CapeEpic 2025 Stage 2 TT

Niclas: Welcome to the Afasteryou Podcast, where everything revolves around endurance sports and training. Here, Sebastian Schluricke, Björn Kafka, and Niclas Ranker give you valuable tips and insights to help you take your performance to the next level. Welcome to a new episode of the Afasteryou Podcast in the Cape Epic Edition. It was hot today. Today we rode from Merendal to Pal. The stage was listed as 66 kilometers and 900 meters of elevation. My own measurement showed 857, so more or less that matches. The stage was held as a time trial. The pro teams started first. The first ones rolled off the ramp at 6:50 a.m. The worst, in quotation marks, the worst in GC. They had to go first, and then the best, meaning the yellow jersey with Schurter and Colombo, started last. After that the Open Men and the amateurs were allowed to go, or rather I think the top 30 teams of the Open Men, Masters, and Grandmasters started. And only after that did the pro women start. So basically, I'd say purely from a stage perspective it was actually a really good stage. Compared to the last stages, it was boring, in quotation marks, because a lot of it was just farm roads, lots of jeep tracks, and basically just flat hammering. Right at the start we headed back out over the Merendal trails. We've now ridden those partly for three days in a row. So we already knew them pretty well. After that, first lots of jeep tracks, often alongside fences, singletracks that basically went right past a farm. On the right there was a barbed wire fence, on the left a huge field. And there was a trail that ran right along there. We rode that for a long stretch, very rolling, just constantly. Very fast, especially. In the first race hour, for example, my partner and I rode a 26 kph average today. We actually kept that up almost across the whole distance, I think. At the end it was still a 25 kph average. 25.6 overall, exactly. So a lot of it was very flat at first. That stretched out, I'd say, for the first two race hours, so in our case 1:50, the first 50 kilometers, and after that came a climb and then a few steeper rolling sections and then singletrack into the finish. Basically for the pro teams, no drafting was allowed. So drafting was prohibited. So if one team caught up to another team, either you had to go straight past, or the team behind had to make sure they weren't in the slipstream. And at the end on the livestream you saw it once, Stutzmann and Porro couldn't get past Stiebian and Rabensteiner. And you could really see how they kept trying to choose a good line without ending up in the other team's slipstream. At that moment they apparently didn't have the strength to go straight past. And exactly in that section where they were, it was super sandy at the end. That was really annoying. I wouldn't have liked to be in their situation. But the good thing for everyone else, well, for the pro women drafting was also prohibited, but for everyone else, so Open Men, Grandmasters and so on, drafting was allowed. Which in our race led to us catching the first two teams after the first six kilometers. That then more or less formed into a ten-man group, at least for us at first. We managed to split that up on a farm road. I picked up the pace briefly and then we had shaken them off. Then we rode alone for a bit. After that, a team came back from behind, the team sitting second in Open Men, Team Coach Me with Manuel Fasnacht and Stefan Spielmann. I think that was around kilometer 15, roughly. And actually, funny, well, not funny, but I was riding slightly offset to the right of Stefan Spielmann, who, from what I saw, did most of the leading work that day, and he turned around to the left. And in doing so he made a little swerve to the right toward me, and his shoe, his Boa closure, caught my brake rotor. And so my brake rotor killed his Boa closure. Then they were briefly gone. I apologized, but at that moment it was just a crowded race situation. Neither of us could really help it. He shouldn't have swerved, strictly speaking. But I'd just say it's one of those things that can simply happen in a race. After that we rode with them for a stretch and then caught up to a very, very big group that consisted of, I think, two Open Men teams, and the rest were Masters and Grandmasters riders, so... Udo Bölz with his partner was in there, Bart Prentzschens with his partner was in there. Those were the two familiar ones, at least the ones I knew. And in that group was Ibu Gasti, the leader in the Masters or rather the Grandmasters category. Exactly, purple jersey color they had. They were in