Kevin McCallum At The Epic

Prologue

2012-04-04T13:06:19Z

In a promo video ahead of the Absa Cape Epic, Kevin Evans said that after the first stage a few years ago he thought: “If it carries on like this I don’t know how long I’m going to last.” After the prologue of the ninth Absa Cape Epic yesterday I was left wondering the same thing. It was JUST 27km…but it JUST had 900 metres of climbing. That’s almost as much climbing as the Cape Argus Pick n Pay Cycle Tour has in 110km. It’s, like, a lot.

The first day of the Cape Epic is a red-hot poker shock to the system, a wet newspaper smack of a wake-up call. I’m not ready for the Epic. No one is ever ready for the Epic…well, except the likes of Burry Stander and Kevin Evans…but nothing can prepare you for the stomach-ache of nerves that hits you in the morning. You cannot eat. Your heartrate is going through the roof.

Day one for Team Absa started at the Clara Anna Fontein tented safari park at 7am. We ate porridge for breakfast, a small bowl. I may have had a small energy bar. It was never going to be enough, but my appetite had disappeared, overtaken by a head that was full of wonder and fear. It’s JUST 27km. I answered around 200 tweets of support. The Cape Epic is a race that has an aura about it. I was asked me if I was mad. Yup. A local newspaper said that the race was just over 750km long with 16km of hills. Oh, thank heavens. Here was me thinking it was 781km with over 16000m of climbing. I had last-minute things to organise: a new rear-wheel skewer for the KTM Phinx 29er, which Helet Conradie of Cyclelab had sorted out for me; a new set of lenses for my Oakley Radars. Mat Quinn of Oakley was good enough to give me a pair of frames in Absa colours so that if I wasn’t going to be fast, at least I would look quick. It’s about the look as much as the performance, sometimes. And sometimes the look helps give confidence to the performance.

Our start time was around 9.54am. All four of the Absa teams started at around the same time. Alain Prost, the former formula one world champion, was on the ramp just before us. He looks little different from when he was riding. A smaller helmet for one, and finally that nose of his can be put to good aerodynamic use on a bicycle instead of hidden away behind a visor.

Then it was our turn on the start ramp – Team Absa JackMac. Jack Stroucken and Kevin McCallum. Hell. People were looking at us. They were cheering. A count-down from five to one and we were off, rushing along at around, ooooh, 15km/h. Elana Meyer and Ernst Viljoen, the former an Olympic medallist and CEO of the JAG Foundation and the latter CEO of Team Absa, came past me up the first climb. I climb like a sinking brick. Jack and I rode with them for a while. After five kilometres a twit showed that he did not understand the meaning of the words “single track” and rode straight into me in an attempt to overtake. Knob. We fell over slowly and, save for a bit of dirt-rash on my upper hip, I was uninjured.

I struggled. My heartrate would simply not come down. It was flying, red-lining, but my body wouldn’t listen to me. I listened to Jack, who is a sage, a wise man. He sat behind me as we went up a stiff climb. He waited for me at the top of the next killer climb when I had to get off and push. The timing mats were at the top. If you cross those mats and are not within two minutes of your partner you will be penalised an hour. That could mean the difference between disqualification and riding on for another day.

On that same mat, Team Absa teammate Clayton Duckworth hit the mat, looked back and saw partner Vanessa Haywood pushing up the hill. He screamed at her to run and she got there just one-and-a-half minutes later.

And on we went. Twenty kilometres in I bonked. The nerves I’d been living on, the same nerves that had stopped me eating, fell away. I inhaled a gel and we rolled down to the last climb at Meerendaal. Jack led the way. The crowd recognised Elana and roared her name, but their encouragement was also pressure, but she rose to it and showed how she can spin a bike up a hill. I was shattered and hopped off again with around 700-metres to go. At 500 metres, Jack was waiting for me. “You go first. We’re there. You’ll get across the line, and we’ve started this thing.” I got on and ground out the last metres, Jack telling me how well I was riding. He knew I was hurting, but he lifted me, pushed me and helped me to finish my first stage of the Absa Cape Epic in two hours and 27 minutes. I remembered what Kev Evans had said. I wasn’t sure I could get through this. Jack told me I could. I believe him. There are seven days left to ride.

Kevin McCallum is riding the Absa Cape Epic as a part of Team Absa, the sponsor’s celebrity-media team. He is raising money for The Star Seaside Fund.

