Sorry for the lack of updates for awhile. It’s that time of year again. Taxes! Fortunately I have a personal accountant (my wife Robyn), but I still have lots of work to do, to figure out my expenses. Well, that’s done now (at least for me), so I can focus on things that don’t suck.

I’m settled in, over in Belgium. On Saturday, we went up to Holland for Ronde van Drenthe, a 190km flat race with lots of cobbles. Before the start, the rain was falling at a 45 degree angle and I froze my ass off 5 seconds after getting out of the car. Despite being in Europe for only two days, I felt pretty good. The race wittled down to a front group of about thirty riders. With 30 km to go I attacked with one other guy and bridged across to the two others who were about thirty seconds up the road. We were caught by the group after aproximately 10 km. Once I was back in the group, the jet lag started kicking in and I couldn’t recover from the breakaway. I got dropped in the crosswind section and was pulled from the race, since the broom wagon was behind the front group. About 30 riders finished the race. Despite not finishing, I rode stronger than I expected, so I was pretty happy with the race.

Two days ago we did Scheldeprijs. The weather was fine, but there were strong crosswinds. Quick Step, who were probably eager to make up for a somewhat disappointing Paris-Roubaix, went to front and drilled it early in the race, splitting the field in to bits. In the end 22 riders finished. The group I was in (2nd group), was pulled from the race. At first I was pretty disappointed in my ride, but after seeing that there were only 22 riders up the road I felt better.

Next up is Rund um Koln on Monday. Today I’m planning six hours on the bike, yesterday I did five, the next two days before Koln will be easy.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 1:06 am and is filed under Marks Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.