live-cycle

Standing nervously at the start of the Absa Cape Epic prologue before dawn, watching as the sun turned Table Mountain blood red and then slowly illuminating the start area with a fantastic warm light, the kind of light landscape photographers dream can only dream of. This was not the time to take pictures.
The starters fingers showed 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… and we were off, competing against 1200 other cyclists as we raced round the area and up the sharp incline into the woods and away.
For an amateur cyclist like me – and not a very good one at that – I have to say being cheered out of the stadium was a pretty emotional way to start the day. Bouyed along by their support we quickly caught the team that had started 30 seconds ahead of us, and were promptly overhauled by the team who had started behind us, all is fair in love and war!
The climb to dead mans tree is long and the surface is loose, wheels spinning and sliding desperate for traction causing loss of rythmn made us both sweat. But steadily we found our climbing legs and worked together catching teams and being overtaken in a continual game of cat and mouse. The last bend before the aptly named “Dead Man’s Tree” I pushed up through the corner as the spectators cheered us on and I gracefully fell from my bike to a chorus of whoops from crowd.
“Marks for style?” I gasped
“Never play to the crowd” a man laughed back “get on and pedal man!” he continued his encouragement as I remounted and slipped and slithered to the summit.
Turning on to the road the full extent of the fires became visible, Dennis and I took our time, drank plenty of fluid and ate some gel bars before continuing through the charred and blackened landscape, still smouldering in places the smoke drifting in lazy spirals as we climbed through it.
Once off the road the downhill was fun, hardwork to keep upright because of the loose gravel, but a run into the valley bought smiles to our dust streaked faces. The sting in the tail of this course was the last hill, raising up infront of us like a wall. I passed two riders, “Hey great work,” said the first rider to me. Just to prove lightening can strike twice I looked across to say thanks and fell off again. I moved aside to let Dennis power past me. The surface was so loose and the incline so steep that I couldn’t get going, so picking the bike up I ran up the slope – and soon regretted my enthusiasm as the air I sucked in scalded my lungs and my legs seemed to made of jelly. Dennis seemed to suffer from the same complaint as we gathered ourseleves at the top of the climb for the last singletrack home. Weaving through the trees a Danish rider caught us and as he tried to go past flew over the handlebars, then only moments later Dennis had to go for style marks by copying him. No damage done, we made the arena and clasped hands as we rode under the finish banner to the sound of Green Day’s “American Idiot”. We looked at each other, the pent up nerves of the previous day were forgotten after conquering Table Mountain we just started laughing as we wheeled our bikes to be cleaned.
The time for our prologue, largely irrelevent, but around 1 hour 17 minutes for 16.8 km with a total ascent of 850 metres.
Not a bad start, so bring on tomorrow, I’m off to get my legs rubbed – Now where is Dennis?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 8:13 am and is filed under Paul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.