Written by Stephen Hall with Brett Schnitzerling and Glenn Harris
Day 14 certainly wasn't our best day in Belgium. In fact not much went right today at all. We woke up reasonably early in preparation for the 150km Retie Classic which was less than 10km from our apartment. After breakfast we made sure our bikes were running properly and packed our lunch. Glenn had to cut his new seat post so he rode out of the saddle all the way into town where he found a cycling team car. We borrowed a saw and cut the seat post on the side walk. It didn't seem unusual to us that cyclists were already arriving 3 hours before the race was supposed to start. I made my way back to the apartment while Glenn spent his time fiddling with his bike position. Brett & I walked across the road to the supermarket and picked up a few things to make lunch. We sat down to eat and realized we were running late so we scoffed our food and threw our kits on. Brett was still too sore to compete so he planned to ride up later on and take some photos. We loaded food into our back pockets and took off down the street headed for Retie.
The race was run over a 70km loop before 12 x 5.8km laps of a circuit in town. When we arrived people had already gathered around the circuit. We were confused at first but realized very quickly that we'd missed our start.. By 2 hours. Glenn and I were beyond furious and rode back to the apartment in silence. We're still unsure how we messed up the start time, it possibly as something to do with the flyer being in Dutch. Perhaps 3pm was the time that the peleton was expected to enter the circuit. Glenn decided to go training anyway whereas I sat on the couch and sulked for a while. I was really looking forward to my first big road race not only in Belgium but for my career having always been a track cyclist. Eventually I started to feel better, the process helped along by Glenn returning with 3kg of chocolate. For the rest of the day we watched a few movies and had some Skype dates with friends and family on the other side of the world. Definitely not our finest day but we'll bounce back on Saturday when go to battle in Meerhout.
To make up for our lack of photos we've included some of our racing pics.
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