Our first test ride in Cape Epic-like conditions

After a twelve-hour flight from Amsterdam, we landed at Cape Town International just after 10PM on Wednesday. My friend Darrel was waiting at arrivals, and it was great seeing him in person again. We worked out it had been 2,5 years almost... He and his wife have been extraordinary hosts - proper South African hospitality, which is its own category entirely. Good food, great company, and a home that immediately feels like somewhere you could actually decompress before one of the harder weeks of your life.

Thursday was a rest day by choice. We (mostly Jeroen, I must admit) built up the bikes, after which we floated in the pool somewhere between recovery from the long flight and disbelief that we were actually here. We went for a drink with Darrel later in the village, and did as close to nothing as two people who've been training for eight months can reasonably manage. It felt so good! With afternoon temperatures touching close to 40°C, there was nothing to prove by riding anyway.

We'd decided earlier in the week to use Friday as our first proper shakedown - not a structured session, but a real ride on real terrain. The choice was easy: Boschendal, where I had ridden on one of their rental bikse that same 2.5 years ago.

Boschendal is a wine estate in the Franschhoek Valley that's become an amazing mountain biking destination in the Western Cape - it hosted two stages of Cape Epic in 2016, and the trail network has grown considerably since. Around 70 kilometres of singletrack, ranging from easy vineyard loops to exposed mountainside climbing with fynbos-covered slopes, Drakenstein peaks on the horizon, and views that periodically demanded you stop even when everything about stopping was inconvenient.

Which brings me to the climb.

We were well into the black route, the 23km circuit that the estate describes as its most demanding, when Jeroen started to struggle. Not the normal kind of struggle that goes with riding at altitude in heat you're not acclimatized to, but something deeper. He'd picked up a cold last week, and up on the long exposed climb out toward the upper trails, pedaling somewhere around 300 watts just to keep momentum going, he had to stop at the top and call it there. I've not ridden with Jeroen that many times, but he has been the powerhouse between the two of us throughout this whole process, so when he stops, I know he's serious. Watching him have to bail, and seeing how it annoyed him, was sobering.

It also doesn't particularly worry me. A viral infection typically runs its course in five to seven days. We have two full days before the race starts, and the kind of raw fitness he's built over the past eight months doesn't disappear because you spent a week fighting a cold. The body remembers. I've been on the right side of that equation myself after the training break in Switzerland, and came back stronger for it. He'll be fine, I am confident about that.

For me, the ride felt pretty good. The heat is the main variable we hadn't fully simulated — you can do sauna sessions and summer interval blocks, but there is no real substitute for the heat, even though we rode in the morning, here in the Western Cape at the moment. The legs responded well, the power numbers felt honest, and riding actual Cape Epic terrain for the first time gave everything a different kind of reality. It's beautiful and brutal in equal measure, which is more or less what we were promised. That the Cape Epic signage was still there from the time they hosted the event, added to the experience in a nice way.

After the descent, we rolled back past the oak trees at the Boschendal Werf, found shade, and didn't talk about mountain biking for at least twenty minutes. That felt right too.

Two days to go!