Cycle Club Lenasia’s (CCL) Kamlesh Valla and Dharmesh Rawjee took the opener for the season Powerade Lost City Cycle Challenge head on, the past Sunday, August 15 with a bit favourable weather conditions.
The only ones from the club that participated despite the fact that the cold days of winter are still not over.
The 2015 Powerade Lost City cycle challenge was held at the Sun City resort, this the first seeding race post the winter season. Although many may argue that August is still part of winter, but in Pilansberg area, it’s definitely no winter.
The Lost City cycle challenged is deemed to be a fairly flat race, but there is nothing flat about this with rolling hills from Sun city to Rustenburg, and via the mines back go the resort. What makes this race challenging and interesting is that the wind will never disappoint you to make the last sector of the race extremely difficult with it being head on.
Despite these challenges, 860 cyclists completed the 115 km race distance and 611 cyclists completed the 66km race.
The winning time for the 115km race was 2h34. Cycle Club Lenasia was represented by Kamlesh Valla who completed the 115 km race in a time of 3h07 and Dharmesh Rawjee who completed the 66km race in a time of 2h26.
The race is the official start of racing season for cycling
Says Kamlesh. “ Training during the winter season is always challenging. We have two major issues to deal with. One, the cold weather makes it difficult to ride as the wind chill factor makes it extremely challenging to ride in the cold if you do not have the correct winter gear.
The fact that the sun rises a lot later means that when the visibility has improved, the traffic on the road is significantly higher and this makes the cycling with a great amount of traffic, very risky and unsafe.
Thanks to our main sponsor, Ocular Technologies who have provided CCL cyclist with top quality winter cycling kits which makes cycling in the winter so much more comfortable, and CCL also provided all the cyclist with riding lights which has allowed the cyclist to ride safely just as the sun rises, hence allowing the cyclist to get some miles under the belt before the traffic builds up.
Cyclist who were not fasting took advantage of the new kits and manage to get a great deal of training done during the winter season. Although the training distances were not as long as we would ride in the summer months, we managed to increase our training over last year by 50%. “
He continued, “ Conditions on race day were ideal for a fast race, however as the race progressed, the wind picked up. The route back to Rustenburg was intense and at a fast pace, and many riders tried to force breakaway groups, yet the pelotons, pursued and pulled them back into the main bunch.. Although this being the first seeding race after the winter season, the cyclist whom did take part in this race, were primarily those cyclist whom have been training during winter. ”
Dharmesh added the following comment, he said, “ Training for the race over the winter months was a challenge due to the cold weather factors. We try to leave early but due to low temperatures it really gets cold. If you are kitted out with the right gear you should just about be ok riding in the cold.
For me personally I did a few races before I joined CCL and it was tough especially when you ride alone. After joining Cycle Club Lenasia I have learnt a lot over the few months from the senior guys (A&B group cyclists).Training with them during winter was a huge learning curve for me and I have improved a lot from where I started off. So a big thanks to the club itself and its members.
The race itself was fast paced in the beginning, which was pretty flat. Halfway into the race some of the climbs got a bit difficult because of the head winds and some areas we had to cycle with traffic on our side. They were a lot of railroad crossings, we had to pass which meant we had to slow down and then pick up the pace.
Like Kamlesh said it’s a nice race to do coming out of winter and getting your fitness levels up. “
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