Well here I am, two weeks into Europe, and it's all been a huge blur. I really don't even know where to start. The days have gone by so fast, the rides seem so long ago that were even two days ago. I really don't want the season to go by with the bat of an eyelid, so I am going to try to keep the updates coming every two weeks. No promises, but I'll try. The season will get hectic at points and the kilometers very long, so I may be here in a physical state, but my mind may still be on the road 100 kilometers back.

    The whole trip to Europe began back in November with my departure to South Africa. This part of my trip will be forever part of me, which changed my views on a lot of things. I arrived in Amsterdam airport after a lengthy 11 hour flight. Due to KLM's baggage policy I had to pack only two large bike boxes, each weighing about 70 pounds apiece, and they don't have any wheels. I lugged these around the airport to the train station, hopped onto a train to Brugge to meet my new hosts in Europe. Well the wind was so bad that a tree fell over on the tracks and I was delayed, so I arrived in Brugge an hour late.

    Belgium is a very cold place, well for the first couple of days it seemed very cold, but it's not so bad now that I am use to the cold. I spent the first day getting use to my new surroundings and unpacking my bike. The days that followed there was going to be one of my new teammates arriving each day till Sunday. I hadn't meet any of the guys before as I hadn't been able to go to the trainings camp in Arizona with the other guys on the team.

    Mike was the first guy to arrive, who ended up being my roommate, followed by Jed, Ben and Jacob. All the guys are really good racers coming from all over the US. I have three more teammates Cory, RJ and Brian who will be arriving later in the next three weeks. So it still isn't a full house over here. The setup is quite nice with a full downstairs of a house as the residence of our cycling team. We are able to house up to 12 guys, but will only house 10 at any given point during the season. It's already crowded with 5 of us, so 10 is going to be interesting at points. If you want to find out more about the team or the program you can visit the Cycling Center web-site at www.cyclingcenter.com.

    The teams' first rides took us to around Oostende to do some exploring to find out where all the roads are and to see the town we are living in for the next six months. The next couple of rides we took the canal road, a bike path/ car lane to the town of Brugge. The town is very beautiful with large gothic churchs, narrow lanes of cobble streets, and a very busy city center (which is kinda a maze to get out of).

    There are three things I like most about riding here in Belgium. First, almost all roads are equiped with a bike lane. The people here use bikes for transportation a lot of the time because of the cost of gasoline, so the drivers are use to the presence of cyclist on the roads. Top that off with the fact that you are in the heart of European cycling where the passion of the people for the sport has been called a "neurosis" of the public. So us cyclists get a lot of respect on the roads. Second, the aren't any hills where I am living, which is kinda nice change over the last four months. I hate to say it though, I am kinda missing the hills a little. Third are the abundance of great café's and bakeries in all the small towns, so anywhere you go you can get a nice coffee or snack.

    The two coolest rides I have done so far have been with my teammate Ben. The first of which, we road to France on some of the small farm roads in Belgium then went along the sea for the last 12 miles into France. The towns here are amazing and the coast is very nice on a sunny day. While we were going along the sea the boardwalk ended, well we went along a road and found another "boardwalk". This one actually turned out to be a seawall about 4 foot wide and most of the time it was covered with sands half way. At other points there was sand all the way across and we were having to ride through 2 inch deep sand. It wasn't to much trouble for Jed (as a great cyclocross rider and bike handler), I had some points of worry, but nothing I couldn't handle. We road about 5 kilometers to the end and came to nothing but sand dunes. We new we were at the French border because of a sign posted showing where the nature reserve was and the Belgian-French border. We tried hiking down a sand path with our bikes over our head only to find that there was nothing but more dunes at the top of the path. You can check out my "photos" section to see pictures of the trip. The other cool ride was to the same area, but it was about 40 degrees, raining, and gusting winds of 40 miles and hour. I consider this my next coolest ride just because it was a hard-core ride and proved to myself that I was able to ride like a Belgian and suffer like a dog.

