Day Ten

This was by far the HARDEST race I have ever done. Nearly everyone who is remotely fast in Belgium was there along with a Dutch team. I guess the race was comparable to a national championship in possibly the best cycling nation in the world. Needless to say the U.S National Team had a couple of problems.
We lined up with 20 minutes to go. In the U.S at almost every race this would ensure a front row spot. Not in Belgium. We were about 120 riders back. This was the biggest field I have ever been in, with 140 riders total. My pack skills are not where they need to be, particularly in Belgium. Almost as soon as the race started I had trouble moving up. The only pace I was able to move up was on the hills. Everyone over here rides really close together. I am not very comfortable going through gaps that my bars barely fit through, and riding through corners while bumping elbows with someone. In the races over here it’s not about how strong you are, but how good you are at staying upfront, which saves an enormous amount of energy. Everyone here brakes really hard before the corners and sprint out to break the guys behind them.
The race was fast from the gun. I tried moving up front, rather unsuccessfully. The other guys on the team have found there own way of dealing with this. Joel and Lawson have gotten pretty good at mixing it with the locals. They move up through the middle and stay up front. But they also seem to be able to find the crashes with two each. Alex goes really hard from the start and just manages to hold his position. Anders just uses his massive engine to stay right up front the entire day even if it means prolonged time in the wind. It seems that James and I are the only two who haven’t found a good way of staying up front.
Anyways, today it started raining really hard with 20K to go. I just followed the rider in-front of me, because I couldn’t see, and couldn’t break so I didn’t really want to be in the heart of the field riding close to other riders. This was a big mistake. By the time it stopped raining and was able to see up the road the field wasn’t insight. Someone had let a gap open and I was now in a second group with only 30 riders. The race caravan moved passed us and the chance of finishing with the field was gone. At this point I just saved my energy so I could possibly help a teammate for one of the next stages. At the end I decided to sprint to at least stay fresh. With 200 meters to go I was second wheel and just about to go before the race organizers neutralized us. Oh well. In the end I finished with a whopping average speed of 32 mph in just inside of the top 110. The rest of the Team didn’t do as well as the hoped but considering the difficulty of the race I don’t think we did to badly. Lawson just broke the top 130 because he crashed. James who narrowly missed the split in the field finished a couple places in-front of me after he got dropped in the final few K. Anders finished just inside of the top 60. Joel was 50th and Alex, our top finisher, managed 42nd.