Excuse me, Sven.

So if you scour the internet like I do, then you've probably already seen the news. If you have a life, then I guess you can find out here... I've been selected to go to Belgium with Euro Cross Camp and the US National Team Director, Geoff Proctor. I'm going to BELGIUM TO RACE CYCLOCROSS! SORRY FOR YELLING, I'M JUST EXCITED!

I'm leaving on December 15th and coming home on January 2nd. While I'm there I'll be living in Izegem, Belgium at the National Team house. There are 8 potential races while I'm there, including 2 World Cups (Kalmthout and Zolder), a Superprestige in Diegem, a GVA Trophey race in Loenhout, and the GP Sven Nys in Sven's home town of Baal. Serious stuff. I'm excited, motivated, and a little scared, but the good kind of scared (if there is such a thing).



Knowing that this was on the horizon has made this last block of training so much easier, it's unbelievable. Thinking about cutting that last interval short? Better not. If you do , Sven and his pal Zdenek will lap you in 20 minutes. Not a difficult decision to put in the effort.



I know that this will be a humbling experience as well as one that can teach me so much, so quickly. I'm not going into this with any individual goals, but more the goal to go over and race as hard as I can, be as mentally tough as I can when I'm in these difficult environments, and gain every possible bit of knowledge that I can from these 3 weeks. Oh, and have fun. I think that this will be a life changing experience and hopefully give me lots of knowledge to take away.

As you can imagine, a three week trip to Belgium isn't cheap by any stretch of the imagination, so I'm working on raising some money to help offset the cost of my trip. We're guessing it's going to cost somewhere around $3,500- $4,000 to make this happen, so any little bit helps. I'm going to put a PayPal button up so that anyone who's interested in helping can make a donation. If you don't have a PayPal account, shoot me an email at knapprd@gmail and we can figure something out.

I should be able to update this thing quite a bit while I'm over there, so check back for updates during the Holiday season. And also before then, because I've still got some racing to do stateside first.

Thanks to all of you who have supported me along my journey so far. I really appreciate it. I know that I wouldn't even be in this position if it weren't for so many of you helping me over the last 3 years.