Absa Cape Epic
Absa Cape Epic - Report #6
Matthew / 28.03.2009
Finally. A day of real mountain biking. Rebecca and I have been – in all modesty – constantly surprised by the relatively low level of technical skill demonstrated by most of the riders in the field. We’ve seen nsane fitness and a huge amount of enthusiasm for daily suffering… but not a lot of skill on display. We’ve used this to our advantage, repeatedly, over the past week, but the opportunities for really throwing down on hairy single track have been few and far between. Not so today…After the typical road racing madness for the first twenty kilometers – including watching one rider huck himself off a bridge as he was trying to pass the entire field during the neutral roll-out when the road pinched to a single-lane river crossing – we settled down to a solid, steady pace sitting in the top thirty teams and got on with our day in the saddle. Following a surprisingly technical climb (not particularly steep but rarely out of the granny gear), to a peak deep in a wilderness preserve called the Woolfkloof, we dropped into the finest descending of the entire race. Ripping down an ancient and heavily-eroded jeep track, we flew past riders who had stacked themselves on the big drops, bunged their bikes by smacking rocks or were just generally over their heads. Finally reaching the bottom, we looked at each other with huge grins and mentally high-fived each other all the way to the next moment that required our immediate attention.
Down from the Woolfkloof, we disappeared into a forest of Eucalyptus and Fynbos that hid a most satisfying, swooping, rolling single track that dropped a further 700 vertical feet and delivered the most satisfying single-track experience of the race. Of course, with a cumulative drop of nearly 2,000 ft, we had to climb back out to cross another peak in the Cape Nature Conservation area called Kogelberg. With the sun peeking out and a bit too much enthusiasm spent on the early parts of the stage, we pared our pace and steadily ground out the nearly one hour climb that topped out on a wind-blown ridge with a panoramic view of what seemed like all of South Africa spread below us.
We were surrounded by the teams with whom we had been racing for much of the past week as we punched out the last few, stiff, hot climbs and cruised the final, freshly built single track into Oak Valley, yet another gorgeous wine-making area in the Western Cape. See All Event Posts