there too, and that's where the Coach Me rider, Stefan Spielmann, did the main leading work. The group, apart from him, basically nobody led. At some point I also pulled, because at some point he stopped wanting to as well, and then really nobody wanted to ride. My partner initially held me back, and then, yeah, I did put in a bit of work after all. But toward the end, when it went into the climb and got steeper and steeper, the group then blew apart and each team basically rode alone again. In the end we came in fourth that day, with, I think, 40 seconds behind third place on the day. Overall we also moved up in GC to fourth place. We have pretty much exactly two minutes behind third place. Eight minutes behind second place. Uh, no. We have two minutes behind third place. Behind Coach Me we have, I think, twelve or, no, 14 minutes behind. And behind Avelo Racing with Markus Nicolai and Lukas Koller we now have 22 minutes behind. I'd almost claim, maybe something might still happen regarding third. But I think more likely that the next days are going to be that hard. I'll have to see how my partner is doing, whether we can still move up. From now on it's really just climbing. Overall we needed 2 hours 35 today. I rode with a 253 average and 292 NP. You have to say, significantly fewer non-pedaling moments. So NP and average are definitely closer together. Another decisive factor today was that after just 43 minutes we already had 27 degrees, and after an hour twenty we were already at 30 degrees. For comparison, we're talking around 9:20, we already had 30 degrees, and the whole thing climbed to 32 degrees toward the back end. You have to consider we started fairly early, at 7:50 a.m., I think, we started. There are teams that basically only started when we were already at the finish. That means they set off when it was already 32 degrees, and today the peak was 37 degrees. That's of course really unpleasant. And as a result, tomorrow's stage has been moved 10 minutes earlier, which doesn't make a huge difference, but they actually cut it by 12 kilometers. Elevation stays almost the same, but it's supposed to be 37 or 38 degrees again tomorrow, and I think also simply to protect the amateur and hobby riders. who are in the field, the whole thing is being moved even earlier into the morning and the stage shortened a bit at the back end, so that the riders can simply manage everything and not go under from the heat. On to GC, for the women... it was I think again a relatively clear game, or clear game in quotation marks, from Toyota Specialized. They won again with a two-minute lead in a time of 2 hours 43 minutes. Kendale ISB Sport 1 was then second today with 2 minutes 9 behind, and Vera Lusa with her team partner Alexis Gada came in third with 2 minutes 24 behind. Best German today again, Steffi Walter, today in 10th place. They slipped back one spot, at least on today's stage, with 16 minutes behind. For the men, it was a really, I thought, interesting stage. Buff Megamo are, I think, top 10 in GC, and they started relatively early compared to the other top teams that ended up at the front, and set the top time relatively quickly with 2 hours 13. It's absolutely a type of terrain that suits Ward Aleman, who is also tall and can push a lot of watts. So this flat hammering, he was really strong today. After that in second place, Schurter with Colombo. Today on the stream I also found it clearly visible, especially on the last ramps, Colombo leading all the time, Schurter struggling a bit, couldn't quite close the gap. And was at least apparently the weaker partner again. Then Villiers Vittoria did, I'd say, a really good job with 2:14 minutes. One minute behind, which I find really interesting. They apparently don't ride a power meter, at least that's what was said on the stream. And they apparently looked into it too, they would ride without a power meter. Yeah, for cross-country you basically don't need a power meter, I'd argue. You just ride all out the whole time, and then the guys apparently know each other well enough that they can pace that over these race distances, let's say, well. It's just interesting to see whether they can hold that out for the week. I'd definitely wish it for them, because it brings a bit of dynamic into the race. In fourth place then BH Coloma, David Valero Serrano with Thiago Ferreira. 