Stage 1

2012-04-04T13:24:47Z

Marmite sandwiches. Who would have thought that white bread Marmite sandwiches would taste like the food of the gods? After 57km of the first stage of the Absa Cape Epic, they were just that. Wonderful pieces of salty gastronomic genius served at the second water point of the day, halfway through a stage that most described, including a good couple of professionals.

It was 114km of riding, a claimed 2350-metres of climbing. Except that we didn’t ride a fair amount of that climbing. It was stairway to heaven day. It was my first proper stage of the Cape Epic, and I’ve never been more chuffed than when I finished in around eight hours and 30 minutes. It was an hour and 30 minutes ahead of the cut-off, which is, obviously, important, but it was the way that my Team Absa partner, Jack Stroucken, rode yesterday that gave us the most satisfaction. We rode within ourselves, but we still rode strongly after a tough prologue. We rode, as Jack keeps reminding me in his wise way, for tomorrow. In the Absa Cape Epic you do everything for tomorrow. You eat for tomorrow and the day after that. You make sure your tanks are full and your energy levels are topped up. You do this during the stage, constantly adding to the stores. You can never eat enough, as I found out on the prologue.

I have known Kandice Buys, team manager of Bonitas and RE:CM for almost a decade, since she was manager of HSBC. She is down at the Epic looking after the RE:CM team of Neil MacDonald and Waylon Woolcock. She has kindly offered to make me my race food and supplied me with neatly-wrapped apple and fruit cake, and protein bars and gels. Oh, and mix for my bottle. An apple wrapped in foil. It is wonder food, and pips the Marmite sandwich as food the gods might serve at a banquet.

Riding the first stage of the Cape Epic is a strange feeling. Waiting in the chute to begin the nerves build up, but, strangely, I did not feel the same dread as I had the day before. Jack and I had already agreed on our strategy. Joel Stransky had told me not to kill myself. And to eat. And to ride for tomorrow. Tomorrow’s not just another day. It is the next day of the Epic. It could be the most important day of the Epic. As the next one will be.

In the chute Raymond Hack, who is riding with Marius Hurter, asked me if my little stretching routine were going to do me any good. I told him that it was my first stretch of the year. We rode behind Hurter, a 1995 Rugby World Cup-winning Springbok prop remember, whose big thighs churned out an endless rhythm. When the climbs started, we hit the granny gear and spun. Then we walked. Elana Meyer and Ernst Viljoen, also of Team Absa, rode some of the way with us. Around 60km into the ride, I was behind Elana when she went down hard on a descent, flipping over her bars. She was shivering and calmed her down. Elana is a hugger and soon she was back on the bike, her elbow full of blood.

Jack and pushed on, not too hard, not too soft. The buzz of finishing is immense. Elana and Ernst came home just after us. Elana punched the air and shouted ‘yee ha”, her trademark. She’d done stage one of the Absa Cape Epic. We all had. We live for tomorrow.

Stage 2

2012-04-04T13:30:14Z

There are better places to meet than in the Race Hospital at the Absa Cape Epic, but that was where myself and fellow Team Absa rider Elana Meyer found ourselves yesterday around happy hour time. Elana was there to change the dressing on the stitch she received on her damaged elbow on Monday after her crash. I was there to have the wound on my elbow cleaned up after my crash yesterday.

Crashes warp time. They happen in a rush and slow motion. I watched Elana’s happen in front of me. There was no one around when I came down hard close on 90km into the second stage of the Absa Cape Epic. It was around two kilometres from the last water point, a fast descent before a short, sharp climb ahead of the final water point of the day. I was flying down at 35km/h when I hit a waterbottle that had been dropped or shaken out of a cage by the rocks on the downhill. My front wheel hit it, the wheel kicked right, then hard left and slipped from under me. I hit the ground right arm first, a horrid thud on my helmet as it hit a rock.

The shock of a crash leaves you cold and dead. I sat up and did not move. A Scottish rider, whose name I did not get, asked me if I was okay. Why, yes, I said. I always like to have a little sit down during the biggest physical challenge of my life. They left. I got up, straightened the handlebars and then tried to click down into the granny gear at the back. No go. It was jammed, bent in the crash. Elana and her partner Ernst Viljoen came past and asked if I was okay. They said they’d tell my partner Jack Stroucken, who was about 200-metres up the road. We couldn’t get it to shift and I had to push up the climb and ride in the hard gear to the waterpoint. The superb mechanical team at the waterpoint took a look at it and called the boss. He looked at it and just bent the lever back into place. That simple.

