this week i got back to some real racing.cherise and i made the trip downto pe on monday with alot of luggage.its always hard to fly to an event like this as we had four bikes with us and loads of wheels,helmets etc.

on thursday the racing kicked off with the time trial and cherise had a cracker,winning the womans national title by 70 seconds over the 30km distance! i had a solid ride to place 5th,just 20seconds of the silver medal on a pan flat and windy course.

on saturday we took to a very hard road loop with 2 very steep 500m climbs.the loop was only 8.6 km long but had around 150m of verticle ascent per lap.the womans race was contested over ten laps and at the end it was cherise and team-mate merissa van der merwe against two girls from nashua-toyota.merissa won the title with cherise tacking the bronze medal for team usn.

our race kicked of at 1 30pm with the mercury hitting around 40c!after the first two laps it was obvious that the race was going to be one of attrition.the bunch witled down very quickly.after around 6 laps there were only about 40 guys left in the race and a break of 5 were up the road.as we approached lap 10 i was worried that the break was going to stay away and i made the racing hard on the climbs.it wasnt long before we had a select group going and the break came back with around 5 laps remaining.the real battle started with around 4 laps to go and i could feel the earlier efforts in my legs.the group split again and we were now 4 upfront.myself,christoff van heerden,darren lill and johan van zyl.we entered the last lap of 18 together and it was darren lill who made the first move.johan dropped first as christoff and i tried to respond.in the end darren got the best of us by 3 seconds and i managed to just edge out van heerden for the silver medal.

im realy happy with how my form is after just 6 weeks of training and i feel inspired for what lays ahead.i traveled back home on sunday and get to prepare my mtb for this weekends african continental champs in stellenbosch over the coming weekend.

cheers

burry