THE VAMPIRE RIDER

There’s early; there’s extremely early; and then there’s Neville Cragg early. (You could say he wakes up at the Cragg of dawn.) He gets up in the dark – and sometimes comes back after a three- hour ride, and it’s still dark.

“I have a job and a family; and if I want to see my kids in the evening, riding at night is not an option,” says Cragg, who is a competitive cyclist and a prolific Instagrammer (@bikemob_ sa).

Cragg first started riding as late as 6.30am. Then, as he needed to do longer and longer training rides, he started riding earlier – 6am, then 5.30, then 5. Now, his normal ride time (and ‘normal’ is a relative term) is 4.30am, with more than the occasional 3.15am start.

“If I ride at 3.15am I can do a 100km ride, come home and shower, and still take the kids to school,” he says, reasonably.

According to Cragg, the only negative about pre- dawn riding is that it’s not necessarily safe to ride alone, and thus he depends on other people being available at an ungodly hour. However, he adds, it’s amazing how many people do ride that early.

“We have various meeting points, and pick up different crews along the route – by the time we’re all rolling, we have a decent- sized bunch.

“The benefits of dawn- patrol rides are significant. The wind is quieter in the morning – Cape Town mostly only gets blowing in the afternoon. And there are hardly any cars. Traffic is manic in daylight hours, and motorists get increasingly irate with cyclists; but in the early morning, because there are virtually no cars on the road, we can have a continuous tempo ride – which is much more productive, training- wise, than a stop- start ride in traffic.”

However, the cars that are on the road early are more likely to speed; on the other hand, cyclists have the benefit of being lit up by their headlights, which makes them much more noticeable. In daylight, cyclists tend to blend into the background.

Most people doing a 100km ride before 7am would need an afternoon nap, but Cragg doesn’t slump in the afternoons.

“I drink lots of coffee!” he says. “Seriously though, I’ve been doing this for seven years, so I’m used to it. But I’m also in bed at 9pm every night.”

Cragg has two fast road rides, one easy road ride and one or two MTB rides a week. He often rides a reverse- Argus route, and depending on the time of the year, he gets to see spectacular sunrises on Chapman’s Peak.

“People who ride at that time appreciate the beauty of our city,” he says.