Below is a note from Matt Werrell on his Belgian adventures.

5 June 2009

Just thought i'd drop you all a quick line from Belgium and let you know how it is going. Well its my day off here and its overcast and 19 degrees outside. Pretty nice day really it can be a whole lot worse, when it rains here the temperature drops to about 5 degrees and can be very unpleasant if you're racing in that and they do not cancel racers here for anything, nothing will stop a bike race in Belgium. I've been racing quite a bit the last couple of weeks, about four times a week. Normally race one day on, one day off sort of schedule and maybe once a week i'll do two days back to back. This is really what you need to be doing to be competitive I think, when I first got here I sort of followed the other guys and did what races they were doing, just to find my way a bit, but after a couple of weeks I soon relised they were just a bunch of softees. They would race like once or twice a week and pretty much just looked for a reason not to race. I think there is a lot of bike riders out there who like the idea of being a bike racer not exactly just being a bike racer if you know what I mean. Thats probably why they fly out the back every race before the race even hits the halfway stage. I'm getting a lot stronger and wiser though every race I do, which is good, it keeps my spirits high and gives me that bit more determination for the next one.

In my first couple of races I would pretty much just finish and sometimes didn't finish, but now I'm a regular in the top 30 and have also bagged a top ten. A lot of the time it's not the legs that let me down it's just the wrong moves at the wrong time or basically just show my cards too early, if the Belgiums see you're strong they will just line up behind you, they are very smart bike racers, but I'm catching on. They are smarter but I am faster (lol). All the races I do here are kirmeses between 100km and 140km. The courses are normally very technical and tight and can soon find yourself out of the race if you don't keep near the front because it is always very windy, so the cross winds are deadly and when the guys at the front put their foot down the race just blows apart. Gaps just open everwhere and before you know it your race is done because you may have held the wheel in front of you but 20 guys ahead of you someone hasn't. There are normally around 100 riders in each race, sometimes more, sometimes less. It depends on how many other races there are on in the region that day or how much racing is on that week in general.

Getting to races is easy, normally there is a race on most days within 50k so you can either ride there and ride back or ride there and catch train back if you have a hard race and just feel like you want to fall over and go to sleep, I get that feeling a lot (lol) or sometimes the race could be 100km away so you just catch train both ways, but this doesn't happen a lot that you would have to go that far. Not for me anyway, I live in Oudenaarde which is 30km south of Gent or 50km west of Brussels you could say. So I'm right smack bang in the middle of it all. Drapac Porshe live in Oudenaarde too I've been told, but I'm yet to come across them. I also ran into Mick England and Jack Anderson from Brisbane the other day, not sure if you know them but they race for Budget Forklifts, they live in Gent. Anyway thats about it for now, I will keep you posted on how it's all going and hopefully i'll will be telling you about my first win sooner rather then later.

Matt Werrell.