Cycle Tour the best reason to ride a bike

FOR THE first time in 15 years of riding the Cape Town Cycle Tour, I nearly gave up before I began. Yesterday morning, for the first time, the 109km around the Cape seemed an awful long way away, and I wasn’t sure I felt up to it.

It had been a hard week, of hospital emergency rooms and illness, and very little riding and in the months leading up to yesterday, very little training.

I sought a reason to ride. I remembered my first Cycle Tour in 2000, ridden on a French mountain bike called a Sunn. I had damaged the ligaments in my right ankle playing indoor football two nights before. It was black and swollen. I strapped it up. I was using clipless pedals for the first time ever.

I crashed before the start. Then I got into the wrong group. As we waited to start, my cleat snapped off and got stuck in my pedal, meaning I would have to ride the race pedalling gingerly. I punctured after 7km. It was near on five hours of hell.

I broke four hours the next year over the tougher DeTour route, still riding the Sunn. I bought a bright yellow Trek, second-hand from my local bike shop. I went a little bit quicker. I remember riding up Ou Kaapseweg one year and seeing a sign that said “When the going gets tough, the tough turn to Jesus”.

I turned to my right and asked the guy next to me if he was Jesus. He wasn’t. He was Werner, I think. Or a Gert. He was feeling about as tough as I was, which was about as tough as a tissue.

I wrote more about cycling, got to understand the sport as a passenger in team cars during the Giro del Capo.

Kandice Buys, now married to Jaco Venter of Team Dimension Data, always made room for me in the team cars she piloted.

One year I rode in the Team Microsoft car in a squad that included Doug Ryder, who even then was dreaming of bigger things. I got to learn how to draft and conserve energy, and how to climb out of the saddle and when to sit from watching those pros.

I trained a lot less than I should have. I never got close to the magical sub-three-hour barrier.

In 2007, I crossed the line to break three hours and 30 minutes. As I crossed the line, Jon Gericke of SAfm stopped me for a chat about the ride. As we talked I saw a marshal frantically waving at me. The timing mats were a little further down the road. I hadn’t broken 3.30. I had missed it by a minute and some change with a 3:31.44 because I had stopped to talk. Gericke never used the interview on air.

I rode the windy tour of 2009, making the mistake of using deepsection wheels on the Bianchi I had bought from Team Barloworld. It was a rocky ride, to say the least.

As I came over the top of Suikerbossie the wind took me and pushed me, bike and all into the barriers on the left-hand side of the road. The wind gusseted and blasted us on that last 20km into town, bouncing off the mountain and almost stopping us dead in our tracks on a downhill.

Yesterday morning I remembered the fun and weirdness of the Tour. Of the lady who was dressed in a G-string and a shawl, who would flash cyclists as we rode past her just before Champman’s.

Last year, when the race was shortened, we arranged for Forrie’s to be open early in Newlands. I stopped on the way back on the 47km route and had a few beers with Mike Finch of Bicycling who started later than me. It took over four hours to ride those 47km, but they were the best four hours.

I missed a few races, in 2006, when in Melbourne at the Commonwealth Games, and in 2011 for the Cricket World Cup. And I have a missing completion in 2004 when my timing chip fell off.

I remembered all this and got out of bed yesterday morning. Hell, yes, I was going to ride. It was the Cape Town Cycle Tour. There are few better reasons to ride a bike.