“Kilometer Professional”

Great Day here in Belgium.  I rode the “yellow” loop of the tour of Flanders, with some more cobbles and other realizations.  My legs aren’t rocks like yesterday, so it was nice to pedal hard.  As I was enjoying the Belgian scenery and watching the kilometers tick by on the route on my GPS, I realized I am a kilometer pro.  This means that I can ride most routes at the same speed as the professionals, if you measure my speed in kilometers per hour and the pro’s in miles per hour.  This makes me 62% of a professional, with which I am totally comfortable.  A ‘kilometer professional is a much nicer label than my previous self appellation of “really fast donkey” which comes from the following paraphrased quote.

“You are a fast donkey, if you train really hard, you could be a really fast donkey, but you will never be a thoroughbred.”

I don’t train really hard anymore, and I am probably just a donkey, which translates to jackass.  You can see why “kilometer professional” is a much nicer term for myself.

I had  another realization as I was eating my 5000th calorie today, riding makes you, and me, hungry. I went to the market and bought a couple of nice pre-made salads thinking I would have a couple of days worth of food.  Nope, ate it all.  And I just polished off a Belgian waffle with ice cream and frites with mayo for a 9pm snack.  60 plus miles per day has made me hungry.  My body is convinced we are in a survival situation and is craving calories.  Fries and Waffles, and every other food stuff is better in Europe.  I don’t know how they do it, but even their supermarket pre-made food is excellent.  A couple of videos are posted below, and there is a new video of the whole first five star (3.7 km) section of cobbles from Paris-Roubaix on my YouTube channel.

As I was descending from the Koppenberg yesterday, and from the Molenberg today, I was wondering what the inside of a Belgian ICU looks like, because, if I crash I’ll be lucky if I make it to the ICU.  One of the videos is of part of the descent,  these roads are like 8 feet wide and I hit 80 plus kilometers per hour a couple of times. YOLO.  There is also a short clip of how they make the Belgian cobbles, which are huge.