Hey good readers,
Stand still Sabre, you master needs to fall on you again (twice).
I am only now keeping a promise made about 4 posts ago, that of telling you about the Argus Cycle Tour if the pages vs postings thing does not work out. Another promise about a 39plus-hour trip from Bali is also still outstanding.
It did not work out but my head was in Paris. Now, by bringing you this long promised post, I'm breaking another i.e. to bring you Paris 4 but that one will come too!!! Note, I did not say: "I promise" :-). Sure Paris 4 is full of trials and tribulations but it represents a conclusion with the bitter-sweet tang of saying goodbye to a friend.
Back to matters at hand.
The 2009 Argus Cycle Tour is widely acknowledged to have been the windiest Argus ever. I rode the Argus in 2010 and I wish to disagree. I take issue with the 2009 description on the basis of the winning time of the women's race. The winning time of the womens race in 2010 was slower than that of 2009 over the same route and distance and, in my opinion, this can only be because the wind was worse in 2010. Now I am not an Argus expert, so don't take my word for it!!!
I only partook in only one Argus Tour (in 2010) and the run-up to the race is rather extensive and I hope not to bore you with all the happenings. Some however must be told to give you a clear picture of my other form of travel, cycling.
I started cycling to work mainly to establish control over my petrol budget while I was at my previous place of employ. I then ended up with work place friends who were staunch cyclists, one of them was about o complete his 20th Argus Tour. You get a special shirt for each deca you complete I think, so after 10 you receive a privilege of keeping your number and a special colour shirt. After 20 completions, there are more privileges and colour shirts and so on. Now this special gentleman clearly saw either some cycling potential in me or thought me an easily influenced sucker! Either way, like most people, I did not mind the encouragement, tips and attention.
I trained for a period and entered a pre-qualifying event called Die Burger. You need to pre-qualify to get a good Argus seeding and earlier start time and group. This will mean you do not get bogged down amongst the slow crowds but rather cycle with people of your own ability - THAT'S THE THEORY ANYWAY!!!
I did a reasonable time in "Die Burger" race, something in the order of 3 hours and a bit minutes. This got me a seeding that started before 08:00 in the morning. The "Burger" was also my first organised cycle race ever, not counting the 'races' we had going home in primary school. This, a few months before my 51 birthday, sounded rather ambitious. Unlike Willie Wikkelspier (for non-South Africans, that is William Shakespeare)'s Marc Anthony, I did not plan to pontificate on "ambition".
I had bought myself this weird cheap road bike a few months before. For some reason, the bike felt super-quick going downhill while it had serious issues going uphill. The Argus, being a hilly race, therefore caused me some trepidation! I have a hill called the Helshoogte (Height of Hell or Hellish Heights if you prefer) next to where I live but its profile was not ideal for the Argus or so I was told, so I hardly cycled up there. I preferred to drive to Somerset West and trained up a hill called Spook (Ghost) hill in the instilled belief that it had a better Argus profile. The other reason for training there is that there I found some mates to train with whereas in Stellenbosch, I did not have those privileges!
Training long distances or hard sectors by oneself is not to be recommended!!
The longest distance I put in in training for the 109 km Argus was 70 km a pop for a few weekend mornings. This in contrast to what I heard some Capetonians were doing, six easy hours in the saddle on one weekend morning followed by a hard hour the same afternoon. According to seasoned cyclists they were doing real training. With the dubious benefit of my lack of experience, I thought they were seriously over-training.
Sometimes we would have a longer training run from Somerset West to Rooi-Els, a favourite cyclist training route. It was here that I had a rear- wheel puncture while flying downhill on the downhill demon. I nearly came to grief because the control required on those skinny road wheels is something to behold. Luckily, I was in the Somerset West training group, experienced cyclists, who fixed the puncture in record time and with no fuss!
At the time I was chasing one of two lasses who had smoked me going up the same hill earlier. Being smoked going uphill is embarrasing enough but downhill??? I noticed they were wearing national colours but thought it was fake at the time, NdiIndoda mna!! (IsiXhosa for "I'm a man!!").