    Later on in the week on Friday I went to the bike-fit-guy. He is a former Belgian national team mechanic and a very smart man. He measured just about every limb on my body and had about 100 different tools that he uses to get everything just right. He was impressed that my bike wasn't to far off from where it should have been. All I really needed to do was have the seat about 2 centimeters higher and the bars about 4 centimeters wider. Apparently the 42-cm bars are too small for my chest. When I bought mine I used the method of having the bars at the center of the shoulder. This is actually to narrow to allow you to breath well, so he had me get 46-cm bars, a big jump from 42-cm. You want the bars to be almost to the outside of the shoulders.

    Watching this guy work on a bike was great. He takes much pride in what he does and made sure everything on my bike was working well and fit properly. He adjusted a few cables here and there and set up my shoes to the correct position. We finally left his house late that night and drove back to Oostende. I had to be up tomorrow for a Kermese in Wetten. Top that off with a totally new position and I was in for a fun day.

    For those of you out there that don't know about bike racing, where I am at in Europe is at the heart of cycling. It's a culture all its own. One of the biggest reasons I decided to come to Belgium are for the infamous Kermese races. These are 115-120 kilometer races, usually around a short course of 5 to 15 kilometers in a town, and held in conjunction with a carnival or parade of sorts. These are known for there fast speeds, tight and technical courses and large fields.

    The race I was going to be doing was kinda low key, none of the really fast guys were there, but there were still lots of great riders and ex-pros from what my team director, Bernard, was telling us. The course was 7.6 kilometers and very technical. The weather was on our side as far as the having no rain, but it was still about 45-50 degrees and very windy.

    The race started off at 3pm with about I'd say a hundred or so guys. Not to bad of a field. The race started off fast and we immediately gunned it through the small town. Our first turn was a sharp right hand with a traffic island in the middle of it separating the road from the bike path. I decided to take the outside along the road. This was immediately followed by another fast right had onto another road. If this race was in the states, people would call this "road" and alley way because of how small it was, but it's a full side road in Europe. The race then went on in a nasty headwind for about 700 meters and we made a left hand onto a very small road, about the width for a large SUV to drive on. We were going almost 50 kph (31 mph) and just flying down this very twisty path. Soon we made a hard right hand onto what can only be described as the windiest road I've ever raced on.

    This won't be the last windy road I race on, but it was sure a wake up call to what I was going to be in store for the rest of the year. The road had a bad cross-headwind which forced everyone to take shelter to the side of the rider in front of them, unfortunately when the road ended on the side you had to ride in the wind behind the rider in front of you. It was during this section that I was really pushing it hard. I later found out that I had actually reached an AVERAGE heart rate of 201 for two minutes down this road. The road was about 2 kilometers long and lead to a right hand turn.

    After we turned the wind was right in your face and you had a little break from the wind if you were in the pack. However your break was soon over with right hand which again put you into another nasty cross-headwind. The pack was hauling it and we soon came to a really cool left hand turn full of cobbles. Down a fast small one-lane road and then a final stretch to the finish line with a refreshing tail wind which pushed the pace to around 65 kph (40 mph).

    I spent the rest of the race repeating this same type of lap for 11 of the 14 laps. I chased a lot of the time to maintain contact with the main field and was dropped twice only to chase on both times. Finally on the 10th lap I was caught at the back of a split in the main field and then called it a day when my group stopped chasing and we were about to be pulled. I was happy to last so long, an hour and 45 minutes, and to have made it longer than many of the local riders. It was definitely a lot of fun.

    Sunday was a different story, as we meet up with our teams doctor to have a blood test and a lactate threshold test. The lactate acid threshold test was increasing resistance every three minutes until you can't go on any more. Or another way to describe it was, pain, pain, and more pain. I wasn't looking forward to the test as I was very sore from the previous days race and still felt some strain in my legs.

    As it turned out, I didn't have any lactate acid left over in my legs. So the doctor was ready to go along with the test. I lasted only 13 and a half minutes. Not to bad, but not great. He wasn't to impressed with the point at which I started producing lactate acid, but was happy with how much lactate acid I can take in my legs at the end of my effort. From the test results he was able to set up a training schedule for me to follow to be able to increase my endurance and still improve my speed and intensive endurance. I really like how knowledgeable he is in sports and medicine.

    So there it is, my first two weeks in a nutshell, to use to cliché. It's been a really fun time with so much more that I couldn't include because I wanted this to be something other than a novel. I hope everything is going well for everyone and I'll keep ya'll all updated on what's going on over here

-Gregg-