, like punctures and crashes. I decided from that point on that I would do my best but accept the results whether good or bad. If I win, I win. If I crash, I crash. If I come in 30th, I come in 30th. I’ll still be Peter at the finish, and the sky won’t fall.