Wet, strong wind, dark skies .. excellent conditions to stay home in bed, one would think. But no, today I had promised my club to help out with the organisation of the first leg of the "Trophee Jeunes Vetetistes" , taking place in Heze, a small rural village next to Grez-Doiceau. My task consisted of safeguarding the security on one of the crossroads where the mountainbike race was to pass. I had demanded a spot in the forest so I could also try out my new camera and flash . The conditions were dark, so the flash came in handy.. unfortunately I would discover later that I had overlooked restoring some settings I had previously tampered with while trying out some stuff at home. This oversight rendered most of my pics even darker than they already were due to the storm that was still raging in the early hours of the day. Oh well, we live to learn, don't we. I was in place around 10am and some 4 hours later it all was all over and done. Being in the forest and in a hollow road I was spared from the fierce wind, which had already felled some trees on the main road earlier that day. I have to admit, I saw a lot of nearly-dead bikers pass before my lens today. The climatic conditions were horrific: wetness , mud , storm wind in the plains and of course the ups and downs and technical passages of this circuit took their toll. Mountainbiking is a tough sport, let there be no doubt about that. I shot some 160 pictures and I think I have around 20 that I consider to be good. I hope they reflect some of the toughness of the race. Scroll down to the bottom of this article for a link to a small pictorial album. I tried out a lot of stuff on my Nikon D2X camera , like different autofocus procurement settings , some of them worked, some didn't quite give me the results I was looking for. But thats OK, this is a learning process and I rather have some bad pictures now, when things aren't stressy, than during some important race where I want most of the pics to be good. Later that day I managed to squeeze in an hour on the rollers, to complete a powertraining session. I was quite tired and I have not been feeling all that good these last few days, but the workout went fine nevertheless.
