Let’s just get this out of the way, ok? Bredene was one of the weirdest races I’ve ever done.

First, it was in a trailer park. It was a nice trailer park, more geared to the vacationers who stay while visiting the beach just across Bredene’s main street, but there’s still something weird about weaving around people’s trailers in a cross race. About 20% of the course was road, and all that road was back and forth around people’s little front yards. Make a mistake and you were going to end up in their birdbath.

Warming up amidst the trailers.

The other interesting feature of the race was a brief ride through a building — a garage-like structure, which housed both registration and the main refreshment area. It wouldn’t have been particularly bad, except that the door heading in was only wide enough for one person, and the floor was as slick as ice. They put a couple of rugs down to help with that, but getting to them, especially in traffic, was still a treacherous situation.

Racing indoors, briefly.

The race itself went pretty well for me. I had poor position at the start, as usual, since they steadfastly refuse to award me points for quality finishes here, meaning I got called up pretty much last. I also didn’t have much chance to warm-up or preview the course, because we spent about 90 minutes in a traffic jam on the way to the race, and only arrived with about 45 to spare for me to get ready. So I suffered badly for the first lap before my legs opened up and I started moving up.

The course featured one fairly technical run-up over a giant mound of mud. A lot of people rode it, but I had some trouble with it on the early laps and decided to play it safe and run, which turned out to be much faster than riding it anyway. I was pretty much in last place after one lap, but I just buckled down and started to work on picking people off. It was slow progress on a pancake flat course. Any course that doesn’t have any climbing is always kind of a challenge for me to do well on.

But I ground away, pulling people back one-by-one. I’m starting to get to know the competition pretty well, because I’ve been picking off the same guys race after race, finishing sandwiched between Kris Maes and Bjorn De Meulemeester for the second time in two weeks. Kris doesn’t speak much English, so my efforts to congratulate him on solid races have been pretty futile, but Bjorn does, and we had a nice little chat together after the race. It looks like we’ll be racing each other quite a bit this season.

Anyway, in the end I think I wound up around 35th or so. I went in and handed over my number, got my €5 for the finish, and headed out of the park. I felt pretty good, actually, so to celebrate Mindi and I picked up a bunch of piping hot frites and headed over for a nice walk by the North Sea before heading home. All in all, I’d say, a successful day, as is any day that involves fries and mayo.

Kite flying on the beach.