If only the stage had been that simple. It was called the “easy” stage of the 2012 Absa Cape Epic, but the mantra amongst former finishers is that there are no easy days on the Epic. Jack and I followed our own mantra and rode for tomorrow, keeping our heartrates down and spinnng out, but it was still a hard day. We saw a man having an epileptic fit not long into the race. There was a rumour around the race village that a man who had been treated for a heart attack on Monday, did, in fact, have his heart on the other side of his body. It’s a rare syndrome, and when the medics listened, allegedly, for his heartbeat, but would not believe him when he said it was on the other side. I do not know if he carried on riding. I hope he did.

Team Absa teammates Nico Panagio and Sean Kristafor suffered their second mechanical in two days, the rear derailleur of Nico’s bike all but shearing off. They had to ride for 25km with the bike as a single speed. That’s no fun, not on the sort of day we had yesterday. Exactly 122km with 1690-metres of climbing – a “rest” day ahead of today’s 147km, 2900-metre beast, which is the longest day in Epic history. They say, though, that it is not the toughest stage on this year’s Epic. It’s taken its toll on me. My helmet is cracked and cannot be used again, but Willie du Plooy and Hans de Ridder have promised to have one waiting on the start line for me tomorrow morning. My team jersey is ripped, my quad bruised and my wrist eina. But we finished another day on the Absa Cape Epic; the second stage, the third day. Tomorrow is the beast. Elana and will be putting our bodies on the line again. Let’s hope we come home with less blood.

Stage 3

2012-04-04T13:34:01Z

It is probably the wrong thing that the race director of the Absa Cape Epic is a German. It makes jokes about cruelty and coldness too easy to come by, particularly if you are a rider doing his first Absa Cape Epic, and have listened to her briefing every night after dinner has been served, looking ahead to the next day’s stage.

On Tuesday night Kati Csak had good news and bad news. She told us the stage was no longer the longest in Absa Cape Epic history as it had been shortened by four kilometres from 147km to 143km. The cheers rocked the dining hall. “But there is still 2900 metres of climbing,” she added, because that’s what Germans do, apparently. No niceness without cruelty. Hey, Greece? Want a bail-out package from us Germans and the rest of the broke Europeans? Well, there’s a sting in the tail… Which is exactly what Kati told us. The finish of the third stage of the Epic, the queen stage, would have “a sting in the tail”. Was there ever. With 10km to go, they sent us upwards through a pleasant meadow where wild Germans gambol during the day outside Caledon.

Then they sent us down a rocky, sandy descent, and then, with the skyscrapers of Caledon in our sight, they sent us up again. “This,” a man who rode up the final hill with me, “is unnecessary.” He then proceeded to blame myself and partner Jack Stroucken because we were riding for the sponsor, Absa. I told him that we should give the “sting in the tail” girl a “sting around the ears”. It may have been the one Hansa I had yesterday, but I could have sworn that she said “and we have our first water boarding of the Absa Cape Epic tomorrow” instead of “and we have our first water crossing of the Absa Cape Epic tomorrow”. We waded through a river, thigh deep for me; up to the ankles for others.

It was my longest and hardest day on a bicycle ever. I didn’t have too many nerves, which may have had much to do with the fact that I was a little rushed yesterday morning. My broken helmet from the crash on Tuesday was being replaced by Willie du Plooy and Hans de Ridder of Sagitta with a Uvex one on the start line. Karl Platt of the Bulls, who won the second stage with Stefan Sahm, wears Uvex, so at least I would look fast even if I wasn’t.

Jack and I decided to take it easy, and soft pedalled from the start again. Unfortunately no one had told the other back markers this and they rushed past us in a race for 450^th place, apparently. We caught them all at the first climb after 40km.

We walked up that climb. And the next one. Only the truly strong and talented could get up there. Marius Hurter, the former Bok riding for the jag Foundation, gave it a good go. Jack and I paced ourselves. We saw big crashes. A kid overcooked a corner after a long descent and went down hard. We slogged away. I had left my Garmin Edge 500 at home and rode blind, only taking time on my watch. It was okay for the first 100km, but with 43km left to ride I was desperate for information. I cursed, loudly, at every climb in that last 43km, cringed as James Walsh of Sinametella caught me taking a sand bath with 10km left to ride. We kept checking our time. We had plenty of time before the 11-hour cut-off at 6pm, and came home after 10 hours and 15 minutes of riding. Shattered, tired and bursting with accomplishment. Kevin Evans sent myself and Jack a message on Twitter saying “Respect boys, respect”. That’s what the Cape Epic is all about.

