Asg Tyger Valley - Jacques Pretorius

With all the races on the calendar coach Paul Cordes and I decided not to slow down my training for this race, I decided to ride to the venue to warm up properly and get a little bit of extra training done before my rest week.  On the start line I felt confident knowing I can go hard from the gun because I had a proper warm up. When we started I attacked on the first drag about 1 km into the start and just kept a steady pace on my super fast Pinarello Dogma XC.  After about two kilometers I noticed a few bike lengths between myself and the other two riders I then put down another hard effort to open up the gap even more, the plan was just to get out of sight and win the race as far as possible .

Halfway into the race I reached for my High 5 ISO gel and noticed that it had fallen out of my pocket, for a moment I felt sorry for myself but I knew that my High 5 2:1 energy drink could give me the energy I needed to maintain a hard steady pace to the finish . My Pinarello combined with the Continental rubber did not only provide me with a lot of fun in the muddy singletracks but also gave me confidence knowing my opponents didn't have this advantage.

My last few k's mostly consisted of dodging traffic from the shorter distance as well as pushing hard to get away from the rider a few  meters behind me,  it was only in the last few hundred meters where I realized that the rider was Jan Withaar doing the marathon , we both then followed the lead bike and ended up on the wrong side of the finish line.  Jan , the race organisers and the commissaire sorted out the problem and I won the race for the second time .

I would like to thank Epic Sport Cycle Shop for always helping me to keep my bike running smooth after muddy races like this, without their expertise I would've spent a lot more money on components during this wet season.