Usually after a race I write a short blog post, but on reviewing the photos I think that words cannot do the race justice, so instead I am going to post a series of photos.

By way of introduction, the Bart Brentjens Challenge is a mountain bike race that starts just south of Maastricht, which is about a 3 hour drive south of Amsterdam. If you look on a map it should be in Belgium, but it is not and often the Dutch wonder what they got besides hills, but then that is the Amsterdamer in me talking.

Bart Brentjens is a retired Dutch mountain biker who in the late 1990's was a prolific winner. He won the 1996 Gold Medal at Atlanta and the world mountain bike championships in 1995. He also won the Dutch national's 10 times between 1995 and 2007. He is a Dutch hero, and as a side note we knew his brother when we lived in Singapore. The Bart Brentjens challenge is a tribute to him.

This year was the Dutch National Marathon Championships as well as a sportive. I had intended to race the Championships with Ben Evans, my fellow ATAC'er doing the race, and I went to register found I did not have a UCI license number, so I ended up in the Sportive. Ben was racing in the big boys race. After some fast talking I managed to start in the "sponsors" area, rather in the back with the 500 sportive riders. This meant that I started 8 minutes behind the rest of the men's race field and 3 minutes behind the women's field. I was going to be doing some passing..

Now for the photos... From smiling and clean, to, well, you can see...

Happy at the start on the front row.

Going for the line into the front corner, 500m away..

Starting to get muddy..

Still pretty clean

What happened. I like this photo as you can see the globs of mud stuck to my legs. It was crazy muddy.

Yep, it was a mud bath. In the end it took me 4hrs 48mins, which would have got me about 10th in the 40+ age group. The fastest time of the day was 3hrs 59mins.

Cleaning the bike took a full two hours, and that was just the mud on the outside. At the moment the parts that need replacing are: chain, both brake pads, headset, bottom bracket and rear wheel bearings. An expensive race.

Well that was the Bart Brentjens challenge. My expensive lesson is not to race in the Netherlands if it is pouring with rain, and it has not rained for a while......

http://www.strava.com/activities/203762348