Stage 4

2012-04-04T13:36:32Z

I cried when I finished the fourth stage of the Absa Capo Epic yesterday. I didn’t want to cry. Rita Duckworth, mother of Clayton my fellow Team Absa teammate, hugged me as I came over the line in nine hours, 49 minutes and a whole lot of pain. Then she cried. And I cried. Jesus wept. The relief of it all.

It was a day when heaven became hell; of being broken in a crash and breaking a chain. It was day when the Absa Cape Epic ground me down and picked me up, leaving me in a sobbing mess in the arms of Rita. Clay’s mum works for Absa. One day I’ll ask her what her title is, but it seems she is concerned mostly with keeping us happy and making us feel utterly special. All the emotion, the fear and the pain of the fifth day of the Absa Cape Epic came out as Rita hugged me and made me cry. When we untangled, Paul Kaye, the finish line announcer, asked me about the day. I spoke, but I can’t remember the words exactly. I know I didn’t swear. I’m sure I didn’t. I probably wanted to, but I’d already cussed up a blue storm over 103km and 2700-metres of climbing. It was supposed to be a little longer and 100-metres shorter in terms of climbing, but the organisers of the Absa Cape Epic can play silly buggers sometimes.

Today was a day when the 143km of the third stage, the queen stage of the Cape Epic, sat heavy on our legs. The third stage was always going to be tough, but getting through the next day was going to be tougher purely because of what had preceded it. It was pain. We flowed from the start, rolling through the rock ‘n roll centre of Caledon, our home until this morning, when we left headed for Oak Valley-Grabouw. Again, the foolhardy kicked hard and rolled through like they were riding the Cape Argus Pick n Pay Cycle Tour. Jack Stroucken, my partner, had no argument from me when he told me to sit back and save myself for the end.

But the end nearly came sooner than it should have. At the base of the Charlie’s Heaven mountain climb, not far away from where we saw three pigs rutting away in a mating dance that may catch on in Caledon, a traffic jam of riders formed. Some of them were Day Trippers, those who chose a stage of the Cape Epic and ride along for the day. It was slow going and one in front of me clipped a rock with his back wheel. My front wheel hit it and it kicked up into the air. The wind. Hell, the wind. It blew like hell on the mountain called heaven. A gust caught my wheel and pushed it over the edge of the cliff, and I flipped over my handlebars. I saw a rock heading towards my face and somehow managed to twist so I was only left with a scratch on it. My wrist hit down hard. Someone shouted “medic”, but I wanted none of that. I wanted to finish this damn thing and jumped up. Got on my bike and rode. My hand has a blue bruise; so, too, my index finger on my left hand. My left hip and upper quad is bruised. I have more scratches. I was sore. I was angry. And I rode in anger, which was a mistake. I blew. Badly. Jack told me to calm down.

Then Jack broke his chain just before we came down the hectic descent, and I began to panic more. Would we finish in time. Jack was calm. I was not. Jack works for Absa and can crunch numbers. I crunch words. He knew what we needed to do. The wind was the thing. At the last water point we were told the cut-off had been extended by 30 minutes. Relief surged through me, but we didn’t need it. Jack drove us home in the wind, riding strongly. Then we finished, coming in at the same time as Elana Meyer and Ernst Viljoen of Team Absa. Then I cried. Oh, how I cried. Three days left to go. I may cry again.

Kevin McCallum is riding the Absa Cape Epic as a part of Team Absa, the sponsor’s celebrity-media team. He is raising money for The Star Seaside Fund.

Stage 5

2012-04-04T13:42:10Z

Ge Lydia van Gildenhuys has hurt me daily since I began the Absa Cape Epic, but in the nicest possible way. Lydia is one of our physiotherapists and has been my angel with the healing hands this week as she has massaged and worked the pain from each day’s ride out of legs that told me they had no business riding 781km in a week.

“You know I won’t hurt you on purpose,” she said to me shortly before I started writing this column. And she wouldn’t, but the pain is necessary, so necessary. If only she could count properly. She counts like my mum used to when she ripped off a plaster when I was a kid: “I’ll count to three. One…” Rip! “You lied! You lied!” But Lydia does it with hands so educated they turned legs that were so sore I could barely walk after a stupidly brutal fifth stage of the Absa Cape Epic. The sixth day, an 119km slog through the rain, mud and hail (at one water point according to Hans de Ridder of Sagitta, who supply me with my KTM 29er) was what I described to Karl Platt, the German rider with the Bulls team, as a “f**king proper day”. He agreed. They had taken it easy after Stefan Sahm, his partner, had struggled with form and, as Karl gently put it, “lots of kakking”.

