What a Difference

What a difference a week can make.

After my last post I got a lot of phone calls and emails from family and friends offering words of encouragement and generally wondering what’s going on and if they can help – and it was wonderful. One of the biggest things I’ve realized is that I’m lonely here – really lonely. And I’m not that kind of person. I know I can take care of myself on my own, and I do like doing lots of things on my own, but I really need a balance – which is something that’s completely missing in my life right now. Here I have none. So that’s one of the changes I’m working on right now. I felt so much better after getting other people’s opinions and thoughts – it sounds really dorky, but if you’ve ever spent a long time without them you’ll know what I mean. As I’ve mentioned before, don’t make any decision’s when you’re on a really big high or really big low – so although I haven’t made any concrete decisions I’ve started to look at things with a different eye now and it feels good.

But I digress – I should tell the story of the weekend. It actually started LAST weekend when I did the Sunday crit. It was 80km with 12 corners – generally regarded as one of the hardest crit courses in the Netherlands. I went into it feeling OK – not great, but after getting some coaching from my Dad the night before I was in better spirits. The race started well enough (I did all the good things I’d done the day before), and soon enough I found myself in a break of 12. Unfortunately I didn’t realize we were already in a break, otherwise I would have worked harder, but it was so early in the race it might not have made a difference anyway. So I settled back a bit, but still rode near the front. Soon enough 2 of my teammates made another break of 12, so I knew my job for the rest of the day – control as much as I could. So I spent the day riding at/near the front of the peloton, and any time someone tried to go I’d be right on them. It probably wasn’t necessary as the break was strong enough to stay away, but it sure felt great. I was at or near the front and felt like the strongest riders there. In the end I have no idea what place I finished, but I won some money, so that was pretty cool (and my first winnings!).

So – this past weekend was the club championships: the 12 best teams from the south, and the 12 best teams from the north squaring off with their 6 best riders each (144 total), winner declared the best in the country. The first race was a 9km prologue – so I got decked out in all the time trial gear and hopped on one of the clubs TT bikes and away I went. This was the first time I’d done a real time trial and I didn’t know what to expect, so I just went as hard as I could. I made some mistakes (could have gone faster thru the corners, smarter in a few sections, etcetera), but I was actually in 2nd place for a little while! (Not long – but it sure felt good!). I ended up in 50th place, about 40 seconds slower than the winner, 15 seconds slower than my fastest teammate, and 4 seconds slower than the next fastest – so I was 3rd on my team, not bad! I felt I rode just about as well as I could at this point, so no complaints.

Next up was the crit – 100km on a 3.5km course. This was a killer race with a really fast pace and a really nervous peloton, and after 2 hours I got caught at the back in the wrong group and was gone – fack. But I still got points because a few of us worked together and kept going until the end (the points are tallied over the weekend to decide the winning team). My only teammates that finished ahead of me were the 2 guys who beat me in the time trail too. I was riding stupidly in the peloton though – taking dumb pulls, riding in the wind, etcetera, which really cost me lots of energy in the end. I was not happy with my riding. It’s funny how easy it is to say ‘that’s not how you should do it – try this’, but when push comes to shove it can be pretty hard to do it sometimes, especially when there are 140 other riders trying to do the same thing!!

The next morning was tough – mostly because on Saturday night my roommate couldn’t sleep, so he was tossing and turning and kept me awake. Eventually he left to wander around the hotel, at which time I finally fell asleep – only to be woken up when he came back (he forgot the key, so he was knocking on the door). I’d had about 2 hours sleep by the time the alarm went off and we headed off to the team time trial – I felt like a deer in the headlights, and my coffee that morning didn’t even pep me up at all :o(

23km with some windy sections, this was going to be interesting – especially since we’d never ridden together in formation, which is pretty hard to do with aerobars. We didn’t even have time to see the course – how shitty was that planning! In the end my roommate was the first off the group (about 5km from the finish), and I fell off about 2km from the finish. Overall we ended up 9th out of 24 teams – pretty good for such a young/inexperienced team (we were really happy with that result). I had lead in my legs the entire time, so I wasn’t happy with my effort and felt I could have helped more – but I just had nothing after such a crappy sleep. I was also really scared for what was coming up in the afternoon…..

So Sunday afternoon was the race of truth – the 150km road race. We lined up feeling pretty tired to say the least – we only had 3 hours from the end of our team time trial to the start time to shower, eat our lunch (spaghetti of course!), recover, get our gear together, do our warmup, and get to the start line. I was pretty worried – I had no idea how I’d handle it, but I was sensing disaster.

The pace from the gun was quick as usual, and pretty soon riders started shooting off the back. I was trying to learn from the day before by riding as covered as I could during the windy sections (which were plentiful – lots of crosswinds in this one!) and making up time in the tail wind sections. It turns out things were going fairly well for me though – after 2 hours I was still with the peloton (no lead groups at this point) and we were trucking along nicely. We’d dropped about 50 riders, so things were thinning out a bit too – from what I was hearing from my teammates (they speak Dutch so they had radios) there were riders falling off the pace all over the place – trying to use team cars to catch back on, and just general carnage of the peloton.

For me things were great though - all across the board I felt much better than I’d expected: more confident riding at speed in the peloton; eating was easier; grabbing food was a cinch (musette bags et al!); keeping out of the wind was easier; the cobblestones were a piece of cake (totally reminded me of the Arenburg forest – really, huge cobbles for 2.5km through thick forest, you’re never sure if you’re going to emerge on the other side!); and just generally moving around the peloton was fine.

After a little while though things changed and a break of 25 pulled away, which sucked – we missed it. By this point only 3 of us were left in the race too, so what to do? We decided just to ride out the rest of the race and see if anything happened. There were some more splits in the peloton and we lost another rider to a back group, so now it was just down to 2 of us. We both stayed near the front though to make sure things didn’t break up any more, which worked well for us. For the 2 finishing laps through town we were near the front – I was doing a lot of pulling to make sure it would finish in a sprint (I knew my teammate was a really strong sprinter). In the end he won the sprint for 26th place, and I finished just behind in 37th place – out of 144 starters! This was my best result so far, and it really felt good. I was near the front most of the race, feeling good almost the whole time (the first time that’s happened for sure!), and never really worried about it – and I almost made the break.

So that really helps me out – to get results, and the rest of the club was really happy for me – they knew this was great for me so they were ecstatic (our directeur hugged me at the finish line and said he was proud!). Now I’m SUPER tired, but much happier :o)

In the end we finished 14th out of 24 teams (10th as a team in the prologue and 9h in the team time trial) – we were pretty happy with that considering our team: one old guy with no experience and bad results all year (moi); one 21 year old with great results but not much experience (my roommate), two 24 year olds with not great results and not great experience, and two 21 year olds with no experience or results. This was mostly a development club that will try for better things in the coming years!

Anyway – I’ve got to go eat – my spaghetti awaits me (did I mention that’s all I ate this weekend and muesli in the morning!).