This year’s biggest goal for me is the Absa Cape Epic. And this type of long-distance mountain bike stage race, completed in teams of two, presents many unique challenges.
First there is the challenge of racing that many days on the bounce, which for an amateur racer is pretty unusual, I think. It’s possible to do stage races on the road in the UK, but they tend to be two or three days over a long weekend. And there’s certainly no amateur equivalent of a Grand Tour, at least as far as I know. So eight days hard racing on the trot is a pretty hard thing to train for.
There are the conditions. From accounts of previous Epics, I’ve heard of thorns, extreme heat, dust and long distances.
For a Brit, it’s also early in the season: having started back on proper training in December, racing only usually starts in mid-March, and I don’t normally feel as if I’m going well until May or so. So having to hit the Cape Epic Prologue with legs firing on all cylinders on 27 March is going to be a big task.
But finally, and importantly, there’s the challenge of racing in pairs. Having completed two TransAlps – in 2008 and 2010 – I feel familiar with this challenge, and relish it. It turns the sometimes solitary pursuit of XC mountain biking into a real team effort – you have to focus on your own performance, but also on making sure that your team-mate is OK too. You have to keep talking to each other, and being absolutely honest about how you’re feeling. There’s no point one person feeling great, pushing the pace and the other blowing up – that’s the fastest way to ruin the team. And both of you will have bad days and good days; you just have to find ways together of recognising what’s going on and dealing with it.
My participation in the Epic this year layers on an extra challenge on top of that: my team-mate and I live on opposite sides of the world – Mike in Sydney, me in London. In both the TransAlps I’ve done, my team-mates have been guys that I’ve been racing and riding with for years. Leading up to the race both times, we made sure we raced together a fair bit, and did some big rides to work out strengths and weaknesses. And even then you can get to the race and find some surprises – you just don’t know how the team is going to work until you do an hour and a half climb in a race together.
Mike and I have actually only ridden together on a mountain bike once, and that wasn’t very auspicious – I was out for the first time on a bodged-together singlespeed, and was having problems keeping my chain on. And we won’t have seen each other for about eight months by the time I turn up in South Africa two days before the race! However, we know each others capabilities, having raced against each other at those aforementioned TransAlps. We’ve also raced together on London’s crit circuits, and we spent a solid few days on the roads of Provence in spring 2010, building up that confidence in the other’s ability to knuckle down and grind out the hard yards. A memorable couple of rides in unseasonably cold temperatures and driving rain were enough to form a strong bond.
And there’s another positive side to this too. I don’t normally have a problem motivating myself to train, but the knowledge that Mike is out
there in Oz, smashing out the miles, racing through the Antipodean summer, spurs me on even more to make sure I’m fast enough to make a good team-mate come the end of March. I don’t know just how fast he’ll be, but I know he’ll be fast, so I’ve got to make sure I’m up to the challenge.