Yesterday I competed in the Carnival City Cycle Race, a 100km fairly flat and quite fast race, the last major race for me before the Cape Argus Cycle Tour in two weeks’ time.
I had a seeding for the A-bunch, but again opted to rather start in the B-bunch. Things got underway and even though the speed was quite decent for the first half of the race – we averaged just over 40 km/h – the bunch seemed to lack some “punch”, with no-one really taking up the challenge and up’ing the pace at the front. I even went up to the lead and assisted in pulling the paceline along, but things never really became heated.
Things were fairly uneventful for thefirst 65km, but at this point the guys slowly started to pick up the pace, with the climbs – even though there weren’t any steep climbs, just some long drags – becoming visibly tougher.
At the 85km mark our route merged with the 65km route, which caused a lot of havoc. All the slow 65km riders blocked our path a lot and this caused a lot of swearing and shouting from within the bunch. When moving along at about 40km/h, it’s quite difficult to get around slow riders doing about 20km/h when you’re a big bunch, over a 100 strong!
As we approached the final 1000m, everyone lined up for the sprint, and with about 500m to go, I was sitting in the leading 20 or so riders. But with the hammer down, everyone sprinting like crazy, things went horribly wrong with about 50m to go! A big crash right in front of me took out about 6 or 7 riders and I had to brake hard and swerve between some traffic cones to avoid becoming part of the pile-up!
This crash caused some problems for all of us, sprinting for the finish, but all things considered, I’m quite happy with my 36th place (amongst the B-bunch finishers of 137 riders). Finish time was 2h39 at an average of 37.2 km/h, a slightly lower average than last week’s Ride For Sight race. This time was nealry 6 minutes better than my previous best on this race though, so I’m quite happy with the result.
This week’s training will continue as normal, but next week Wednesday we’ll be travelling down to Cape Town, so next week’s training will be heavily interrupted by the travelling. A few tapering rides will make out next week’s training/preparation sessions. Then, hopefully, I’ll be ready for the big day!
Happy cycling, and good luck to all other Argus competitors!
Tags: Carnival City, Cycle Race Result, MacSteel
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