Stage 1 — Rock Bottom, Coke, and a Comeback
It started exactly as Stage 1 of Cape Epic probably shouldn't start: Jeroen hadn't slept a single minute.
On the way to the start — which was already hectic and slightly chaotic, the timing having been pushed 30 minutes earlier due to expected heat — he told me that somewhere around 3AM, lying awake, he'd made up his mind. This wasn't going to work. It was done.
And yet, at 6:55 we clipped in and rolled out anyway.
The opening kilometers were relatively civilized - wide gravel roads, riding in large batches of around 100 riders. Everybody was cruising, nobody was pushing, because what's the point if you're in the middle of the pack?
Once we hit the first single tracks and the real climbing started, that changed quickly. The roads narrowed, the pace slowed to a crawl, and we were stop-starting constantly, just waiting for the traffic to thin out.
Around us: sweeping views of the Klein Karoo mountains, dramatic and vast, which you'd have fully appreciated if you weren't primarily focused on not riding into the wheel in front of you. So, far so good, we seem to be doing well.
After waterpoint 1, at roughly 24km, the field started to spread. That's when Jeroen hit a wall. Not a small one.
On the climbs, he couldn't push anything above 150 watts. For context: that's around 40% of his threshold power. He was struggling badly — visibly, audibly, completely. I pushed him on a couple of climbs. On the ascent to Signal Hill, with everyone around us walking their bikes anyway, I just grabbed both our bikes and walked them up so he could have a few minutes without any effort at all. You do what you have to do.
We carried on. The descents, to our surprise, were a completely different story — fast, technical, and it turns out we're actually quite decent at them. On the wider gravel roads we were overtaking riders. But the climbing remained a battle, and we kept the pace deliberately conservative on the way up. The Slog, which looked intimidating on the profile, turned out to be more manageable than feared. After waterpoint 5 at 76km — the last one — Jeroen grabbed a couple of Cokes.
What happened next was remarkable.
Within minutes, something shifted. I heard it in his voice first. Then I saw it in his pace. He confirmed what I already suspected: he felt completely different. Whatever his body had been waiting for, it had apparently been sugar and caffeine, served cold in a cup. From that point, we stopped managing the situation and just rode. A strong tailwind pushed us across what looked like a golf course - we were doing over 50 km/h, pushing 350 watts, grinning behind our helmets.
The route has been throwing all sorts of things at us: fast tracks cutting through orchards, river crossings that came out of nowhere, loose dusty climbs and descents where you just had to commit and trust your wheels. A completely different experience than anything I've done in Europe.
Today was the first proper stage, and if I'm honest about it: it wasn't a great start, and the middle stretch was genuinely difficult. But we pushed through, and we drove it home. That matters.
The goal of riding competitively was already off the table after the Prologue gave us a reality check. And that's completely fine - in retrospect it was probably always a stretch. We're here to get to the finish line at Stage 7. Everything else is a bonus.
Two stages down. Six more to go.
Tomorrow, let's hope we'll be chasing again.
