The day started off at La Paradiso Guest House, just after the Harkerville trail entrance, so no guesses to what the day's racing would entail.
After a short neutral zone on the N2, we turned off at the Sasol filling station to access the Harkerville trails (those of you who had to use the "escape route" on Harkerville before, would know this stretch). The riding was hard and fast, even after 2 days of racing and we were looking good for a top 20 at this early stage. We made our way along the service roads for about 15km's and entered upward single track section on the backward loop on the traditional red route. Just before entering the single track we spotted the race leaders with tyre issues. Hard luck to Timo and Jacques, but it seemed like they did enough on day 1 and 2 to pull this one off, even after finishing about 25 minutes behind stage winners on day 3. It just goes to show that its never over until its over.
The legs were burning as we hit the upward climb on the single track and by now the races within the race was evolving nicely. Going up single track is not my strong point, but I gave it horns to ensure that we had a clean run going down the rooted, stepped part of the trail.
We arrived at water point 1 with 2 or 3 teams hot on our heels. We kept it tidy with a quick lube and fill and a potato in the mouth, but 2 teams beat us out of the water point and was attacking hard. We kept our nerve and roped them in one by one. With some fast steep downhills we could reverse the situation and we attacked without mercy up to the second single track section. Here we caught the second team that jumped us at the water point and went hell for leather to drop them too.
Now half way in we rode the service routes beyond the regular trails and made our way to sections of the trail that is used with the Knysna Oyster Festival routes. The climbs were hard, but all middle blade stuff and we seemed to have knocked off the chasers at this stage.
The second water point approached and we cut our stopping time down to less than 2 minutes. We were leaving before the chasers made it to the stop and rode hard to maintain our lead. By now fatigue was setting in and small mistakes were creeping in and we took it down a notch to ensure that we kept it together on the fast rutted downhill sections. As we were climbing another hill the second ladies team caught us. We held on and opened the gap again on the next down hill section and had to ride hard on the last series of climbs before you hit the bumpy downhill sections just east of Knysna.
The highlight was surely riding the very technical section of single track as on all previous Knysna Oyster Festival races I was forced to walk this section with 50km riders all over the trail. I made a small mistake and had too much weight on my back wheel just before the hairpin turn and lost the back wheel. Fortunately the slip wasn't serious and I got straight onto riding the rest of the trail with my partner capturing the moment on his GoPro camera. Guess I'll have to put this on YouTube now...
We hit the streets and progressed quickly to George Rex Drive where we were on the cobble stone path to Thesen Island. I was being dragged along by my partner who rode another monster stage and we crossed the finish line in 19th place. With some teams ahead of us not completing all 3 stages, this would probably end up being about 15th or 16th.
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