Young Tuks student was the youngest participant to finish Cape Epic
Rekord recently reported on the doctor from Pretoria who was the oldest finisher of the murderous Cape Epic Mountain Bike race this year and now it has become known that the youngest finisher of 2019 is a young Tuks student.
Training for the Cape Epic entails spending hours on dirt tracks pushing yourself to the limits.
Most avid mountain bikers will probably agree with this statement and will have stories to tell as to where and how they did their training. There are always the exceptions though. The 18-year-old Tuks dentistry student, Thana Groenewald, who was the youngest rider to complete the Epic this year is one of those.
In the build-up to the big race she and her dad, Willem, only had the opportunity to train in real mountain bike conditions twice. The rest of the time she was in her hostel room at the Prinshof Campus training for up to two hours a day on a “Kickr” which is essentially a smart indoor training device.
There are two reasons she did this. Going out to ride your bike in the city centre is, apart from it not being the ideal training ground, not considered to be the wisest thing to do. Even more so if you are a woman. The other challenge was that Groenewald and her dad only got confirmation that they would be allowed to start two months before the actual race. This did not leave much time for hardcore training time on the bike.
Luckily Groenewald was already reasonably fit as she is an avid Xterra-competitor (mountain bike triathlon). Two weeks before the Epic she ended fourth in the age-groups category of the Grabouw Xterra-event.
The Tuks student explained that the nice thing about training on a “Kickr” is that you get to program your ride in the finest detail which means she could test herself to the limit on countless occasions. The downside is that the “Kickr” can never genuinely simulate real mountain bike conditions.
Groenewald quickly faced that harsh reality when riding the Epic. The constant bouncing around through rough terrain, at times battling to keep her bike under control, took its toll. Especially on her upper body. She started to suffer severe inflammation in her arms. There were stages when it got so bad that she battled to grip the bike’s handlebars properly and braking became agony.
In spite of all this trouble, she still enjoyed the challenge. There were numerous times when she found herself wondering as to why she was voluntary punishing herself to such an extent. The sense of achievement on finishing the stage though made it all worthwhile somehow. Apart from being in pain nearly constantly, the toughest part of competing in the Epic was the seemingly never-ending climbs. To make things worse both she and her dad suffered from short but intense “battles” with a stomach bug towards the latter stages of the Epic.
Six days after finishing the Epic, Groenewald admitted to not yet being able to appreciate what she had achieved.
She can honestly claim that cycling is her passion. It has to be considering that in 2015 she was involved in a severe crash while training for a cross country event in Pietermaritzburg. On a downhill section, she went down so hard that her liver burst on impact resulting in her spending five days a hospital’s intensive care unit.
Her answer as to why she got back on her bike and continued to pedal is really simple.
“I love to cycle,” the young student concluded.
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