13 May 2013 - The Van Heerden clan arrives in the Underberg. We booked into the very picturesque Glenlea farm cottage. Pieter & I & the wifes left for race registration with the rest of the clan exploring the wooden cabin and small lake outside.
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| Glenlea - Underberg |
The whole town of Underberg was buzzing with an army of nervous & excited cyclists. At the registration tent on the school grounds we were tagged and issued with our luggage boxes for the next 3 days. The boxes filled with free goodies including clothes which surely must have been worth about half the entry fee. At 15h30 the legendary race organiser - Farmer Glen, made quite a spectacular entrance with a helicopter, proceeded with a very witty race briefing and we were off back to Glenlea for final packing & preparations.
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| Registration at Underberg School |
14 May 2013 - Finally the waiting is over! At 9h00 Pieter & I lined up at the start with the rest of group J. We had some ambitious plans for a quick start, unfortunately destiny had other ideas. In the first 8km's our luck deserted us completely, a stop for a dropped chain, quickly followed by another stop to pick up a dropped water bottle and then followed by our first mechanical... A tough introduction into stage racing!
Bizarrely Pieter's shifter broke after going over a small bump. And we spent about 20 minutes standing next to the road while Pieter was doing emergency repairs on his bike and me standing around attempting to look helpful. Luckily unlike his brother, Pieter is blessed with good mechanical skills and he was able to salvage his shifter to some extent. He was able to continue with about 3 gears working (which meant extra hard pedalling from him to keep up on the straights and downhills).
We were off again, with a little less enthusiasm and lot more caution. Even though we were not riding at full pace we were steadily passing other riders. Soon we were into the first sections of singletrack, frustratingly it seemed our fellow back-markers had zero technical skills and even less trail manners. We spent a lot of time being stuck behind lines of slow riders gingerly making their way through the twisty forest sections. At one stage a girl rode into a tree, promptly stopped and parked her bike across the single track blocking everybody else!
After a number of forest single track sections we emerged onto the highlight of the day, a big dam crossed by a 200m curved floating bridge. With our supporters cheering on from the side, we were onto the bridge, quickly snaked our way to the other side and were off again with big smiles on our faces.
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| Riding on Water |
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| Big smile! |
The rest of Stage 1 was fairly uneventful. Short steady climbs and quick downhills on district roads and jeep track, interspaced by pine forests with cool singletrack sections given weird names like Wappo's, Muffin Top and Goog's. Every now and then we would turn a corner and be pleasantly surprised to see our team of supporters up ahead.
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| A quick stop to have a chat with the fans :-) |
Stage 1 is a fairly easy but signs off with a sting in the tail with a few short nasty climbs the last 5km. Team Racemiere finished strongly, passing a lot of riders on the last climbs to finish stage 1 at McKenzie Club in a decent time of 4h30. Given our mishaps at the start, and being stuck behind slow riders for long times we were very happy with our time.
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| McKenzie Race Village |
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