Once I went up and down Helshoogte in training and, while going up, I made a mental note of big manhole cover on the opposite side of the road. On the way back I was again flying downhill on my super downhill cycle when I neared the position of the previously noted manhole cover. I became very alert and managed to see and miss the manhole cover but I hit a cat's eye in the road and had an immediate blowout on my front wheel. I forgot to mention that while my cycle was really fast downhill it was also very twitchy!!. When the blowout happened, I learned the true meaning of twitchiness. The front wheel wobbled and threatened my immediate acquaintance with Mr McAdam's legacy. This was no fun at a speed close to 85 km/h. I managed to stay on the bucking bronco for long enough to shake hands with the road on my own terms and at a more civilised speed of about 3 km/h. After repairing the puncture using my onroad repair kit, I resolved to buy a cycle with more front-end stability. That is why you'll see pics of me training on a bright yellow cycle while I competed in a more stable purple piper in the Argus. The yellow blighter was the unstable downhill demon!!
My Good Wife (she was good then already), probably thought I had gone off my rocker what with all the training and special diet and stuff. Having been married to me for a good number of years already (32 years on the 1st of the 5th Month this year), I suspected that she probably knew I've been off my rocker for considerably long time.
You see, she's a social work professional and they are trained to pick up these things as a matter of course.
She said nothing seriously contrary however and I was further encouraged in my ways by this because she can get rather serious with sanctions should she become convinced of untimely contrary behaviour on my part! Here I mean stuff that can dislocate my favorite right wrist (I'm reasonably ambidextrous but it does not pay to have both wrists out of action, does it?) and that, for a squash player, is serious stuff!!!
When I rode in Die Burger, I had serious trouble with the downhill demon getting up a hill with a rather stiff gradient, but I made it without getting off the cycle. I then noticed on the other side of the hill the gradient was as steep going down towards Malmesbury. Before the race I was told by experienced cyclists that a single cyclist cannot catch a bunch going downhill. I saw there was a bunch a hundred or so metres ahead of me when I decided to test this assumption.
Now previously, I mentioned that my bike was strangely fast downhill and not so uphill. I think most cyclists simply thought that I'm too lazy to put in enough effort. Not so. I always felt I was putting in more effort than my training partners on the uphills and far less on the downhills.
I decided not to pedal going down that hill and simply assumed what I presumed was an aerodynamic position. So I just sat there, flew downhill, gained on and passed the bunch. This was apparently unnatural and many in the bunch assumed I pedalled hard to latch on and then simply used their wind breaking formation to pass them but that was not true. I did not pedal at all, my super cycle was simply too fast downhill!. I think it had to do with my physique and the fact that the cycle was probably a bit small for my frame, so most of my weight settled itself ahead of the centre of gravity of the cycle. That, to my mind would easily and scientifically explain the uphill struggles as well.
I visited the race exhibition show the day before the race, got my number and all my goodies sorted out. So we were ready for battle on the morning of the race. My whole family came to enjoy themselves at my expense. I could see in their eyes they thought the old man was going to make a fool of himself and they, under embarassing glares of strangers, were then to be called upon to 'rescue' the old monkey - my deliverers! The evnt would probably have been announced over the public address system and I could already see the shame in their eyes as they had to publicly identify themselves as family of the unfortunate, silly old monkey. These thoughts may not have been in my family's minds but they served to keep me motivated as I pedalled up the Suikerbossie (Sugar bush) hill, supposedly the final bone breaker.
I was about 20km from the end of the race but before me was the sweet downhill past Llandudno. Oh and before I get there, let me go back to Suikerbossie. Some roadside wag cat-called me as I swayed up the hill asking mockingly if someone should give me a push. I was never short on words, so I shouted back that if he had the cajones, perhaps he should show others how it is done. To my surprise, the little twerp was an action hero and my words were still carried on the Hout Bay wind when he was pushing me uphill, hard!. Other competitors were miffed and called: "No fair". Me I was happy to have this advantage and it was their loss for opening their mouths only to breath.
So I got to the top of Suikerbossie 'slightly' fresher than my fellow competitors.
