Winter in Cape Town is always a hit and miss when it comes to races and weather conditions! This weekend was exactly that with perfect "Tru-Cape" weather.
Saturday was the Tru-Cape Grabouw PPA 50km mountain bike race that took place in perfect conditions, while Sunday saw the weather turn real ugly for the first Western Province cross-country league race of the season in Helderberg.
I have always said that Grabouw is truly a mountain biking paradise! Although races are never really easy, some can be harder than others due to various reasons. Grabouw is always going to be a hard race from its steep hills to the abundance of technical single tracks.
With a different style of starting the race, the only one of this kind I have ever done, everyone lay their bikes down on the ground behind a line and stand about 30 meters back behind another line waiting for the start gun after which dashing to pick up your bike (hopefully not having to find it in amongst all the other bikes!) and jump on and get going as quick as possible! Similar to a Le Mans motor racing start.
After the mad start rush a group of five guys formed out in front consisting of Nico Pfitzenmaier, Adriaan Louw (GT Mr Price), Greg Knox, Charles Keeys (Blend Properties) and myself (Blend Properties). From there it was all about pushing the pace as hard as possible and making sure you don't make any mistakes on the single tracks. After a long stretch of the famous rocky Grabouw single track before the end of the first 25km lap the group of 5 was strung out, I was in 5th place and had some ground to make up as we headed out on the second lap of 25km.
Not far into the second lap and the route began to head upwards! Most of the climbing for the entire race occurred between 29km and 40km with two major climbs of about 300 meters of altitude gain. I was able to put in a hard effort up the climbs and move my way up into 3rd position. Unfortunately for Nico who was in the lead and broke his chain on the technical single track in the final 10km, I was able to move into 2nd position and ended up that way behind Adriaan Louw of GT Mr Price.
Sundays race was a different story all together due to the weather and type of racing. Being a cross-country race and those that my slow twitch muscles can never really adapt to in the first lap, the hard race in Grabouw the previous day certainly didn't help in this regard! Neither did the cold wet stormy conditions. However, after dragging myself out to Somerset West it was a fun race on a very decent circuit.
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