One of my favorite lines I hear after someone hears that I race bicycles is, "Oh that is great job, you only had to ride an hour today!" This is usually on a rest day and I slyly reply back with a smirk, "Oh yea, it's only an hour of training, it's not that hard."

    What this person doesn't realize is when the weekend comes I'm not out on the town, drinking many of the wonderful Belgian beers, staying awake till the sun comes up. I'm off at the races doing my job. This weekend my "job" was the Circuit des 3 Villes in France. My work began bright and early at 7am Saturday and didn't end till about midnight on Sunday.

    Circuit des 3 Villes is a new 2.12 UCI stage race put on by a new club. The team knew there were going to be some kinks and problems, but what we got no one could have expected. It all started out innocently with there being a mix-up about the directors meeting being at noon and not the published 10:15 am. Well there went two hours of extra sleep I could have used.

    This disorganization quickly became the theme for the weekend. The next great screw-up was a two-hour delay in the start of the first stage. Apparently there weren't enough course marshals and they had to find them out of the crowd. After a nice baking in the sun I we started the race now shortened to 110 kilometers. The race was extremely fast wtih the first hour average speed being 46.5 kph. In the end a break of 15 or so guys got off the front and the ABC-Aitos team didn't have anyone up there. A bad result for the team and we weren't happy.

    We left for the hotel, which claimed to us that it had hosted Tour de France riders before, on an off comment by our coach Cory Hart about the horror stories one reads about hotels in the TDF. We arrive to a very nice hotel with a good restaurant and after a good meal we finally arrived to sleep at about 11pm. I was just about to fall asleep when I heard some very loud music start. I hope it goes away, but it doesn't, and after 30 minuets I get up and look out my window to see where it comes from. I hear it coming from the left and I figure it was a house party, nothing I can do about that, so I just try to drown it all out.

    The next mourning at breakfast I learn that the music wasn't coming from the houses to the left, but the bar of the hotel! They were throwing a party at the hotel. Pete when down about 2am and actually talked to them about turning down the music but was told to basically piss off and the guy turned away from him. The music finally stopped about 3am and we all got about 3 hours of sleep for the night.

    The next mourning was a Team Time Trial along with a short road race in the evening. The TTT started on time and we thought this was a sign of the organization getting its act together. Wrong! We start are team time trial following the lead motorcycle and after a couple of kilometers I start to see some oncoming traffic! Then the motorcycle actually makes a turn on the highway. The motorcycle took us the wrong way!!!!

    We had to got backwards on the highway and make our way back to the course and to the finish. When we arrived back one of the promoting clubs guys had the audacity to say that was the end of our race. Bernard told him if it was the end of our race it was the end of HIS race. We got to go again.

    We finally get results from the first day's road race and they have me listed as placing 8th! I finished in the field, but somehow I made it into the break. Just a sign of how disorganized things were. The final road stage went off only one and half hours late.

    We were able to pull off a great placing with Pete Barlin taking 4th place in the race and making that our best place in a UCI event so far. So it was a decent end to an otherwise crappy weekend. We finally arrived back home after midnight and all dragged ourselves back to bed. Just another weekend at the office…

    The funniest thing to happen this weekend was meeting a Frenchman named Pat. I think he is only Frenchman that likes to speak English. As he puts it, "It's my hobby, I love to talk it with people and I listen to BBC radio every night." At 81 he was able to name all 50 states in alphabetical order and likes to go up to people and just speak English to them to confuse them! He also said the last time he saw and American was 1944 when Bavay was liberated. A really interesting guy to say the least.

    Tot Ziens,

    -Gregg Germer-