So I tucked into my trusted aerodynamic position and flew down the Llandudno hill. When I turned a corner near the bottom, I was going at about 80km/h when a serious gust of wind stopped me almost dead in my tracks. The sudden deceleration was unexpected and from that point I had to pedal hard to get my cycle further down the hill. Since the wind generally blew from a South Easterly direction and should have been between my shoulder blades at that point, this sudden change had me fluxomed.
I consoled myself that after passing the Twelve Apostles Hotel, I would only have Bakoven, Camps Bay, Clifton and Bantry Bay to conquer (all relatively flat roads) before entering Sea Point and the Beach Road Boulevard wherein I would find the finishing line. There was the little hill from Camps Bay to Bantry Bay but it was short and not too steep comparatively speaking.It was at this point that I was caught by a lady cyclist dressed in all pink, including her cycle. She actually passed and ended Die Burger ahead of moi. So my red blood cells staged a mutiny and kicked up such a ruckus that I had no option but to compete with the Pink Lady and beat her to the finish line. It felt great to gain control of a fullblown red bloodcell mutiny. They were worse than COSATU mixed with RED ANTS but they peacefully retreated to their normal job stations once I was safely ahead of and beating Pink Lady.
So it was that I finished the really windy 2010 Cape Argus in 4:25 plus some odd seconds. This is not a time to be overly proud of but in such Windy conditions many backmarkers like myself finished 30min to 1 hour off their PBs.
Oh I forgot about the portaloos that were blown over at the start of the race, apparently with an unfortunate person sitting on the throne. I was not anywhere close to those portaloos either at the start or the finish line. That was what the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront was there for.
Many other smaller incident happened to me along the 109 km race but we'll peruse them at another time and perhaps in another post. The 2010 Cape Argus was my last competitive cycling race. Reason? Cape drivers have great trouble to respect any vehicle smaller than theirs on the road and winters in the Cape are dark and wet, so outdoors training became impossible.
Indoors training became difficult as well when I chaffed all the skin off my inner thighs on one of the gym cycles. Raw chaffed meat between one's legs does not make for pleasant walking never mind cycling of any sort.
Cycling is indeed a different form of transport and one feels it by the seat of your pants. I felt like Kamau after his supposed circumcision operation. I'll re-tell the story of Kamau another time. Just remember a formerly sprightly Kenyan chap.
Schlaf gut meine Freunde,
Guten tage,
I noticed an uptick in readership from der Kaizer's home state ;-)!
Stand still Sabre, you master needs to fall on you again (twice).
I am only now keeping a promise made about 4 posts ago, that of telling you about the Argus Cycle Tour if the pages vs postings thing does not work out. Another promise about a 39plus-hour trip from Bali is also still outstanding.
It did not work out but my head was in Paris. Now, by bringing you this long promised post, I'm breaking another i.e. to bring you Paris 4 but that one will come too!!! Note, I did not say: "I promise" :-). Sure Paris 4 is full of trials and tribulations but it represents a conclusion with the bitter-sweet tang of saying goodbye to a friend.
Back to matters at hand.
The 2009 Argus Cycle Tour is widely acknowledged to have been the windiest Argus ever. I rode the Argus in 2010 and I wish to disagree. I take issue with the 2009 description on the basis of the winning time of the women's race. The winning time of the womens race in 2010 was slower than that of 2009 over the same route and distance and, in my opinion, this can only be because the wind was worse in 2010. Now I am not an Argus expert, so don't take my word for it!!!
I only partook in only one Argus Tour (in 2010) and the run-up to the race is rather extensive and I hope not to bore you with all the happenings. Some however must be told to give you a clear picture of my other form of travel, cycling.
 |
| Off toTraining |
I started cycling to work mainly to establish control over my petrol budget while I was at my previous place of employ. I then ended up with work place friends who were staunch cyclists, one of them was about o complete his 20th Argus Tour. You get a special shirt for each deca you complete I think, so after 10 you receive a privilege of keeping your number and a special colour shirt. After 20 completions, there are more privileges and colour shirts and so on. Now this special gentleman clearly saw either some cycling potential in me or thought me an easily influenced sucker! Either way, like most people, I did not mind the encouragement, tips and attention.
I trained for a period and entered a pre-qualifying event called Die Burger. You need to pre-qualify to get a good Argus seeding and earlier start time and group. This will mean you do not get bogged down amongst the slow crowds but rather cycle with people of your own ability - THAT'S THE THEORY ANYWAY!!!
