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!
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