Rappel : Pendant la durée de la Cape Epic, deux de nos trois partenaires principaux étant étrangers (American Classic et KMC), le blog sera en anglais, vous pouvez cependant nous suivre en français en utilisant Google translate, les traductions ne sont jamais parfaites mais vous aurez je pense le plus important. Pour traduire en français l’article ci-dessous, cliquez ici.
At Cape Epic, you definitely never know what the next day has in stock for you… we finished well yesterday and could have expected a nice 75km « single-tracky » day today… Unfortunately what was a little pain in Jeff’s right calf yesterday climbed up the back of his knee during the night and he pretty much couldn’t walk when he woke up this morning. He was quite nervous at the start and you can understand why, 75km is a short stage at Cape Epic but it’s also a very long distance when one of your leg is wrong.
So our day was mostly damage control. Actually Jeff being the dog he is kind of raced it for a while in between km10 and km30 and even though I knew he shouldn’t you also have to accept your partner’s temper and I knew I was better off saying nothing for now. Then of course pain got back to him and his left leg was tired for working twice as hard to compensate for the other. From there we did what we could to finish and I actually got myself pretty tired from pushing Jeff as much as I could, now I’m the one who needs a massage 😉 , that’s the team spirit !!! Even though we could have done much better today, we didn’t loose too much time and actually got one position up in GC (now in 37th after finishing 44th in that stage). What was most enjoyable today were the singletracks, they were awsome, some of them even have little names like « rodeo » or « rollercoster », some would go just down, so were ups and downs and they were all quite different : sandy pine forest, low vegetation rocky ones and so on. Wooooh this day was worth the trip and the efforts to get up to that point in the race !
Now Jeff went to the medical service of the race and they took good care of him with tape + ice + allowed anti-inflammatory. We hope he feels less pain tomorrow for a tough stage with 3000m of climbing and a finish line in Stellenbosch, the town where many top euro mountain bikers spend their winters in !
We’ll definitely let you know how it goes, and if it all goes well I guess we will make it to the final finish line with a short stage sunday… fingers crossed !
STATISTICS :
– Jeff’s TrainingPeaks curve + map
– Pyf’s TrainingPeaks curve + map
Picture of the day… one of Jeff, finally ! Not that I did not want to show the guy, we just didn’t get a picture of him until now !
Pierre-Yves Facomprez - Sportif passionné 