Cape Argus Cycle Tour - South Africa

The Cape Argus Pick n' Pay Cycle Tour is the largest timed bicycle race in the world. Drawing more than 39,500 riders from around the world in a race that has waves of timed start groups beginning at 6:00 am.

I stumbled off of an all-night flight from London Heathrow at about 10:00 am on Saturday, the day before the race, located my bicycle and duffle bag and grabbed a taxi to the Westin Grande Hotel, only blocks from the exposition and starting area. After putting my bike together, I went over to the registration area to pick up my number, race chip and some packets of drink powder for pre-race hydration and for my bottles during the ride.

Richard Sherman, who runs our African Regional Project and lives in Cape Town and I went for dinner and beers at Relish, a great neighborhood bar/restaurant near his home in the trendy area of town called Bo Kaap. Honestly, now that I look back on the weekend, I probably should have arrived a day earlier so that I could have rested before the ride. Three all-night intercontinental plane flights over ten days, too many time changes, strange food and drink and then heading out to hammer on a bicycle at physical red-line for three and a half hours up and down the hills around Cape Town, I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking. No wonder I fell apart on Sunday night after the race.

The race day was magnificent! Blue skies, no wind, and temperatures that ranged a bit on the high end, particularly on the back-side of the course away from the ocean (24-29 degrees.) The course went south-east, climbing out of Cape Town, before going fast and flat along the coast. The second half of the ride is almost all hills, never anything more than 183 meters high, but there is enough up and down so that the entire ride is about 1938 meters of climbing.

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For much of the ride, there were a group of us who started together in the "Z" group of international riders, riding in a fast pace line. The "Z" train would hammer along at 35-40 kmph on the flat, forming up, reforming, and passing thousands of riders. Our group, an un-seeded group, started after the slowest of the seeded riders and there were some fast international guys. I rode with a German, a Dane and a South African living in Virginia. I lost touch with them on the last climbs, since I felt strong toward the end, climbing like a wild man, passing riders like they were standing still. The early season work in Thailand and Monaco had paid off!

So, final numbers for the day.. 108.2 km in 3:33, average speed 30.6 kph, average heart rate 153, with 45 minutes of the race at 92% of maximum heart-rate or better. I was redlined for the entire race. No backing off, no taking it easy. A great effort.

However, my post-race strategy was not so smart! Rather than get a good meal and some sleep, I headed for the bar in the hotel and rehydrated with beer and ate a nice, but not particularly filling meal with more beers. I was totally wiped out and crashed at about 4:30 pm and slept until 10:00 am the next morning. The only thing I remember was waking up to chat with Pam on the Internet and then slipping in the bathroom around midnight, falling on the edge of the bathtub. I think I was just so run down, left it all on the road on Sunday and then did all the wrong things after the race. The result, I spent Monday in bed nursing a bad bone bruise on my ribs. Arrggh.

Now, on Tuesday, the hotel doctor paid a house-call this morning and set up a series of x-rays for me at the Christian Barnard Hospital in town since he suspected that I had fractured my rib. The xrays came back negative, but the doctor said that a bone bruise can be as painful and take as long to heal as a broken rib. But at least I now know that I didn't break anything and I'm hoping that the recovery time will be short and I can get back to training soon. But, I'm going to look at my travel and training schedule over the next few months and cut back a bit on one or the other. Obviously the intercontinental training and racing schedule is a young man's game and is one more begrudgingly acknowledgement that I'm not twenty-seven anymore, but twice that age.