Nedbank Sani2C 1: this time it’s about bicycles

The cycling gods have not been smiling upon me. And it turns out my teammate has a knife.

I’ll leave the knife bit until last and kick off with my tragic loss of my quality Italian lycra. Right. So up until last week, my training for my inaugural multi-stage mountainbike race was going rather well. I was, as they say, well chuffed. Things have changed…

For the preceeding 3 months I had mastered what’s regarded in mountainbiking circles as an utterly daft bicycle. My Cotic Simple… here it is…

… is the anti-thesis of the what the modern mountainbike is supposed to be. It’s mostly defined by what it is not. It is not, for example, made of carbon-fibre. It’s made of steel. It doesn’t have 21 gears. It has one. It doesn’t have a rear suspension – hell, it doesn’t even have a front suspension. Nope it’s a rigid-forked bastion of all things old skool. Interestingly, just like me .

All in all it’s a very cool bike in a niched and, dare I say it, hipster kind of way. It’s the kind of bike that requires one to wear cycling clothing made of merino wool and one of those little cycling caps with the small peaks that flip upwards. All of which I have.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a thoroughly modern machine – a 10.5kg wonder of modern geometry, 29er wheels, and disc brakes all held together by the kind of bespoke mastercraftsman welding we barista-brewed, coffee-quaffing cyclo-snobs worship.

There’s an added benefit too. The satisfaction. There’s nothing quite like dropping your training partners and their R50 000 carbon-fibre dual-sussers on the way up the steepest climb.  Like this...

But enough smugness.  As I said it was all going well until the Sunday before last. Then I crashed.

Within the last 5 km of our weekly 85km training ride, on the scenic ocean-side road between Llandudno and Camps Bay, our little peloton managed to trip over itself. Three of us went down pretty hard. Ricky was the most serious. His wrist looked like it was broken and his stomach pain turned out to be some concerning internal bleeding. Mike’s fall looked the most serious – as I hit the ground I remember him cartwheeling over all of us – but he was relatively unscathed. I was somewhere in the middle. Once the initial shock of seeing the very expensive Italian lycra I had purchased only days earlier flapping in the wind, I began to feel my knee.  Okay, first I felt this…

… and then this…

…and then the bit on my arse which you don’t want to see, trust me.

For the next few days I suspected serious knee tendon damage. It looked like my Nedbank Sani2C aspirations were finished. All the months of training, the help from our sponsors, Oakley, Isostar and African Nature Company, would all come to nought.

But no.

Thanks to the outright wizadry of my physio/doctor Lawrence Van Lingen, what was just a badly bruised tendon was nursed back to health. I had my last treatment yesterday afternoon. Looked like I was good to go...

Then my Sabi2C race partner and teammate Matthew do Jongh slashed my tyre. It’s a long story. “Unpacking your bike… something something… bubble wrap something something… Stanley knife… something… cut the sidewall ‘by mistake’ something something”.

During Sani I’ll be spending two nights in a small tent with Matt. It’s going to be  long race. And it starts on Thursday. I'll keep you posted. Hopefully.