The rain had begun shortly after we had finished the fourth stage on Thursday. I woke up at 4.30am to send a “fax” and could hear the pitter patter of trouble on my camper van. The stage must surely be cancelled?!? I can’t get my bike wet? But the Epic, which has had but two (possibly three days) of rain in its history, went ahead. We rode into a deluge, soaked after 10km and thoroughly “over” the race before it had really begun. It was atrocious. The mud stuck to the sensitive bits of bikes and hurt them. Derailleurs clogged up, chains sucked and people fell over. You had to pump your legs to get up to 10km/h on the flats. It was a daft day, finished by some “legendary” single track in Oak Valley. As Jack Stroucken, my Team Absa partner said, it would be fun any other time but it sapped what little power and energy were left in legs that had hundreds of kilometres in them.

I was thinking about Lydia on the single track, wondering how much work she’d have to do when I got back to the Team Absa compound. Lydia is part of a team led by Francois Pienaar, a man armed with a BSc, honours and more qualifications than I’d care to mention. He draws the pain out of others on the massage table next to me, while Lydia looks at the scratches on my legs and asks if I crashed again. The answer is usually yes. She massages around the bruises, of which I now have around 10. Or 12. I forget. Lydia works the “blockages”, the knots, and then pushes hard on the “lines” on my quads and ITB. It can be excruciating, but I told Lydia I’m from Boksburg and can handle it. But I can’t. She’ll hurt me tomorrow for the last time after I’ve hurt myself yet again on the sixth and second-last stage. She stretched my quads and sent me on my way. “Good luck. You’ll be here. I know it.”

Lydia could feel the pain in my legs yesterday. I could barely walk to the showers. She

Kevin McCallum is riding the Absa Cape Epic as a part of Team Absa, the sponsor’s celebrity-media team. He is raising money for The Star Seaside Fund.

Stage 6

2012-04-04T13:45:26Z

And so, with a gentle flop to the right, I fell over at the finish line of the sixth stage and the seventh stage of the Absa Cape Epic with a beer in my hand and one waiting in the hand of a lady. It was a slow, inelegant fall, a result of exhaustion, eagerness to get the bear and relief, relief, at having come through a tough second-last day on the Epic.

Hans de Ridder of Sagitta, the man who puts the “A” in Hansa and, along with Willie du Plooy, a KTM under my bottom, held out a Hansa for me to grab just before I crossed the line. On the other side of the finish line, Rita Duckworth, mother of my Team Absa teammate Clayton and Absa’s maker of smiles, had a Black Label in a bottle waiting for me. I like drinking out of bottles. I also like Hansa. The choices. So, I fell over, the right foot failing to unclip. Burry Stander, who is leading the Absa Cape Epic, naturally had to be close by to witness said fall and tweeted it. “@africanmtbkid: nice crash on the line. #drunkrider @KevinMcCallum @KTM_bikesa @AbsaCapeEpic.”

It was not my only crash of the day. I had a little escapade as myself and Team Absa JackMac partner Jack Stroucken entered some singletrack around 8km from home. Jack had just told me to be careful, so, I went and crashed. It’s what I do. I crashed early on into the race. On Friday night my body wanted nothing to do with me. It had been too big a day in the wet and the cold. I was shivering cold. Food tasted like cardboard. My legs were a mass of pain. I curled up on the bed in our campervan and whimpered. Jack saw me and was worried. I forced food down. Chocolate milks, chocolate bars, a sandwich I found in the fridge, a Hansa, two litres of water, fruit juice and some fruit cake. Then I passed into the sleep of the dead.

At the start my legs felt good, recovered thanks to Lydia van Bildenhuys, one of the team’s physiotherapist. But there was something missing inside, and on the first climb of the day I went backwards, which is not unusual, but I couldn’t even pedal up a 10 percent gradient. I walked. Every climb. Jack waited for me, then walked alongside me. He made me eat a gel and told me we had plenty of time. The views were beautiful from Groenlandberg, but I was hurting too much. The descents were tricky, washed out bits on the roads, looses rocks and ruts left by the rain, but we still made good time. “We’re here to finish, not to win,” said Jack. He tried to take my bike to push it up the hill, but I said no. That was unfair on him. Last year he didn’t finish the Epic because after missing the cut-off I stayed on his wheel, and he kept an eye on me. The announcer at the second water point called him a wise sheep dog. I was a stuffed sheep with a saddle up my bum. I drank Coke, ate sweets, but there was nothing. My legs were hollow. I fought with myself. Told my head that it had been thinking one day ahead to the finish today when that was still two days away.

