The Cape Epic: My week pretending to be a pro biker

Rock Bottom

"I think this is the stupidest thing you've ever done," my wife says to me on the telephone. I am in full agreement.

It is the end of the fourth day of the Cape Epic. I am supposed to be happy. After all, M and I have just completed another day of this grueling, eight-day mountain bike race, in our best time so far: seven hours and thirty minutes. For the first time since the beginning of the race, I have had time to handwash my cycling clothes, and even stroll into the middle of nowhere desert town we are passing through. We have completed almost 500km out of 890km, and the worst days are behind us.

I should be happy, but I am downright miserable. The places I would rather be (which I have just enumerated to my wife in great detail) include:

• At work, in a tedious afternoon meeting.
• Naked in a winter snowstorm.
• In bed with e.coli poisoning.

In short, anywhere but here. Things on my little bike race are not going so well. The thought of getting back on my bike and riding another 115km tomorrow is utterly depressing.

My problems are not exclusively psychological. My palms are quite literally blue with bruises from being pounded by the rocky descents of the Little Karoo. My cheap ($800) hard-tail mountain bike has fed the full impact of every little desert stone into my hands and back, and I now dread the downhills much more than the climbs. My toes are numb from the loss of circulation caused by my Time pedals and too small bicycle shoes. Worst of all are the growing saddle sores which make each pedal stroke painful, and for which I will have to endure the humiliation of standing in the Medi-Clinic "bum line", to have my male nurse Randall apply protective tape. Finishing this stupid race cannot possibly be worth this.

The shower truck is broken, but at the edge of our tent town (in a grassy and shit-filled cow pasture), cyclists are washing themselves in the sprinkler irrigation system that borders the highway. The men are stark naked and without modesty, their dark pelvic regions standing out even from two hundred metres away. The women in their midst have kept on their bikinis, but are undisturbed by the male nudity all around them. I, on the other hand, find it all severely disturbing. It is strange to think that I am here by choice.

Today was our Recovery Day, after the toughest three days in Cape Epic history. The Recovery Day, in Cape Epic terms, is 120km with 1200m of accumulated vertical - still longer than any mountain bike ride either of us had ever done before entering this race. Our's began badly, as M's rear tire rapidly deflated in the starting gate. The culprit can only have been a thorn picked up on our way to the start line - carefully removed from somebody else's tire last night, and then carelessly chucked into the middle of the tent town.

Nervous and jittery, it takes us an inexcusable ten minutes or longer to change the tube, by which time the peloton is long gone, not to mention the Medi-Clinic "sweep" vehicle, and the volunteer crew that takes down the race direction signs after the last rider - there will be no directions left for us. We speed into town, but of course the race is nowhere in sight. Trying to maintain tempo, we desperately shout at the elderly white folk standing on the street corners, "Which way is the race, where did the cyclists go??" They wave us on with half hearted and unconvincing gestures. Fifteen minutes of furious pedaling and we have not seen another cyclist.

As any road cyclist will tell you, the nature of drafting makes it extremely difficult for a pair of cyclists to catch up to a large group - especially an inexperienced and untrained pair of cyclists like ourselves, who finish 450th out of 500 on a good day. Our only indications of where to turn are the vague clouds of dust in the distance and the race helicopter which is tracking the pros. They are already so far ahead of us that the helicopter is partially obscured by the curvature of the Earth.

After thirty minutes, we finally catch the sweep vehicles, which have stopped for a team with mechanical difficulties, and after another thirty, we have caught up to a small group of laggers. But in this first hour, we have used what feels like a full day's worth of energy, and have pretty much destroyed any possibility of this actually being a recovery day. It gets worse from there, with sandy jeep tracks and desert heat sapping what little motivation we have left. Only the watering points make it bearable, because from each it is only 30km to the next. And even at the edge of despair, one can be convinced to ride 30km to the next water hole and defer the decision to quit by one or two more hours.

next: A few inches from rock bottom