The Accidental Single Speeder - Race to Cradock Part 5

Leaving the comfort of a support station at 23h30 isn't everyone's idea of fun. The sensible thing would have been to have a shower and flop down on a bed. However, when deliberately racing the Freedom Trail sensible is surgically removed from your ride lexicon. Many people don't get the attraction of racing hard and I don't blame them. There's no question that the Freedom Trail is best experienced in daylight when refreshed from a good nights sleep.

There's a small group of weirdos that can't resist the urge to test and redefine their limits. Riding at night, particularly when tricky navigation comes into play, opens up a whole Pandora's box of challenges. The potential for failure is ever present, even for seasoned campaigners. One moment of inattention and the dot watcher army (DW Army) fire up their popcorn machines. The moment someone deviates from the recommended route, as marked on the tracker page, the DW Army literally snaps into action with screenshots filling the various Whatsapp groups. Game on, OH NO!!! and Not again being familiar refrains.

The term schadenfreude is often used by the online brigade. It refers to deriving pleasure from another person's misfortune. However, as much as the DW Army derive amusement from wayward rambles there comes a point where they feel sorry for the flesh and blood person who is that dot and will that person back on track. However, if the dot is a so-called race snake the schadenfreude runs deep and long. Especially if it happens at night. Riding at night is mostly a choice. Stepping into the dark is a risk and in a way a tad arrogant. It screams, "Watch me!" And watch we do. So many DW Army sleep hours surrendered to schadenfreude.

Leaving Kranskop I had two sections of attentive navigation to deal with. Two back to back sections across farms that would take an hour each. A few years back the DW Army watched the race leader make 2 big mistakes - one on each section - that had us (I was a drafted DW Army member at the time) pushing back our usual bedtimes. The mistakes were incomprehensible. A year later I rode those same sections at night and could see why they had gone. Each resulted from a momentary lapse in concentration. Their mistakes a year before become warnings that helped me not make the same blunders.

My attention levels were high and I moved through those sections without a hitch. It might seem easy but it's not. All of us who willingly take on night navigation have made mistakes. Even when I turn at a given point and am 100% sure that I am going the right way my mind is not at ease until the next expected landmark emerges from the gloom. It can be anything from a gate, fence line, windmill or signpost.

I have developed mantras for the tricky nav sections. For the second farm traverse out of Kranskop it goes: Gate, over stream, follow fence, over a fence, through a donga, find gate, turn right, etc. might sound silly but by the time I get there I've been on the go for over 18 hours and I'm fairly fatigued and I find these prompts helpful.

Once through those two early farm traverses I had a few hours on district road that didn't require too much thinking. While it sounds like a good time to relax it does introduce the risk of nodding off. Fortunately I didn't have that problem this time around. I bypassed the interim support station of Brosterlea, passing their turnoff a little after 03h30. Riding in the cool of night means less water is required and in my case the need to eat is markedly reduced. It'd only been 4 hours since leaving Kranskop so my water supply was still fine.

By the time I portaged down off the ridge above the Stormberg station the sun was up. The station is the halfway point of Race to Cradock. It'd taken me 26 hours to get there. 3 hours later I was rolling down the driveway of Romansfontein the 3rd support station. It was 10h00. So far my ride was going to plan.