Finally, we hit some downhill, but the Absa Cape Epic loves a “sting in the tail”. With 2200m climbed, we still had a few bumps to go, but nothing major, yet major enough. I struggled through the single track. I hate single track almost as much as I hate portable toilets. I think I may have mentioned this before. But at least it was mostly downhill. As we came into the finish straight, Erica Green, who represented South Africa at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics in mountain biking, roared at us in delight as we finished in seven hours and 45 minutes, an hours and 15 minutes before the cut-off. She called Jack and I “legends”. Around 300-metres later I was a legend. A legend of the fall…with a beer.

Kevin McCallum is riding the Absa Cape Epic as a part of Team Absa, the sponsor’s celebrity-media team. He is raising money for The Star Seaside Fund.

Stage 7 & The Finish

2012-04-04T13:45:20Z

There are no words. There is no reason, no rhyme, nor sense to be made of the maelstrom that is my head as I right this. I finished the Absa Cape Epic three hours before I sat down to write this. I’m still struggling to take it in. My mind has no sense of direction, no amount of drifting, dragging and dredging can pull it into line to make a straight line of the accomplishment. There’s an acronym that works: WTF.

I finished the Absa Cape Epic. WTF. Officially, it was 781km and 16800-metres of climbing, but things are never perfect. I finished the frigging Absa Cape Epic. Christ. There are only four races rated “HC” (Hors Categorie – beyond categorisation – ie, stupidly tough) and I finished the only one that is not a Grand Tour: the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, the Tour of Spain and the Absa Cape Epic. That’s not a good list to be in if you’re riding the thing. It’s especially not a good list to be in if it’s an Epic described by the professionals as the toughest in yeas.

And so I shall defer, if you will permit me the big-headedness, to the professionals. Kevin Evans shook my hand in the Oakley tent, after the race, to say “respect”. Karl Platt, the former winner of the race, and a man who has become a good friend, was, as fate would have it, the fella who presented myself and Team Absa teammate Jack Stroucken, my wonderful, patient and wise partner, with our medals, said the same thing. Such emotion. Such toe-dancing, sphincter-clenching joy I have never experienced. And, brace yourselves, this is better than the 2005 Champions League final.

I was never sure I could do it. My training was okay. Solid enough, but I worried that I had stuck rigidly enough to my training plan, drawn up by Kim Gershow-Rose of fittrack.co.za. Her work was perfect, as it turned out. You can always train harder for the Absa Cape Epic. You can never train enough. Ernst Viljoen, the manager of Team Absa, said he saw something in me during the training camp in February, which suggested to him I could finish it. It was a willingness to keep on keeping on. “You did what we asked you to do,” said Ernst yesterday, when I asked him yesterday. “You looked like someone who could push themselves harder.”

I didn’t think I was. I was a man in fear. I had no price to finish. Yesterday, the final stage, I was more nervous than ever before. I wanted nothing to go wrong. Jack and I decided to take it easy. And then I got my numbers all wrong. I thought the stage was 65km with 1650-metres of climbing. It only had 1350m of climbing. For the last 10km I was looking for another hill. Jack told me I was wrong, but I was reluctant to believe. With 4.5km to go, he told me that it had been a pleasure to ride with me, and spoke of the accomplishment. I rode slightly ahead of him as he spoke. I was crying, beside myself with every sort of emotion, none of which would settle long enough to be identified. Relief? Yes. Pride? Too much. Joy? Yes. Belief? More than anything I have ever done.

I have a list of people to thank, a list that is too long for the few words left for me in this column. The hundreds of messages on twitter, the BBMs, the love and hugs – all pushed me an extra metre. To Nikki for introducing me to Hans and Willie of KTM, who gave me such a superb bike to ride on, I am so in your debt. That, more than anything, set me on my way. But, I will send thanks to all of you this week. Right now I’m a wreck.

This is a race I’ve been promising to cover since it began. Since Kevin Vermaak, the race founder, walked into The Star’s Sauer Street offices and showed me a Powerpoint presentation on a mountain bike race he was hoping to make into the biggest mountain bike race in the world. On Saturday night Lance Armstrong tweeted that he’d been watching the race and must ride it one day. Yeah, Lance. Bring you’re a game. I finished the Absa Cape Epic. Holy f…