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

28 May 2009 

Hello, finally I have my computer, not sure if you heard the story but its long and complicated and just glad to have it and be back in contact with everyone. Well so far Belgium is interesting, very different but I'm starting to really like it, especially in the last week. The first week I was a bit lost. Just with not having anything that you're familiar with like food, the weather, day light (at the moment it gets dark at like 10.30 and light around 4 in the morning) and of course the racing is nothing like Australia. At the moment I'm racing about 3 times a week, the races are Kirmeses (anywhere from 4km to 10km loops normaly through a town) the races are all about 120km long and have 100 to 150 riders in each race. That's a lot of riders when the road can only be 2 metres wide at times. It can get quite hairy.

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.