VWCA Champs
A nice fun event this one… Day 1 is a 24km time-trial, on a not completely flat course, day 2 is an 80km road race.
24kms is a bit short for a training day, so I rode to the start and back. Not being a time-triallist (by a long shot), and not having done a TT for about 12 years, I wasn’t expecting too much. I managed to get a good steady effort going and came in 4th, a long way behind Robby, but only 1:10 off Francois, which I didn’t think was too bad! Unfortunately not much other competition - none of the Virgin Active guys were here.
The road race was a lot of fun. We had 5 BikeMax team members, and no other teams present, the only real competitors being Brian Ireland and Robbie Setton, and they were rather outnumbered. So we set a steady hard tempo from the start to shed all of the wannabes, ending up with a group of about 10. Coming back over the Paardeberg rollers I started putting in some attacks. Brian was watching Francois (who was just ahead of him in the points), so off I went, to be joined by Robby (thank God! I wouldn’t have managed on my own!). And we rode alone for the next 40 minutes to finish with 6 minutes on the bunch. Robby did at least 3/4s of the work and my legs were pretty poked by the end of it. Just to make sure that I got the necessary points, Robby set me up for the win.
Which meant that Robby got 1st for VWCA champs, I got 2nd, and Francois beat Brian in the sprint for 3rd, so he got 3rd overall. BikeMax 1-2-3! Admittedly against not a full complement of opposition, but we’ll take any glory we can get :)!
Thanks to Attie and the rest of the VWCA team for putting on a great series and a great finale.