Blend team training camp: George

After a long six and a half hour trip from Cape Town to George, the 5 team players of the Blend Property Group Cycling Team (Shan; Charles; Stuart; Rafeeq; and myself) arrived at our luxury accommodation in Fancourte Golf Estate.

Here we would spend the next 3 days either on our bikes or chilling out watching the World Cup Soccer in style. However, there was a bit of wine tasting and festival atmosphere thrown in as well.

The first ride on Friday morning was an immediate introduction to a mountain biking training camp with a solid 10km of climbing in the first 15km of riding up the Montagu Pass. It was rather freezing on the way down the other side and through the valleys! Stuart had decided to wear short finger gloves and lets just say I haven't seen him wear short finger gloves since then... On the other side we made our way to the ostrich populated town of Oudtshoorn. I always enjoy climbing high altitudes and riding along the winding roads over these big mountain ranges. Having studied honours in Atmospheric Science at university it makes it even more interesting when you cross from one climatic region to another. In this case we went from the greener coastal plain to the more arid Klein Karoo. Altogether we covered some good distance and pushed some hard climbing on the way back.

Then it was time to refuel with some good food, sit back with our legs up and recover until the next morning.

The next day was going to be a ride out along the seven passes route in the direction of Knysna. This took us to a Berg Plaas Plantation above Wilderness. Here there is some good proper mountain biking, which was most enjoyable! The highlight of this ride was the support crew that provided us with an unbelievable refuelling station! It came at a time where we had been riding for almost 4 hours and we were all starting to get rather hungry and wondering when we were going to stop at a shop to refuel. To our amazement our riding partners for the training camp, Ischen Stopforth and Marcel Deacon had arranged for their friends to meet us up in the mountain somewhere behind the Wilderness to provide us with anything we possibly wanted!

We had had perfect weather conditions for Friday and Saturday. However, this was all to change for Sunday, our final day and session. We woke up to the rain, wind and cold. Fortunately for us the rain didn't stick around and we were able to start and also do most of our ride without much rain. Sunday's session was one of climbing and cross-country. We didn't cover much distance, however we climbed up two big climbs in the mountains behind George, Tier Kop and Groen Kop. We also threw in a lap of the Saarsveld national cross-country circuit.

All together this made for a very good, solid and memorable training camp with a great team! Thanks guys, and a special thanks to Martin our team owner from Blend Property Group and his wife Paula for accommodating us and putting up with our strange cyclists behaviour!

WP XC mtb league race #2 - Durbanville

The second race of the WP cross-country mountain biking series took place in the Durbanville hills area. It turned out to be a really nice course with just over 200 meters of climbing for each 5.8km lap. The laps consisted of some decent long up hill stretches, some short very steep up hill sections and some nice fast flowing single tracks with switchbacks both up and down.

The race started out extremely fast as usual. It took the first two laps for me to get more familiar with the course. Then I was able to get into a decent rhythm and was really enjoying myself. I was lying in 3rd position in the elite category for the first 4 laps until the two riders in front of me, Renay Goustra and Erik Kleinhans (Mr Price GT) pulled out. I therefore ended up coming 1st out of the elites. I was however, 5th over all as there were 4 U23 riders in front of me. Those U23's really seem to know how to race these cross-country races! I am fairly new to this kind of racing as this is only my third one ever and I think I'm beginning to enjoy them more each time.

There was only one problem with this race. The cross-country races are normally aimed at an optimal total time of 2hrs +/- 10min from the winners to the back of the field. Like the previous XC race I didn't have anyone to keep anything for me in the feed zone, so I had to take everything I was going to need from energy stuff to fluid along with me. I don't find this too much of a problem as I know the race should only last about 2hrs, which isn't very long and I know exactly what I would need to eat and drink during that time. I also don't want to take extra and have to carry anything unnecessary along with me.

So, I'm not sure what the reason was but the organises made the race 8 laps. As it turned out this was one or two laps too many. I ended up bonking half way through the 7th lap (after about 2hrs10min of racing) and still had one and half laps still to go. They ended up being a very long and difficult one and a half laps as I was rather dizzy and had a slower reaction time that resulted in me over shooting quite a few corners, making quite a lot of mistakes and riding off the single track a few times. At least I didn't end up being over taken by anyone else during this time and is something to consider more in the future.