First UCI experience, the painful way... Flanders

well- i am not going to go into full details on what happened in the race, and will instead, just post my race report under my race page. but the short story is that i had a BLAST out there today!!!!! i LOVED racing in europe! it was fun, fast, aggressive moving through the field and i am now fluent in “HEY!”... it is international for “what the hell are you doing?!”, “get the hell out of my way!” and “HOLY HECK! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!”. i speak and am conversational in it.

i was surprised that the course was not what i expected. basically, position is everything and if you are in good position, the race is not hard. it is only hard when you are in bad position and have to chase to close small gaps. then it is REALLY hard. but for the most part- the #1 thing that i worked on in this race was positioning and i did a good job of it mostly... i was where i wanted to be or could get there for almost the whole race. so- the race was not as hard as i thought that it would be. i felt great and was shocked when i heard that we only had three climbs left... then even more surprised when i hung on over the Muur... and when i was able to hang on again on the last climb...

there were 6 riders off the front and i was in the lead pack. i was VERY excited for the bunch sprint. it was my chance to see what euro pros throw at the line. long story short- i crossed wheels and went down. hard too. but, fortunately, i rolled and was hardly hurt at all. i have a contusion on my butt that i think will bruise nicely... i have posted a picture and am hoping to do a daily ass-shot to document the color changes... my fingers are crossed for good gory shots! ps... my site is no long PG... you need a parental notification to view future sequences.

other things of note- it was SUPER cool to be part of this race in general. it would be fun to go to watch it even. people were coming up and taking pictures, asking for autographs... bottles, jerseys... anything is a souvenir here. walking around and seeing the team cars and the riders is really interesting. so many world and national champions... it is impressive.

and you get yelled at and bumped a lot. riders are very aggressive about moving up and around in the peloton and will just shoot you to the back if you are not paying attention. the strange thing is though- i have NEVER felt more comfortable or relaxed in a race before. i just held my line and asserted myself. i was so relaxed- it was strange. i was not even nervous before the race. but it was a heck of a lot of fun.