Michelle Geoghegan's first event of the season didn't go to plan but the Irish international showed enough form to suggest that her busy winter will pay dividends this year. Here's her account of a character building Omloop Het Nieuwsblad 2011. 
06:10am the morning of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and my room mate Kirsten’s alarm goes off. I had mine set for about 06:35 hoping to make a seamless transition from my bed to the car where I planned to sleep for the entire trip to Ghent. 25 minutes of valuable sleep taken away by my team mate no less!
Outside it’s dark, cold, wet and windy. Harrie has already packed the car by the time I wander downstairs with pillow in hand. My special skill of being able to sleep on a clothesline comes in handy and the next time I open my eyes we are five minutes from the Eddy Merckx centre, the location for the team presentation and roll out for the elite women’s race. It’s about two and a half hours to the start of the race. The rest of the team is already there and we head into the centre to have our packed pre-race breakfast and get ready.

After a long winter looking forward to this race time is flying by now. Team piveresentation and sign on, legs and race food, warm up and before I know it I’m standing on the start line. It’s still raining but I’m happy enough. I’m right at the front which is good because the neutralised section has loads of street furniture and is a bit messy. The race commissaire tells us its f minutes to the start. Pre-race nerves are in full swing. Two minutes, a minute, 30 seconds and let the madness begin. And it does.

The race starts on quite wide roads going through some villages every now and then. It’s wet and there have already been some crashes. The first climb is about 40km into the race. It’s not cobbled. There was some action in the opening stages of the race. I was even up there myself trying to get away with a group early on. Groups were getting out of the bunch but there was no real commitment to staying away. It was too early and the second half of the race was where the sharp climbs and cobbled sections featured. Despite being sick in the lead up to the race I was feeling good – not super strong but reasonable and happy in the bunch.

It wasn’t that long into the race before I noticed that my brakes weren’t exactly the best but with the conditions as they were i.e. wet and muddy, I didn’t think much more of it. They got progressively worse though and I had a few close calls in the bunch with the result that I was staying at the back – almost off the back – of the bunch. This is not where you want to be in this race.
You go from wide roads to “paths”. A peleton 20 riders wide suddenly squeezes onto a road only wide enough for 2/3 riders. Position is everything. There is no point in being able to blast up a cobbled climb if you find yourself behind riders who are getting off to walk up the 20% or so gradient. This was now the situation that I found myself in and it was extremely frustrating. I just wanted them to get out of my way. With my brakes almost completely useless at this stage I couldn’t even attempt to chase back on the descent.
At about 85/90 km into the race I was still going and was in a group of dropped riders. We came to a downhill section with a right-hander. I pulled on the brakes and nothing happened. I careered through the crowd on the side of the road and quite some time later I came to a stop!
I had put cork brake pads on my bike. I used them towards the end of last season with my carbon wheels having tried some other pads and decided they were great. I used them on my training wheels but given the amount of racing I would have been doing at the time that wouldn’t have amounted to much more than an hour of pedaling. When I looked at my bike my brand new cork brake pads were completely worn away. Apparently they don’t do aluminum rims in the wet and the mud. Chris pulled up in the team car and I got in. Sitting in the car covered in mud and freezing, listening to the race happening on the radio was depressing. That was my Omloop Het Nieuwsblad 2011.

Anyway I’ve decided I’m over it and hopefully Paddy Doran is right, maybe I got all my bad luck in one day. I’m going to put in some good training - motorpacing, club crits and a training camp in Valkenburg in preparation for out next big race, the Parkhotel Rooding Classic in the Holland hills on the 27th of March.