Life on the Road: Learning the Trade

So just over two months have passed since I made the move to Belgium, since my last post I have been mostly ‘learning the trade’ at kermesse races with a couple of Interclubs thrown in for good measure.

Kermesse racing consists of around 120km’s of flat out racing on circuits ranging from 4km to 12km’s long. It certainly requires some time to get your head round the tactics of these races and who to follow (as most of the time there are over 200 guys lining up on the start line), there is a little bit more to it than two and a half hours of full gas racing although this could provide a quick summary of how these races are. Typically the first hour of these races will be the hardest until a break finally forms, it can be hard to know which break to get into as you think any of them will stick it to the end and then inevitably the one you don’t go with ends up staying with.

Over the past couple of months I have been learning this process and have had mixed fortunes in these races, my best result being 15^th out of 230 riders in Torhout. From there it went slightly downhill results wise as I was involved in two crashes, the first not too bad (just a few scratches), the second took me a week or so to fully recover from as I was forced down a drainage ditch at 60kph and came out with a fair few cuts and bruises. However over the past couple of weeks the form seems to be coming back and I have been moving up the results sheet again, my latest being 24^th last weekend in Heule.

Besides from the diet of kermesse racing I have also competed in two interclubs, the Handzame Challenge and just last week at the GP Wouter de Wilde. In Handzame the weather gave us all seasons in one and was decided by plenty of crosswind sections. Lotto Belisol and the Omega Pharma U23 teams had fun splitting the race in the winds while the rest of us suffered in the gutter just hoping to hold the wheel of the rider in front of us. I managed to finish in the peleton though and came 5^th in the bunch kick at the end something which I was pleased with. Last week, the GP Wouter de Wilde was another interclub, I spent the first hour of this race trying to get into a break and used up quite a lot of energy. Typically the break I didn’t end up going with ended up being the main one of the day, from then on I did as much as I could for our teams sprinter and finished in the front part of the peleton.

Coming up over this weekend I will be competing in Pittem at another kermesse, following that I will be preparing for my main goals in the last couple of weeks of June. Thanks again has to go to the Dave Rayner Fund for supporting this year, without them this wouldn’t be possible for me and many others that they support.

Adam.