1:11 behind. Of course also two big riders who simply have incredible pressure on the pedal. If I saw that correctly, Serrano led a lot from the front. In fifth place then, really cool, Ägger and Baum with 1:45. If I saw it correctly on the stream, in the first half more Ägger from the front, in the second half more Baum from the front. And Georg apparently also let gaps open here and there. And the whole thing, yeah, definitely looked like it was going to get hard for him toward the end. I can totally understand that if you have to push like that the whole time and then at 32 degrees, that just gets really unpleasant. What I found really, really cool about the two of them was their grip position and overall their position on the bike. So first, the guys already sit, I'd say, very aerodynamically on a mountain bike with this Bike-Ahead seatpost that goes back, with setback. Then a lot of drop, meaning they already sit very road-bike style on the bike, and then they both had a very, very consistent, well, what does very, very consistent mean, but almost completely consistent actual inner grip. As I think I mentioned last time in an economy episode, where I tested the whole thing myself. That really does make seconds of difference. So the guys simply ride faster because of it. If you constantly grip on the inside at those speeds, at 25 kph, you save seconds per kilometer. And if you extrapolate that to 66 kilometers, they ride 2-3 minutes faster just because of that. What I find really impressive is that they manage that on all the trails and jeep tracks too. That definitely takes some practice, because of course when you grip narrower you have less leverage, and so the whole thing can become a bit more unstable at times. Especially on the jeep tracks here there are lots of braking bumps. It's never, let's say, a normal German forest road rolls significantly, significantly better than the jeep tracks here. And then these fields and these singletracks across the fields basically don't roll at all in comparison. So I'd say, the same race in Germany would definitely be two, three kph faster. So it's definitely cool to see that the guys have it down so well, always gripping in the middle. Moving up a bit today were Beers and Swenson. Beers also said afterward in the interview that Keegan had some back problems. It shouldn't sound like an excuse, well, he directly said, it shouldn't sound like an excuse, but Keegan hadn't ridden any mountain bike races and had had little mountain bike preparation. Especially because the Cape Epic is becoming more and more XCO-style in its riding and less marathon, he was having problems with that right now. I can understand that. But, yeah, from an athlete's perspective, I don't quite get it, if Keegan knows, okay, he's riding here with Matthew Beers, the defending champion, then you'd have to come to the start top-prepared from a mountain bike technical standpoint. But fine. Furthermore, Marco Gilbert had a better day again today. He wasn't doing well toward the end yesterday. Stibi and Rabensteiner only 3 minutes 17 behind. Absolutely cool to see and also very nice to see in ninth place. Seewald and Hartmann apparently ran much better today. Only 3 minutes 23 behind. So that's definitely good. The Germans continue to ride really strong in GC. And exactly, let's see where that leads. Tomorrow, and everyone has also been saying all along throughout the race, from tomorrow on it really kicks off. We've now had the prologue with 26 kilometers and 750 meters of elevation. Then Stage 1, 92 kilometers and 2700 meters of elevation, was a crusher. Today 66 kilometers and 950 meters of elevation, rather flat. Tomorrow has now been shortened, it would actually have been 90 kilometers with 2600 meters of elevation, it's now 78 kilometers with 2450 meters of elevation. But it's definitely going to get really hot. That could be interesting. Then there's Stage 4, which also has 80 km with 2000 meters of elevation. Then Stage 5 with 98 km and 2.8. And Stage 6 with 87 and 2.5. So from now on, apart from... tomorrow, no, nonsense, from now on every day 2000 meters of elevation or more. And the whole thing with at least two very hot stages. And probably on Friday rain was at least forecast. And then we head back over to Lawrenceford, where that wild, or two years ago, yeah, two years ago there was that brutal rain stage. We'll see. As a rider, I'm not looking forward to rain stages. As far as I'm concerned, it can stay hot. That's definitely more pleasant, and it's easier on the equipment too. If it gets really wet, I'm curious. We do have tires for it with us, but it doesn't necessarily have to happen. Exactly, that's so much about Stage 2, the time trial. I'm curious, if it doesn't completely cook me through tomorrow, I'll definitely manage to get the episode out again tomorrow evening. And exactly, that's it for now.