I did a reasonable time in "Die Burger" race, something in the order of 3 hours and a bit minutes. This got me a seeding that started before 08:00 in the morning. The "Burger" was also my first organised cycle race ever, not counting the 'races' we had going home in primary school. This, a few months before my 51 birthday, sounded rather ambitious. Unlike Willie Wikkelspier (for non-South Africans, that is William Shakespeare)'s Marc Anthony, I did not plan to pontificate on "ambition".
 |
| Starting Training Downhill on the yellow 'downhill demon' =Great!Returning home = Not So! |
I had bought myself this weird cheap road bike a few months before. For some reason, the bike felt super-quick going downhill while it had serious issues going uphill. The Argus, being a hilly race, therefore caused me some trepidation! I have a hill called the Helshoogte (Height of Hell or Hellish Heights if you prefer) next to where I live but its profile was not ideal for the Argus or so I was told, so I hardly cycled up there. I preferred to drive to Somerset West and trained up a hill called Spook (Ghost) hill in the instilled belief that it had a better Argus profile. The other reason for training there is that there I found some mates to train with whereas in Stellenbosch, I did not have those privileges!
Training long distances or hard sectors by oneself is not to be recommended!!
The longest distance I put in in training for the 109 km Argus was 70 km a pop for a few weekend mornings. This in contrast to what I heard some Capetonians were doing, six easy hours in the saddle on one weekend morning followed by a hard hour the same afternoon. According to seasoned cyclists they were doing real training. With the dubious benefit of my lack of experience, I thought they were seriously over-training.
Sometimes we would have a longer training run from Somerset West to Rooi-Els, a favourite cyclist training route. It was here that I had a rear- wheel puncture while flying downhill on the downhill demon. I nearly came to grief because the control required on those skinny road wheels is something to behold. Luckily, I was in the Somerset West training group, experienced cyclists, who fixed the puncture in record time and with no fuss!
At the time I was chasing one of two lasses who had smoked me going up the same hill earlier. Being smoked going uphill is embarrasing enough but downhill??? I noticed they were wearing national colours but thought it was fake at the time, NdiIndoda mna!! (IsiXhosa for "I'm a man!!").
Once I went up and down Helshoogte in training and, while going up, I made a mental note of big manhole cover on the opposite side of the road. On the way back I was again flying downhill on my super downhill cycle when I neared the position of the previously noted manhole cover. I became very alert and managed to see and miss the manhole cover but I hit a cat's eye in the road and had an immediate blowout on my front wheel. I forgot to mention that while my cycle was really fast downhill it was also very twitchy!!. When the blowout happened, I learned the true meaning of twitchiness. The front wheel wobbled and threatened my immediate acquaintance with Mr McAdam's legacy. This was no fun at a speed close to 85 km/h. I managed to stay on the bucking bronco for long enough to shake hands with the road on my own terms and at a more civilised speed of about 3 km/h. After repairing the puncture using my onroad repair kit, I resolved to buy a cycle with more front-end stability. That is why you'll see pics of me training on a bright yellow cycle while I competed in a more stable purple piper in the Argus. The yellow blighter was the unstable downhill demon!!
My Good Wife (she was good then already), probably thought I had gone off my rocker what with all the training and special diet and stuff. Having been married to me for a good number of years already (32 years on the 1st of the 5th Month this year), I suspected that she probably knew I've been off my rocker for considerably long time.
You see, she's a social work professional and they are trained to pick up these things as a matter of course.
She said nothing seriously contrary however and I was further encouraged in my ways by this because she can get rather serious with sanctions should she become convinced of untimely contrary behaviour on my part! Here I mean stuff that can dislocate my favorite right wrist (I'm reasonably ambidextrous but it does not pay to have both wrists out of action, does it?) and that, for a squash player, is serious stuff!!!
When I rode in Die Burger, I had serious trouble with the downhill demon getting up a hill with a rather stiff gradient, but I made it without getting off the cycle. I then noticed on the other side of the hill the gradient was as steep going down towards Malmesbury. Before the race I was told by experienced cyclists that a single cyclist cannot catch a bunch going downhill. I saw there was a bunch a hundred or so metres ahead of me when I decided to test this assumption.
