Brussels Opwijk 1.13

Brussels Opwijk 1.13
February 26, 2006
Today I did my first race of the year, Brussels Opwijk. It was a pretty hard race. Last year none of our guys finished, so my goal going into it was to finish and hope to be as far towards the front as possible. The race was about 145k which would take about 3.5 hours. After 15 k we had to do 2 laps from 55k then 3 laps of 6k for the finishing circuits. During the first 1 hour and half I felt pretty good. I was in the chase group of about 25, and John Devine was in the front group of about 16. We hit our first feed zone and got a bottle of hot tea. This must have gone straight to my legs cause I felt phenomenal after that. I went across to the front group with 8 other guys. Since I had Devine up there, I hardly had to work. Once we got to the front group, a break of 7 rolled up the road. I wanted to make sure not to hurt myself, so I let it go. The problem was when 7 more guys got off before I could react and formed a 14 man break. That was dangerous. Devine and I started following anything that looked good. We had no luck and both finished in the chase group of maybe 30 riders. I finished 24th with Devine close behind. I was definitely happy with the first race of the year and will be looking to build on that with the weeks to come. Our next race is Vlaamse Pijl 1.2 in Belgium. The 1.2 UCI ranking means there will be some pro continental teams as well as numerous continental teams from Belgium. The next day will be Brussel Zepperen 1.12, which is a slightly lower UCI rank, but still very tough. Hopefully we will again have good races and improve on today.