The Amazing Adventures of an Average Actuarial Cyclist

December 2014, I was scrolling through Bikehub.co.za and discovered a "Sneeuberg Crawl" thread on the Bikehub where "Josias" posted : " Het my eerste 100km race gedoen, het die baie geniet! Tussen Graaff Reinet en Murraysburg." I have never heard of "Sneeuberg" nevermind the "Sneeuberg Crawl" before was immediately intrigued by the idea of doing this 100km mtb race in the middle of the Karoo (just like people & water, cycling events in the Karoo are few and far in between), but unfortunately the date always clashed with my cycling highlight at the tail end of every year - the Stellenbosch Cycle Tour. With the Stellenbosch Cycle Tour moving dates to January finally 5 years after seeing the bikehub thread I had the excuse to make the trip to Murraysburg. With my parents as company for the long road on the N1, we made the 600km trip from Cape Town to Murraysburg on the Friday. Murraysburg is a typical little old Karoo ...

The Trans-Augrabies is a 3-day stage race hosted annually at the Augrabies National Park at the start of the winter school holidays. A big positive of this timeslot & venue is that it gives participants the opportunity to take along their family for the experience, staying in the park (or nearby) while you are out riding Working long hours to meet deadlines in the lead-up to the event was not ideal and meant we only managed to leave Cape Town late morning the day before the race, arriving at Augrabies after a long drive just before sunset. I rushed to the race briefing and then fumbled to pitch our tent in the darkness. During the night the temperatures dropped drastically and we woke up early Saturday morning with the temperature at 0 degrees! After the long working hours, long drive, pitching the tent at night and freezing temperatures I was sorely tempted to stay in bed and skip Day 1! Day 1 - Riemvasmaak Start of Day 1 But I got up and saturday morning...

When you do road races around Cape Town, you eventually realise that almost all races (Cape Town Cycle Tour excluded) are a variation of the same routes in a triangle around the Paardeberg area with  Durbanville to the west, Paarl to the east and Malmesbury to the north. We are certainly privileged to have a good number of races during the year but one can only ride Bothmaskloof so many times before seeking some new challenges. I looked up the Herald Cycle Tour in Port Elizabeth. One of the very few races (and the only large road cycle race in the Eastern Cape) with full road closure and an official seeding event for the Cape Town Cycle Tour. Stilbaai Systems Check On Friday 22nd February after work I set off for my road trip to Port Elizabeth, overnight at Stilbaai and setting off again on Saturday morning for Port Elizabeth. Left Stilbaai a bit late on Saturday morning so it was a rush to cover the 450km to PE to get to registration before it closed at 17h00. Sund...

My biggest fan at the finish Some people are under the impression a Sub-4 Karoo2Coast is equivalent to a Sub-3 Argus. After my second failed attempt at a Sub-4 K2C I can now confirm that it is not equivalent, it's indeed much harder! Karoo2Coast often falls on the weekend of my wedding anniversary so all else being equal it is not a race I will get to do often. Special permission was required to make an attempt this year, luckily our anniversary also happens to fall near a public holiday so this year K2C fell on a long weekend which allowed for a short anniversary weekend away and K2C double feature. The Saturday we stayed over near the cute town of De Rust, did the touristy activities with the kids and had an anniversary pizza dinner in town and then it was an early night to be ready for Karoo2Coast the next morning. To be fair the winter school holidays + cold weather + flue wreaked havoc on my training schedule and I was never quite fit enough for a realistic Sub-4...

Racemiere finishing Day 1 Gravel & Grape is a fairly new stage race (The first event was in 2015) hosted at Goudini Spa in the beautiful Breede River Valley. I have some family roots in the valley and good memories of spending December holidays in the area so I was always keen to do this race and finally this year I got my chance.   Team Racemiere was resurrected as I was reunited with my brother Pieter again, both our families were booked into camping spots in Goudini making this a proper family weekend. Gravel & Grape has a reputation for having tough technical & rocky singletrack and a few sandy spots between the vineyards, so proper preperation would have helped but between work commitments & dirtroadie events this dirtroadie managed to train a sum total of zero kilometers of singletrack in the 3 months leading up to the event. Not exactly ideal preparation. But the plan was to just take it easy and not ride too hard but even so other than being fi...

At the end of January the seeding for the CTCT was sent out , now there were 2 more races on the calendar to prepare for the CTCT. But then out of the blue I got invited to do the Tour of Good Hope(TOGH), a 5-day stage race in the week leading up to the CTCT. 5 days of cycling, 600km, about 6000m of climbing - not ideal tapering before a big event! But this is also an amazing cycling opportunity that cannot be missed so there I was, having fun cycling every day in Paarl from Monday to Friday killing off any realistic attempt at a Sub-3 Argus! I was given the advice that the best thing to do on Saturday before the race is to not rest, but to go for another(!) ride - a light spin to work out the lactic acid built-up in the legs during the TOGH. The legs felt fine during the light spin but by now I have cycled 8 days in a row in the lead up to race day, cannot imagine that this is the ideal approach recommended by sport scientists! Sunday morning was windless, ideal conditions for...

Cape Town Cycle Tour (CTCT)/Argus seedings are out! I am seeded in 1B (the 5th group) with a seeding index of 16.54 based on my finish time at the 2017 Stellenbosch Cycle Tour . This is my worst seeding since 2014, coincidentally the last & only time I managed a  Sub-3 Argus  so maybe in a way it is a good omen, but my campaign for a 2nd  Sub-3 Argus is certainly not going according to script. After the high of Lormar it was back to the reality with the 2017/2018 roadie season. The first step towards a Sub-3 Argus is a good seeding, I started 2017 with my best seeding ever but the cancelled 2017 CTCT and no road races since,  meant my seeding was gradually slipping from great to bad as the year progressed. The race I targeted to get my seeding back on track was the 160km  PPA One Tonner . A good finish time in this race guarantees a good CTCT seeding. However disaster struck halfway through the race, 2 punctures in quick succession near Hermon m...