Woke up early on a Wednesday morning last week and flew with the Team Jeep boys, Patrick Belton and Travis Walker, from Durban to Cape Town, South Africa for my first cross country race of the season. I slept the whole flight, like a boss! Brendon Davids was already there to pick us up at the airport, due to some VO2 testing with his coach, Jeroen Swart, earlier in the week. He arrived in this SWEET Chrysler van Jeep hooked us up with to get around. Man that thing was nice! Our race didn't start till Saturday, but we wanted to get there a couple days early to check out the course and get familiar with it. We unpacked our bikes and built them back up. Got a bite to eat, filled up our bottles with some GU Brew and were on our way to the course. When we got there I was pretty skeptical about the rock gardens, the drop offs, and the steep descents into tight corners. Coming from pretty much solely a roadie background, I found myself not 100% confident I can ride these things. But with the help and guidance of my teammates, I managed to overcome my fears and doubts. They had me ride behind them finding the good lines and even stood at the rock gardens in-case I fell. Thanks guys, I learned a lot.
Thursday was an awesome day! Woke up to some horses right outside our front porch. Fed them some carrots and apples. There were animals everywhere! We were set up with some really nice accommodation at Clara Anna Fontein. Gorgeous place! Had a good ride on the course and the weather was hot and sunny. Couldn't have asked for a nicer day. That night, GU South Africa took Team Jeep athletes out to dinner. Had a great time chatting with Rebecca Laird and getting to know everyone personally. Thanks again!
Friday was the hardest day for me to get through because I was getting antsy to race! Went to the race track again and did some opening efforts and road all the difficult parts of the course to get it in my head that I can ride them. Leaving the track with my legs and head feeling good I went to registration and got my number 61. Time to chill and put the legs up.... and wait.
My alarm goes off at 6am and I wake up with that feeling of: "where am I? Oh right I'm racing at 8:45, I should get going." I hate it when that happens. I walk out the door and it's really cold and raining. What happened to the sun? All I could think about was how different the course is going to be because of the rain. I got a pretty descent warm-up in and headed to the start line, where I started to scope out other riders. There were 13 Elite/U23 women on the start line. A few I picked out were a international riders, riders from BMC, Contego and Cherise Stander, who I knew from the road. It's gonna be a hard day. The whistle blew, clip in, and put the power down. My word was it a fast start. I didn't get myself in a great position at the start, but I just focused on pulling riders back one by one. We had 6 laps of a 4k course to complete. With Rebbeca Laird and the rest of the GU clan in the feed zone cheering me on every time I went by I was really happy with how the race was going. The first 4 laps went really smoothly for me. I made no mistakes, I found a nice rhythm and worked my way past other riders in different categories; all the womens categories started together. Going into lap 5 I was sitting in 8th overall and 4th U23. It started to rain harder and the course was getting a lot more slippery. I crashed in one of the rock gardens and hit my hip really hard on a rock on lap 5. I got up quick and tried to get back in my rhythm and block out the pain. Pretty much lost all my steam after that and was running a minute slower on laps 5 and 6. I ended up placing 10th overall and 5th U23. Not exactly the result I was hoping for, but not a bad race for my first experience at cross country racing.
Doing some hard training for the next race on February 23rd, Sabie! Should be an awesome race. Heard it's really tough, so it probably is. I'll be racing the Marathon 74 km.
Thanks for reading!! Ride on!
Kendall Ryan
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