South African National – Pietermaritzburg, South Africa

A drive to Heathrow marks the start of my long haul travelling for this season. This year’s world cup series visits South Africa for the first time since 1998 and for me it is my first ever trip to Africa. It’s always great to visit a new place and especially and very different culture. After a fairly hassle free trip I arrived into Durban, to meet up with my entire new team, some I was meeting for the first time. We have a team of 6 riders and 5 staff so it’s a big squad to move around, but we were quickly on our way to Pietermaritzburg.

We have taken over an entire house for our 2 week stay which is absolutely ideal for relaxing and getting the bikes all set up. We had a few days to train and get used to the heat and humidity before our warm up race at the South African national. The national was held on the same track as the world cup will be next week, so it was a great opportunity to get a good look at the course. It’s a long track with some steep technical sections at the start and then it levels out and becomes a very hard pedalling session for most of the rest of the track. It’s high speed with loads of jumps and requires some great stamina and fitness. The whole track is on clay and when it rained, it was almost impossible to stay on your bike as it was so slippery ! Luckily it was dry for the race, I just hope it’s as dry next weekend !!

There were quite a few of the International riders taking advantage of this warm up race, so I had about half of the women’s top 10 field to compete against. I was surprised how hard the track was to race as there is such a long pedalling straight that I had a few sketchy moments in my run, but managed to keep it together to take first place in the first run ahead of Clare Buchar of Canada. I went a fraction of a second faster in my second run, but the positions did not change. I took the win ahead of Clare and Emmeline Ragot of France. I was satisfied with my ride and now have a few more days of practice to try and improve on some sections. Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the race, but I do have some of the local wildlife I visited in a nearby game reserve, it was great to see these animals in real life and not at a zoo!! I also dropped in to the local mtb legend, Greg Minnaar’s shop, which was cool to see as he has all his trophy’s and old bikes on display.

So now it’s a few days off before the World Cup rolls into town this weekend for the main race.