Yesterday, I competed in another kermesse in the town of Ruien, Belgium which is located about 30 km east of Roubaix, France. The race consisted of doing 17 – 6 kilometer laps for a total of just over a 100 km. The laps would challenge us with a false flat, an uphill section, a speedy decent, cobbles, and a few corners. It was about 70 degrees with a little wind to top it all off.
Just before the beginning of the race, I went through my routine of trying to do a couple warm up laps to determine the course. The only thing was that the course wasn’t really marked this time around so I was only able to see about half of the actual loop. The rest of my routine involved rolling around the start/finish area and the lead vehicle to make sure I would have a good start position when we lined up. After about 30 minutes of spinning around, the announcer told us we had about 5 minutes until start. The riders began to group up behind the lead vehicle on the cobbled start area. After standing for a brief moment we were sent off. The beginning part of the lap was fairly fast where my legs felt slightly heavy riding over cobbles to begin the race. A small break of two riders also occurred early on in the race. We made the first right hand turn onto a decent where the field was strung out single file. It wound its way down to a right hand turn on a fairly bumpy concrete road with the typical Belgian crack right down the middle. Only this crack was about 2 inches wide. Enough to gobble up two wheels at once. The field hopped back and forth over the center seam until we approached a roundabout, some retired railroad tracks, and a right turn. I quickly learned a shortcut of hopping onto the bike path on the right side of the road and moving up several positions. My teammate, Evan, would make his way cyclocross style over the grass to move up even further. After making the turn and crossing another set of tracks we made our way to a left turn onto a narrow winding uphill road. This was where attacks occurred regularly and the pace picked up. This was part of the course that I hadn’t pre-ridden as well. This was also where the Kazakhstan national team would control the pace as they had one rider up the road. On one of the laps, I was bumping bars with a Kazakhstan rider as we jockeyed for a position, out of the wind, up the ascent. We would eventually make our way to the top of the climb and begin a roaring decent. A couple of times I found myself on the brink of spinning out in my biggest gear. It would lead us to the last turn on the course and back to the start/finish area. When we made the last turn; the field was strung out yet again into a single file sprint. We rode over the cobbled sections easily over 40 km/hr which made it a little smoother ride. It was the initial hop onto the cobbles where I found my rear wheel skipping back and forth trying to maintain a line while trying to keep constant pressure on the chain and pedals. Another break occurred early on which had a total of about 25 guys up the road. The peloton kept its high pace trying to catch the break throughout the race.
After about 50 km, my brakes didn’t feel quite right. The distance my levers pulled back kept decreasing. I released my rear brake but would encounter the same situation of my brakes tightening. Soon my rear shifting was getting more and more clunky and wouldn’t shift at all at one point. My rear brake ultimately was pulled tight until I had to pull out of the race at about 56 km. When I pulled off I realized my right brake lever/shifter had come loose after riding over the cobbled sections. I spun around for a lap till I arrived back at the van. It was a little disappointing, but crap happens sometimes. I was able to watch the race and cheer on the teammates as they passed by. Casey and Evan rode strong and finished 45th and 59th out of a 100 riders.
