I'm happy to say that life in Belgium has improved in many ways since my last post. I may have been a little bit sad of myself (opposite of this) after getting sick, getting crushed at Liege, and many days of grey weather in Belgium. So I'll get you up to speed with the good happenings.
1. The temperature has been hovering around 80F with sun for the last several days. This is much improved over the previous 63F with light rain that happened for the 10 days or so before that. Also convenient is that the country of Belgium, Belgian bike racers included, begin to melt at or around 79F. Also Belgian cycling has not yet discovered ice socks. The preferred heat combativity method here is a cold sponge dangled on a string in the feedzone. I enjoy watching the sponge hand up and the sponge bath that quickly follows at 30mph while I just hang out in my Defeet UnD Ice baselayer and drink some water.
2. I rested a bit, can eat normally again, and got a massage.
3. This one is the rest of the blog post about the kermesse in Lichtervelde that I raced yesterday:
I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of these kermesse things! The course in Lichtervelde (about 12k from our house in Izegem) was about half city streets and half farm roads. The last corner was narrow, featured some road construction and was less than 200m from the finish line. This was good. The race was 18 laps of a 6.4k loop. There was a prime of 15 Euros available at the line every lap except the first one! The field was small though with only 36 riders ----> several potential starters may have melted on the way to the race.
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| Start line action. The rider in black and orange I'm chatting with is a fellow USA U23 rider named Jos. |
We rode the first 1.9 laps without much happening. I was real ready for the first prime sprint after that though. I went through the final turn real fast in second wheel and did a minimal amount of sprinting to pocket my first 15 Euros. It was as if the melting Belgians had never gone through the last corner of a criterium before. Wait, that is true, they don't really have criteriums here and the amount of braking into corners makes that apparent.
Then we went around for another lap and still no breakaways had stuck. So I did what I just told you about again. With 30 Euros in my pocket in less than 30 minutes I pretty much already considered this race a success. For good measure I did the same thing for the 3rd prime as well. At this point I think the Belgian riders were starting to get a bit frustrated. Understandable... I was taking all their money. As I attempted number 4 in a row the rider in front of me grabbed his brakes real hard in the exit of the final corner. I think this was his desperate and shady attempt to create a gap to me rather than cause me to crash. Either way I still sprinted around him and kept the streak alive. Then after another lap I won the 5th prime in row.
At this point I was ready to make it rain, in Euros. I was also getting fairly tired though and the remaining Belgians who hadn't melted were riding against me as much as possible. If attacks went there was a lot of looking at me to accelerate and/or chase it down which was quite understandable. Perhaps I'd shown my cards a bit early, but at least had some cash in my pocket. Jos and I did our best to ride near the front and follow the attacks, but right around the midway point of the race a group of 6 got away without us and built a big gap quickly. We and several others gave chase in the pack, but they were pretty clearly gone. We rolled around and there were lots of attacks and the main group got whittled down a bit before the finish, but we were far from catching the break. Jos offered and gave me a great leadout for the field sprint. I botched it a little bit though when I overcooked the last corner and ended up a bit too far into the construction zone with 150m to go. I lost a lot of speed and only managed 2nd in the field sprint, 8th place on the day.
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| The field sprint for 7th place. |
Overall it was a great race though and I'm very pleased to have some good legs again. Sure I could have raced it a bit differently and maybe gotten a better end result, but I had a lot of fun. Tomorrow we have a longer one-day race as a full team starting in Ieper, Belgium. I'm quite excited for that and I'll let you know how it goes!
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