Cowan House 40km Mtb

Arrived at the race to find very cold and very windy conditions. The wind was the main chill factor as the wind was coming off the snow on the surrounding mountains. You could definitely see who all the Hilton and Maritzburg locals were as they all braved the cold with no warm gear. After a very quick warm up which pretty much had no warming effect, we all lined up on the start with a relatively small batch of riders.

There was supposedly a neutral zoned start but i don't think anyone really saw it that way. The pace was fast on the front and I tried to keep up with the group. After 1.5km my legs were not warming up at all and i was forced to drop back to the next group. While managing to keep up with them I wasn't really finding a rhythm, my quads were really cold and very sore. At 9km into the race I crashed into a small tree trunk stump thing, where I hit my knee badly causing a really sore throbbing pain in my knee cap. Unknowingly I also lost my water bottle and only realized at 11km. Fortunately at the next water point they gave me a bottle of powerade which turned out to be powerade concentrate, but it was better than nothing so i just had to sip on it slowly. Soon Ross van der Merwe caught me and we rode the next 8km together. My legs were finally warm and I decided to make a move up the king of the mountain climb where i couldn't seem to get him off my wheel. It wasn't until the next single-track piece where i decided to take some risks and created a very small gap on Ross. I slowly began to open up the gap on the next few downhill pieces. I had to keep a very good pace on the climbs because i knew Ross was stronger than me on them. Soon I couldn't see Ross anymore, but in the back of my mind knew I had to drive it home to stay ahead.

I managed to finish in 2hr11min and finish 4th Junior in the tough windy conditions.