The last week has been a true throw back to the days of pre-war cycling. Having survived a tough race on the bank holiday Monday, my upbeat mood was short lived as on Tuesday our borrowed internet disappeared, there was never a formal arrangement but it had kept me and my team mates sane! Earlier this year our television digital box broke, to be honest this wasn’t a major problem at the time as the channels were mainly Dutch but the internet is another thing entirely. There does seem to be a light at the end of our tunnel, a different company will be installing both a new digital box and the internet on 11th May if everything goes to plan. I have read many stories of the greats like Tom Simpson crossing to France with just a handful of francs in his pocket and learning the language, the style of racing and the lifestyle, all for the love of the sport. But to be honest I don’t know how these men did it. Having no connection to the outside world is the most isolating and depressing thing I have ever known. This has led to me and my roommate Mike to start a new hobby… wifi hunting. The rules are simple, we set off walking around our village with our various electrical gadgets in search of some naïve persons unsecured internet connection, if you win you get to find out the latest cycling results and maybe even send an email home. It really is amazing what our brains will do to keep us occupied. I have been a bit more adventurous with my cooking of late, a couple of decent lasagne and an attempt at Bombay potatoes has been the limit of this week’s cooking but if anything it’s good for the morale to try something new. The fact that I am able to publish this blog is due to the courtesy of Gyles Wingate, not only our GPS but now our new wifi king.
This weekend saw the provincial championships being held right across Belgium, unfortunately that excluded us from racing as ‘foreigners’, but some time ago we had agreed to ride in something called the ‘Super Klassica’ with our next door neighbour. The idea of this is that it is basically a sportive taking in the majority of the Tour of Flanders route, in particular the climbs or ‘bergs’ as they are called out here. The day started badly… we had understood the time of departure to be 8:30 so we were surprised when we were awoken at 7:15 by our Neighbour on the door step already in his lycra and stretching. This was the worst lost in translation moment I’ve had since reaching Belgium but having demolished a bowl of shreddies in record quick time and stuffing my pockets with brioche we left for the town of Oudenaarde in west Flanders. I have never done a sportive before, to be honest I have always been abit snobbish and thought of them as the territory of non-competitive Sunday riders, or weekend warriors as I’ve heard them called. I rolled down to the sign on and it was immediately clear I was in amongst a different level of bike rider. There were hundreds of men and women, donning an array of replica team kits, sporting chain oil marks or ‘4th category tattoos’ and on hundreds of different carbon fibre bikes that they would struggle to justify buying to their wives. I paid my eight euros and was given number 10868… and I’ve been complaining about 250 guys in my races! Our group of 4 set off on our 136 kilometre route, the route was marshalled incredibly well and signposted at every lamp post… Stevie Wonder could have negotiated the course it was that good. After just about getting out of the car park we were presented with our first berg, I was hoping for a nice gentle incline to break me in, maybe a token town cobble at the top for good measure, how wrong I was. The ‘Koppenberg’ was staring us in the face so without so much as a warm up I threw myself at its mercy. The slopes were cobbled and at one point 22% towards the top. I absolutely crawled up at the steepest section but I crested the top, cheered on by a couple of the local nutters. The bergs came thick and fast from then on, just a handful of kilometres later and I was thrashing it up the oude Kwaremnont closely followed by the Patterberg, this was to be the steepest of the day at 25%. The knack to climbing them is to keep as much weight over the drive wheel as possible which means sitting down and just concentrating on being smooth…easier said than done, at some points the gradient nearly had my front wheel in the air. I was pleasantly surprised when we got to a feed station, I had never experienced this but having paid to enter the true Yorkshire man inside me emerged and I filled my pockets with free waffles and bananas, it’s all about getting your monies worth! Having puzzled at the rather rubbish statue in the village green for a couple of minutes, my confusion was ended when our 4th man went up and relieved himself against the statue… or as I had just found out, the temporary public urinal. We pressed on and crested 3 more bergs before reaching the Bosberg, I had seen this climbed many times by my heroes on the Television so I attacked it with vigour. It was a lot steeper than it appears on Eurosport is about all I can say as I was running out of steam towards the top. We passed a steady stream of middle aged man, some who appeared to have been shoe horned into their shorts and jerseys but it was actually a refreshing sight to see that everyone was having a go no matter what shape they were. We dragged ourselves round to the final couple of bergs, the ‘Molenberg’ and ‘Wolfsberg’. Our fourth guy ‘Brekt’ was at this point already suffering and discovering that his triple chainset had decided to become a double for the remainder of the ride must have been a hammer blow but we all finished the 136km in one piece…chapeau lads! If you have ever watched the tour of Flanders before and thought that it looks easy watching Boonen rocket up looking like he’s riding on a carpet, I would suggest watching the back guys go up, the pain is always etched across their faces and they even get off and walk on the tougher climbs, this is more what mere mortals can achieve but a great experience none the less. Back to racing this coming week!
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