When the challenges hurt your brain, when the world around you is cold and your body is catching up to that, when you’ve committed yourself to the obsessive quest for an Olympic medal and there are times when you wonder if you should have just had yourself committed — welcome to this world. And a beautiful world it is.

But it takes, perseverance.

Photo by Walter Cooper

Race day three at the ISAF Sailing World Cup Miami sapped something out of everybody. Competitors. Race officials. Volunteers. What it didn’t take out was character.

They’ll be back, every one, because they know themselves as “us.”

Photo by Walter Cooper

The day was windier than predicted, but not beyond numbers in the teens. The challenges came in the form of wrestling — and that’s barely a metaphor — with windshift after shift after shift, unrelenting, as you can read here, class by class, in Moguls? Moguls in the Wind?

Among the inspiring thoughts available in this group would be this from Great Britain’s Sophie Weguelin — inspiring to long-suffering parents everywhere, that is — that, “My first boat was a Mirror that my father built in Lymington. I hated it.”

But she’s here, a world class skipper and third in the Women’s 470 going into day four. Somehow, that came out all right.

And another thing. Sailing is the sport that all can share, even the severely disabled. All three Paralympic classes are racing here and among them, the winningest winner to date, in this regatta, is Australia’s Dan Fitzgibbon, with crew Liesl Tesch. However the regatta turns out, scores to this point of 1-DNS-4-1-1-3 ain’t bad. THESE are Skud 18s, and this is us . . .