Now previously, I mentioned that my bike was strangely fast downhill and not so uphill. I think most cyclists simply thought that I'm too lazy to put in enough effort. Not so. I always felt I was putting in more effort than my training partners on the uphills and far less on the downhills.
I decided not to pedal going down that hill and simply assumed what I presumed was an aerodynamic position. So I just sat there, flew downhill, gained on and passed the bunch. This was apparently unnatural and many in the bunch assumed I pedalled hard to latch on and then simply used their wind breaking formation to pass them but that was not true. I did not pedal at all, my super cycle was simply too fast downhill!. I think it had to do with my physique and the fact that the cycle was probably a bit small for my frame, so most of my weight settled itself ahead of the centre of gravity of the cycle. That, to my mind would easily and scientifically explain the uphill struggles as well.
I visited the race exhibition show the day before the race, got my number and all my goodies sorted out. So we were ready for battle on the morning of the race. My whole family came to enjoy themselves at my expense. I could see in their eyes they thought the old man was going to make a fool of himself and they, under embarassing glares of strangers, were then to be called upon to 'rescue' the old monkey - my deliverers! The evnt would probably have been announced over the public address system and I could already see the shame in their eyes as they had to publicly identify themselves as family of the unfortunate, silly old monkey. These thoughts may not have been in my family's minds but they served to keep me motivated as I pedalled up the Suikerbossie (Sugar bush) hill, supposedly the final bone breaker.
 |
| Going over the top of Suikerbossie with Hout Bay in the background |
So I got to the top of Suikerbossie 'slightly' fresher than my fellow competitors.
So I tucked into my trusted aerodynamic position and flew down the Llandudno hill. When I turned a corner near the bottom, I was going at about 80km/h when a serious gust of wind stopped me almost dead in my tracks. The sudden deceleration was unexpected and from that point I had to pedal hard to get my cycle further down the hill. Since the wind generally blew from a South Easterly direction and should have been between my shoulder blades at that point, this sudden change had me fluxomed.
I consoled myself that after passing the Twelve Apostles Hotel, I would only have Bakoven, Camps Bay, Clifton and Bantry Bay to conquer (all relatively flat roads) before entering Sea Point and the Beach Road Boulevard wherein I would find the finishing line. There was the little hill from Camps Bay to Bantry Bay but it was short and not too steep comparatively speaking.It was at this point that I was caught by a lady cyclist dressed in all pink, including her cycle. She actually passed and ended Die Burger ahead of moi. So my red blood cells staged a mutiny and kicked up such a ruckus that I had no option but to compete with the Pink Lady and beat her to the finish line. It felt great to gain control of a fullblown red bloodcell mutiny. They were worse than COSATU mixed with RED ANTS but they peacefully retreated to their normal job stations once I was safely ahead of and beating Pink Lady.
So it was that I finished the really windy 2010 Cape Argus in 4:25 plus some odd seconds. This is not a time to be overly proud of but in such Windy conditions many backmarkers like myself finished 30min to 1 hour off their PBs.
Oh I forgot about the portaloos that were blown over at the start of the race, apparently with an unfortunate person sitting on the throne. I was not anywhere close to those portaloos either at the start or the finish line. That was what the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront was there for.
Many other smaller incident happened to me along the 109 km race but we'll peruse them at another time and perhaps in another post. The 2010 Cape Argus was my last competitive cycling race. Reason? Cape drivers have great trouble to respect any vehicle smaller than theirs on the road and winters in the Cape are dark and wet, so outdoors training became impossible.
Indoors training became difficult as well when I chaffed all the skin off my inner thighs on one of the gym cycles. Raw chaffed meat between one's legs does not make for pleasant walking never mind cycling of any sort.
Cycling is indeed a different form of transport and one feels it by the seat of your pants. I felt like Kamau after his supposed circumcision operation. I'll re-tell the story of Kamau another time. Just remember a formerly sprightly Kenyan chap.
Schlaf gut meine Freunde,
Guten tage,
I noticed an uptick in readership from der Kaizer's home state ;-)!
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