The day started out with a few surprises. Surprise one was when I looked at the race location on the map, Wulvergem is the next village to Kemmel! For those of you that watch the early season classics from Belgium will know that the Kemmelberg features large, so my confidence in a flat race was already dented!
Surprise two came from Jurgen, my host, who informed me that today was a public holiday in Belgium and there would be a big military parade and fly past - and all shops, garages etc. etc. would be closed, Bugger I needed petrol but freeway services would be open so that was OK. To be honest when I'm at home I hardly know when a public holiday is looming, well I don't get a day off do I!
Surprise three came as I pulled onto the freeway straight into an 8km go slow! I think all of Belgium seemed to be trying to get to Oostende, going to the beach maybe? Problem was the services were an absolute zoo everybody wanted petrol.
Fortunately my route took me off the main East - West freeway to head South to Wulvergem which with my SatNav working a treat was painless. Parking up in the village I could see the wooded Kemmel hill looming behind, so still hoping that we were going the other way I signed on for the O50's race. Funny, now that I'm booted out of my age group they all want to come and say hello and shake my hand! All I'll say about their race having seen how it turned out, is that I would have won it by 5 minutes! but I wasn't in it so that's that.
Briefly the course started with a 2.5km climb, the first kilometre on a two lane concrete road then turned into a lane, the first 50m of cobbles, then up towards Kemmel on a winding hot mix road, only three riders wide. Fortunately it plateaued and turned right instead of left up to the top of the Kemmel climb, so we were into the wind on a more gradual descent which nonetheless was fast and very winding. Then along the flat, back into the village to cross the finish line and back onto the climb. Essentially the climb we had is the descent that the 'big guns' have after they have climbed the steeper cobbled side of the Kemmelberg hill proper. We had 8 laps to do up the hill!
I was number 70 and I wasn't the last to sign on, on the line for my race and looking around it struck me that there were either a lot of fugitives from the 40 year old race or the Belgians are a baby faced lot! The former is the right answer. Looking around I realised I was the oldest by a long way and apparently old enough to have the race caller commenting on it each time I came through the finish.
Anyway, the first lap was fine, I even surprised myself by climbing comfortably in the first 10/15 riders, I lost some places on the descent by not taking the corners too well, subsequently no brakes at all turned out to be the right technique when I eventually got a little more confidence, However the front of the race was full gas through the finish line and all the way to the top of the hill, I was in real trouble on the wide road straight into the wind, I could only hang on a wheel, I couldn't do anything about the gaps appearing all over the place. When we turned onto the winding bit I found I could make up positions, basically jumping across from one small group to the next, mind you by the time I got to the top of the climb I was pretty stuffed and then we were going down hill pretty fast. I had to let some riders pass me there I didn't have a lot of power to spare right at that moment and definitely needed a wheel to follow.
At that point in the race there was a bunch of about 20 at the front, a bunch of about 10 about 100m behind and my bunch which swelled a bit on the descent to about 20 a further 100m behind? No idea where the rest where. The style of chasing is a bit different but has always been the same, there is a guy on the front chasing as hard as he can, as he slows one or more rider's will attack to try and bridge the gap on their own. So we did this for a lap or so before the front group was well gone, we caught the group in between but lost a half dozen who formed another intermediate chase group up the road and seemed to be a bit more organised.
We were a group of 20+, most sitting on, by this stage I was determined that I was going to achieve my main aim, finish the race, get some tough racing k's in my legs. Then it was kind of funny, it was a bit like 10 green bottles or bike rider's, I didn't see them all go but a working group had formed on the front and we were going through pretty hard and in fact I towed the group up winding climb each of the last 4 laps, I was feeling good on that climb and going pretty strongly holding 360 - 380 watts for 5 minutes. So we whittled ourselves down to 5 riders for the last two laps. We did pass 3 of the riders that had been stuck in the middle, they didn't even try to join us.
My temporary 'pals' let me pull the whole of the last lap and then attacked with 400m to go, so I was last in the group, but considering I figured that there were at least 20 riders up the road for 15 prizes I was more than happy with my outing, not quite sprinting for a win but much much harder.
The weather had been brilliant, 28 degrees windy but not gale force, but 10 minutes after we finished, the 'young blokes' had just started the sky went black, thunder and lightening and absolutely tipping it down with rain, it had stopped by the time I got back to the hotel but the drive, with wipers going flat out was interesting to say the least.
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