#Belgium

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FAIL 14: The Quest for Shade on a Cycling Tour from Portugal to Belgium

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FAIL 14: The Quest for Shade on a Cycling Tour from Portugal to Belgium

A reggae legend once told me, ‘the hardest part is the start!’ But let me tell you, Johnny Osbourne never faced the world of long-distance cycling. The start may be tough, but stopping, oh, stopping is a beast of its own. It’s like vertigo, a swirling chaos that leaves you dizzy and disoriented, a sailor back on solid ground after weeks at sea or a diver breaking the surface after a deep plunge. Everything becomes surreal, nothing makes sense, and you yearn for something to hold on to, but there’s nothing, just an immovable void.

For fourteen relentless days, I pushed forward, covering at the very least a hundred kilometers a day, as landscapes, faces, and weather slowly morphed around me. From scorching 43-degree heat to 10-degree cold which by then felt like -10! I rode on. My journey, a long bike ride from my new home in Portugal to my old abode in Belgium, driven by a selfish urge, wrapped in a cloak of nobility.

IRIS x Komoot Women’s Weekender: Lowlands Radical Rally

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IRIS x Komoot Women’s Weekender: Lowlands Radical Rally

Forty-five riders, 280 kilometers with 900 meters of climbing, and two countries. Sleeping out in two (nearly) wild campgrounds, stops at two awesome cycling cafes and one well-timed heat wave. All the fruit pies, ice-cream, coffee, shared snacks and supermarket sweeps. Brightly-colored kits, wild swims, hardpack, ankle-deep sand, cobbled streets and everything in between. This is the story of the Lowlands Rally, a bikepacking weekender hosted by the European clothing brand, IRIS, in collaboration with komoot, and documented by renowned photographer, Ashley Gruber. If you couldn’t tell already, it was a weekend we won’t soon forget!

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Le Fabuleux

Fred sent in this video recap from a Belgian gravel event called Le Fabuleux which took riders from Limburg to the Ardennes over two, 170km days of riding.

Flemish Hospitality: CX Style

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Flemish Hospitality: CX Style

I was hardly surprised when he turned us away. After three seasons battling these neon-vested, parking fascists at Belgian cyclocross races, I’d come to expect rejection.

Max and I were racing today, and we’d just tried to enter the Renner’s Parking, the exact place for people like us. Yet the gatekeeper grunted in Flemish that there was no room for our little Peugeot Partner in the lot stuffed with hundreds of camper vans and buses from the larger Belgian teams.

Brussels Express

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Brussels Express

If you’ve got 19 minutes tonight, you should really watch this documentary on cycling in Brussels. It’s not just your ordinary courier documentary, it’s a story about how the car has created one of the least cycling friendly cities in Europe. I thought all Flemish cities were havens for the bicycle but Brussels only boasts 4% cycling traffic. Some of these shots make Brussels look like Los Angeles at rush hour.