It had all happened just a bit quick, all the stuff and others and fretting. Nothing much more I could do now but to experience the ride.
The Safcol forest road heading towards Arabella not far from the start is very familiar to me, I have done a ton of testing there on my suspension. I realised as we headed onto the dirt that although I had ridden the Mitas E09 rear before, I had never ridden the Mitas C23 that I had on the front. So I was feeling out the front and how it rode, I have experienced that Mitas tires are pretty pressure sensitive to me, so had I got the pressure right? I kept the front just under 2 bar and the rear at 1.7. Also, I was wondering if 2 more clicks on compression up front would be a good idea. There’s an off camber steep downhill with slippery gravel that nearly caught me out. In feeling out the front I was hoofing along and riding aggressively and was close to going farming not 10k’s into a 2000k jaunt!
Rudi took a really meek little tumble whilst Mark Driver and I were behind him. As I helped him pick his bike up he looked a little spooked so I had a few “gentle words of calmness” to him. Actually, I know him pretty well and have ridden with him a lot, he’s normally quite fun and calm, but the fall and struggle to pick his bike up made him seem to me to be less calm that usual. On reflection as I was riding along, I was hoping that I hadn’t been too blunt in my encouragement to get his mind back into the game.
I really struggled to stick to the speed limits. I found myself playing the game of sitting right on the edge of the limit not as shown by the bike but by the GPS, so there was no margin for error. Also, my trip meters were in the beginning very out; it seemed as if for every 10k’s that I rode, the trip meter was 1km out. This could be a serious issue. I was not using an ICO but my bikes standard ones and it is not finely configurable to sort this out. But as I rode on they seemed to get more accurate.
Tricky nav section
Rudi and I rode a lot of the stage together and arrived at the pont just behind the front runners. He made some good navigational decisions that saved me a bit of time because I would have taken some turns that I shouldn’t have. It was good to see the guys had been having fun but there was also a seriousness and maybe a little anticipation for what lay ahead. It was also clear that this wasn’t a normal tour type spirit, this was a bit more serious.
Just after the pont, though I headed off first, I stopped to put on my MTB rain jacket, it pissed down just before Heidelberg but the roads were fine to ride, no mud thankfully.
I made a few errors on the liaison and if they were not from just not paying attention, they were mostly a combination of my trips being slightly off, or worse, them being right but me not believing them. In Heidelberg I filled up, put more fluid in my rear brake and had a banana. I had arrived there as the front runners were halfway filled so thought I had a bit of time to do the body and bike maintenance, sadly I also took a small loop around Heidelberg too as a navigation error, all this cost me 20 minutes in total for the stop.
I have been up the Gysmanshoek pass once before and remember having fun up it then. I was now suffering from a bit of anxiousness about losing so much time in Heidelberg. The speed limit up there is 100kph which I don’t think in many places is possible but I was having fun trying. After not riding for so long I was a bit rusty. It was great to get some groove going. There is a joy for me when a corner is ridden as fast as possible. I love charging up to the corner, climbing on to the front hard to just below traction loss to load it up, whilst banging down 2 gears and dragging the rear brake until just before tip in, then using the engine braking to still slow and bring the back around a bit to get the pointing angle right, then keeping the angle with the throttle and counter steering through. Gysmanshoek pass was an orgy of corners that had me wooping.
Going up the pass I saw no dust up ahead but just over the pass I had caught up to 4 of the Rudi gang who had been 15 minutes ahead. I knew I had been flying up there.
I made a good 8 minute blups just off a tar road and then just before Lainsberg I had to take a 8 minutes shit in the bush, (who would have thought the length of time shitting would have become important?)
Some thought has to be given to where a bossie is taken in order to squeeze the most out of the view…
It had been a long day and the race hadn’t even started yet. In total going by my gps tracks, I had covered 447k’s in 6:12 and had lost, including all stops for having a piss, adjusting ear buds and cleaning visors and getting lost, about 36 minutes. I had made up a lot of time trying to keep at the GPS speed limit and had ridden very aggressively in the technical places.
At Laingsburg whilst filling up I posted that the start was a km away, checked everything and then headed off for the start.
My start time was supposed to have been 11.08. I took off at 11:51. I don’t see how the 5:36 minutes was possible, without getting lost or stopping, it would have been a close thing to make the start. I wasn’t that stressed as I knew the leaders where not that much up the road and would have also had a similar penalty as me.
The real Amageza was about to begin.
Topic: Kakamas you say? Amageza 2013 (Read 17044 times)
