Horses for courses |

Horses for courses, this course didn’t feel like mine. The South African Marathon Championships took place over a brutal 95km and 3300m of vertical ascent over the last weekend. I’ve just realised that this is about the 5^th time I’ve described the course as brutal in different manners, tells you something doesn’t it. The race would also be a dress rehearsal of sorts for the upcoming UCI World Marathon Championships later in the month and hence would give us an important look at the terrain we would encounter.

With so much climbing and an especially difficult final 21km loop, it would be important to spend your pennies wisely. With this in mind I started in a more conservative fashion than usual.

With the race passing through my parents farm I took the opportunity to promote ASS MAGIC, if you raced you may have noticed the Warthog’s ASS?

Expert feeding by my Mom 🙂

Image Credit: Alison Wakelin

Long day.

Image credit: QuickPix

Image Credit: Boogs Photography

Image credit: Alison Wakelin

Thinking back on the race there is not much more to write about, that would not otherwise bore you, so enjoy a couple more images than usual. Perhaps they will give you an inkling as to what it was like.

In a nutshell there was a lot of climbing, it was steep, there wasn’t much place to recover and the downhills were quite technical, again not allowing much respite. I’m happy with how I managed to ride on the day, equipment was good and I had a fantastic back up team with my Mom, Alison and Rob. In looking at where improvements could be made, pre-race there were elements that could be improved, sometimes things beyond control happen and you just need to roll with the punches and learn from your mistakes.

I did manage to have a good look at the world’s course; the nightmares that may result may not be such a good thing, but ultimately it allows a smarter race to be ridden in 3 weeks.