Well this weekend was the 3rd leg of the provincial XC series. It was down on the South Coast near Port Shepstone, situated on a banana, cane and nut farm.
We arrived at our accommodation on Friday night and just lounged around and chilled for the evening. On Saturday morning we headed straight for the course. As we had expected the course was a complete mud bath, but looked to be really fun. Myself and Nic Porteous headed out for some practice.
The course was pretty open for the first section and proceeded into some really cool, fast flowing single track. There were two pretty tough climbs, one being unbelievably slippery. straight after a couple of 'warm up' laps, we left and went back to the accommodation to clean up and get ready for Sundays race.
Later on Saturday afternoon, we were joined by Luke Roberts and his family, which shared the accommodation with us. We again chilled, relaxed, and just kicked back and had a good time with every one.
Sunday morning we were up early and took a mellow drive to the race. The weather was much hotter than the previous day and conditions were drying up nice and fast. With my race being at 9:30 the heat had begun to set in. After a good warm up I saw myself to the start line and onto the front row. There were a couple of fast guys in the batch, Luke Roberts, and Garth(a vet) are some of the names.
The start was really fast and I pushed really hard to see if any one would hang on. after the first km or 2 it was Luke and myself out in front. As we hit the long grass climb, Luke came to the front just before the single track section. He pushed hard, and it forced a mistake from my self, my front wheel smacked a stump and took all the impact on my head and shoulder as I kissed down on mother earth. I lay in a heap, un able to get the bike off me, when luckily, Luke actually stopped and came to help me out. The racing resumed as if it had never happened and we continued to push the pace hard. However, on the last small push up to the start/ finish area i was able to just ride off the front and opened up a gap of around 20sec.
The next two laps I road at a good fast pace and opened the gap up to 2min going into the last lap. On the last lap I really pushed it to the limit and rode as hard as I could. Unfortunately I came into contact with back markers, but I was still able to open the gap. At the finish I had managed to open up a gap of over 4min, despite Luke eating dirt really hard on the last lap.
I must say thanks to Luke for the thought of helping me out whilst we were racing, it's very rare that someone would stop and help. A big thanks to Jono Downham and the team for a really good event.
My next race is in George, it's the big one, S.A Champs! hoping for a really good result. I've put in the preparation and now it's up to me for the result.
:)
I'll keep you updated
Ciao
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