First day at school

A wise man (not like one of those wisemen in Jesus' time) told me the other day that today was going to be like my first day at school and he wasn't wrong....I suppose that's why he's a wise person. As you know  today was the biggest bicycle race I have entered in my life and I loved every single second, pedal stroke, water sip, crash dodging and snot blowing moment of it. Before I go into details of the race let me take you back to 05:40am Belgium time and how the day panned out.....

So my alarm "Quak Quaked" at 05:40am....my alarm is on my ipod and the quak quak noise is the only decent alarm ringtone that I don't mind waking up to....I don't overly like waking up to any alarm actually, when I was back home my mumsy was alarm clock waking me up with a cup of coffee every morning - if some of you like the sound of that, I can rent her out so please get in touch.  Apologies for all the digressing that may happen in this blog entry, I'm still a little wired after the race and high on energy food.  Alarm went off, I closed my eyes for 10minutes saying my "Shalom's" and then ungracefully got myself out of bed, got dressed and tried to shovel down as much nutella on bread as was possible. I did ok, not great but ok....normally I'm very good at eating but not at silly o'clock in the morning. Food eaten, bag and bike good to go and off we set. First stop was to pick up the team car to accompany the team van and at the point of stepping in the team car I was ever so thankful that I was tired as the journey there was an experience in itself.

I'm going to tell you about the car journey as it was insane!! Me, Mariska and Jeroen hop in the car and the man driving it (I don't know his name so I'll call him Cyril for this story). My first cause for concern was how he slammed his foot on the gas with the clutch pedal still all the way in and attempted to move kind of slowly out the drive until he rammed his foot out the clutch and we were off in first gear ragging away for a good minute until second gear was found and eventually third, I think fourth gear was used once or twice - how that engine still works I don't know....that wasn't the main cause for concern however, the main problem was the distcint lack of breaking when coming up to a junction at 70mph or driving toward a lorry in a lane no bigger than a green lane in Jersey. My eyes were then closed for the whole journey except for opening a few times to respond to text messages from my friends.  I was rather releived to get out the car along with my other passengers, Cyril apparently was unaware of his driving skills or lack there of.

At the HQ and it was all looking rather professional, teams with their vans and bicycles all set up nicely and what not, and there was me looking like a little bit of riff raff who had lost her way. After nibbling away at more food it was time to get ready and massage some heat rub on the pins and go and sign on and have a few snaps taken - clearly nobody in Belgium knew I was a right chopper so I put on my best smile and let them continue snapping unawares. Onto the start line and we're off. The race started at a pretty gentle pace, a little bit of bumping and burging with the odd Surge here and there and within a few minutes, crash, someone went down. About 5minutes later same thing and so on for the next 30k or so....how I stayed upright I'll never know but I did it and I give myself a pat on the back as I was bricking it a tad at some point. I was near the back of the bunch when the first crash came so I thought I best move up to the front, got to the front and another crash came.....after that I just tried to sit somewhere in the middle and stay out of harms way. Unfortunately for me there was a crash just before the first time up the cobbled climb and the bunch got away from me. Did I give up and say "oh well bad luck, try the next race".....did I buggery....I then set myself on a mission to get back on the pack, first up was catch up to the team cars, when there it was trying to work my way up through them and what d'ya know I got back on, just in time for the cobbled climb again and I went "Pop" and out the back again....there was no catching that one back. I worked with a few others for a lap before we then sat up and worked our way around the course before being pulled one lap from the finish.

All in all it was a great experience and I know now that I'm capable of getting on a pro team, I've just got to keep working hard, learning and taking the positives and negatives out of every race. Learn from the negative I hear you ask.....another wise man once told me, if you don't learn from the negatives how can you eliminate them from your performance in anything in life....now this man was clever, he was a psychologist, a very good one...always good to finish off with a bit of education.

I have way more to say but I've put you through enough torturous reading for one day, I'll be back tomorrow with more goss and a few special thank-you's for the people who are helping me try and acheive my goals as without them I wouldn't be here writing exciting stuff for you to read after my first big race.

Thanks for reading,
Laters mongrels