So it begins...

I have been in Belgium for two weeks now, and I am just starting to feel settled in. With the help of my father and my new Swedish teammates we have our house all set up for the next three months. We are living about five kilometers outside the city of Namur in the Wallonie region of Belgium. It is a great apartment that is overlooking the Meuse River. The first few days were very hectic, as we were all building and setting up bikes all over the house. I am currently on my spare bike as we wait for our new Pinarello’s to arrive. The weather has not exactly been on our side as seemingly all of Europe is getting hit with a cold front, but the double duo of Canadians and Swedes will be just fine.

One of the first things on our schedule was to meet our new teammates. The team got together the day before our first race, a small Kermesse in the Wallonie hills. The team T-Palm PCW has been completely rebuilt this year with many more foreign riders and I think we all got along very well off the start. I am excited to get racing with these guys and hope we can accomplish much more than this team has ever done before!

The first race of the season is always eye opening, in one way or another. For me it was plagued with mechanicals which sadly took me out of contention, but as a team we were working very well. We had nine riders take the start of the 120-rider field. It was a rolling course that was defined by strong cross winds that caused echelons. At the point where I had a mechanical, that was my seatpost dropping, the lead group of roughly 13 had four T-Palms including myself, which was good to see. Sadly, they were not able to finish it off with a win, coming away with 5th.

These first races are all about acclimatizing to the very different workloads that are required to be competitive. It is possible to simulate this in training, but it would have to be one of the most taxing training rides you have ever done, another option would be motor-pacing. Or, like me, you can use these first races to adapt the legs to the higher speed, bigger gears, and the non-stop accelerations that come with racing in Europe. That is also partly why I waited so long to write this post, I wanted to make sure I found my legs again before I wrote this article.

For me, it took three races to adapt myself back into racing, and it was excruciating. The first race was relatively slow and was not too bad; apart from my mechanical. The second race was a UCI 1.1 Le Samyn, in which Team QuickStep Floors sent their Paris-Roubaix team. That race was extremely difficult, and I found myself lacking on the accelerations, and the small duration peak powers required to do battle in cross winds. Needless to say, Le Samyn was a DNF. QuickStep Floors put on a show to blow up the race with over 100 kilometers still to ride.

It was the third race that was the most painful, and luckily the last one I needed to find the speed in my legs again. It was a pan flat 11 kilometer circuit that we navigated 15 times. We spent three hours fighting for position, and with over 270 corners in the race, each requiring a sprint both before and after, that makes for a hard day out. I was cramping and felt sick with one lap to go that day, and when I finished I didn’t know how I was ever going to race the next day at another UCI race in France.

But sometimes we surprise ourselves. The race in Lillers, France was 180 kilometers and had two small climbs per lap; of which there were ten. It was a miserable day, two degrees and rain made it a long day out there, and the suffering was plain to see. This however was when things started to look up. I had missed the breakaway, but my legs had a new-found ease in them. I was spinning the gears at high RPM and with a finesse that let me know I was back.

The peleton was chasing all day and I was able to ride in a good position despite the weather. My legs were just rolling so well, my hands were a different story. My right hand that had been shifting all day was okay due to the movement, but since I had never used my left hand, without realizing it, it had gone so numb that I was unable to shift.

I knew that I finally had good legs, so I was very careful with my positioning going into the final set of climbs, making the lead group over the first climb, and actually leading up the second I knew that I was back in business. However even all that excitement was not enough to warm up my hands, and when my chain dropped inside the final kilometer I was physically unable to shift with my left hand to rectify the situation. I was deeply upset afterwards; to have suffered all day to lose a good chance at a result in the final few hundred meters was disappointing but I was still pleased with my ride because I know there is still so much more to come.