PassPrijs Hekelegem, UCI 1.12, 4/25/05

Race Report # 4:

UCI 1.12 – PassPrijs Hekelegem, 4/25/05

After my 14 day or so hiatus from racing, I got back into the swing of things again on Wednesday of last week with a nice little kermis. Things went alright, learned some more stuff, but nothing special with the results. For those of you who don’t know, I spent a little bit of time being sick with some Belgian bug or other. Which, I might add wasn’t a ton of fun. But hey, new country, new bacteria/viruses, so build up those antigens baby!

Now to the UCI race. Let’s see where to begin…well I’ll say I got my first “serious” does of cobbles. The course layout was technical, very technical. I think the longest section of straight road was the 3 km flat section of cobbles. Give me a big: OH, YEAH! The weather was pretty good. Things stayed dry for the race, but by the second half there was definitely a front moving in with some rain. The course consisted of a ~60 km loop that was done twice, and then 4 local laps, totaling something like 160 km. The main loop contained 5 cobbled sections. Three of them (sections 1,2, and 4) contained short steep climbs and were preceded by ½ to 1 km of “flatter” cobbles as well. The third cobbled section was totally flat but was about 3 km long, and the fifth was a shorter section through the town where the start/finish was. Usually if you were not on cobbles you were busy doing some fighter pilot simulation, diving through the millions of corners in one little town after the next.

The race hit the first cobbled climb at about 10 km in, so it went pretty good from the gun. I hit it with not good but not horrible position. I then proceeded to hit the 180 degree turn at the top and dive through the town below. As could have been, or to be more accurate, it was predicted that the break would go off at that first climb. And it did, it was THE break. I continued to race pretty much the same for the rest of the first lap and well into the second. Getting myself not in good, but not absolutely horrible positions before bad or technical sections of road…can you sense a little frustration coming on here?? Ummmm, yeah… Physically, I didn’t feel bad so I have no excuses, not that I would anyway! The only time I felt like I was in or getting near the red was on that second cobbled climb. Man, for some reason that one really hurt each time! As it worked out that second climb was the source of my biggest mistake of the day. I went into it the second time damn near on the back, ahhhh! OK, so obviously there was a split off the back when I came over that climb, so I got to work with a not so enthusiastic group to chase back on. I got back on at the beginning of the third flat cobbled section while simultaneously getting caught behind a pretty decent sized crash. I dug into some of the off road skills to go around and ended up with a group of 20-30 off the back (ahhh!!) of the ever shrinking peloton. That group got pulled on the first of the local laps, and so goes my race. Mental Frustration is the word/words for the day. I’m still milling over the details of my mistakes and trying to figure out why I was more nervous for this race than I should have been…I was riding not racing, defensively.

On the lighter side of things, can someone please explain to me how a pigeon got into the showers after the race?? I must say, it was pretty damn funny to see this pigeon just chillin’ in the showers. I also must put out an apology to the riders who were behind me while I was getting stung by the bee that flew into my jersey. It was a single file descent through one of those little towns and I was definitely not holding my line.