The 94.7 race in Johannesburg has almost no horizontal cycling. You're either climbing or descending virtually all of the time. Hence my KCal is comfortably over 3000 for only 90something kilometres. In all, the cyclists ascend a total of 1.3 vertical kilometres. Um....that is a lot.
Although my brother, Alex borther, Helmut, basically everyone kicked (cycling) dust in my face, I'm pretty content with my performance. I trained Friday and Saturday and so started today with very tired legs. I was in C bunch and immediately lost touch with them. That alone showed me how exhausted I was. Another indication: my maximum heart rate never went above 164. That doesn't mean I didn't work hard; it just means my legs were tired for the engine to really get going. Average HR 152.
The weather was good, warm and windy but could have been rainy and blustery. Once again, I was shocked by the constant climbing. This is a race much harder than the Argus. The corwd support was magnificent, lots of colorful people along the way, also lots of poppies shaking pompoms.
What made the ride excruciating was at the finish I went to the Standard Bank marquee - I can get a free massage, food etc. since I'm a member - but Alex wasn't there, so I decided to go home. The Start and Finish were not in the same place, and since I'd parked 1km from the start, I had to work my way a layrinth of highways, trying to figure out on which road I'd parked. It took 45 minutes! And as it turned out, I went searching quite far away when I'd parked just around the corner. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Other news is that I didn't ride with my Zipps, in part because we discovered a fracture on the rim, and it's enough damage to make riding the wheel a bit iffy. A new rim costs R4000. YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! After hearing about that on Saturday I didn't have a very short, buyt very wonderful cry; no, I had a short, but very rivetting nightmare during my afternoon nap instead: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK.
Had lunch with Alex after the ride, and later saw my brother and his gf. It's been a very hard but picturesque day. All that remains is to zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Oh my overall time was 3:00:50
Average speed: 30.9km/h.
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