MTB (the mountain bike)

Those who know me will tell you that I am no mountain biker at all, I have always been a road cyclist and that is what I will always remain.

But when mountain biking first took off in South Africa years ago the name most synonymous with the sport was to me Hendrik Lemmer. I remember once we were to start a race and at the start line Hendrik showed up with a mountain bike. Back then ‘roadies’ frowned on this but, Hendrik being who he was, could not care less and he, as I recall, even did a sub three (under three hours) Argus Tour, a record that still stands of 2h 38min and that shut up most of the road cyclists.

Carinus Lemmer Hendriks’ brother, who was a roadie and track rider also took up the challenge later riding mountain bike.

Many years later just before leaving for Australia I moved back to Cape Town to train for 3months. In rain and sleet I trained each day becoming really, really fit.

Mark Florence had been asking me for a while to join him but I had no inclination. In the end I gave in. He had no mercy to say the least, for my first ever MTB ride as he took me through Tokai Forest in Cape Town and up on a two hour climb, well that’s how long it took me any way. We went up all the way to the the power station where one could see the whole of False Bay to the East and Hout Bay to the West.

I think Mark got a kick out of seeing me suffer, all those years on the road, he was now taking it out on me, it was pay back time and he was dishing out the pain. I must say I really thought I would fall all day but I only went down once over a tree trunk and into the mud. He of course, had a laugh. By the end of the ride all was well, but much worse was to come later.

A few days passed and I felt that the long MTB ride did my legs well. Then one morning he called me again. That morning a number of things happened prior to our ride that should have told me not to go but I did not listen to the messages. The day was overcast, ominous in fact. When I got to Mark’s house it was only a few minutes away from the forest. Ascending on the first climb we encountered a puncture.

Fortunately, it was still close to home, so we turned back and changed the complete wheel. On our second attempt Mark had another puncture, by now I was wanting to call it a day and I should have listened. We went on to a third puncture, eventually when we got to the top of the forest we turned for the run down the steep incline. Mark took me over a jump of about one and a half meters and I flew over it without even thinking, I could not believe it. Mark was ahead of me and I followed, on a curve around some shrubs I took the steep side as storm water had burrowed out a little trench in the mud and it had become hard in the sun.I don’t know what happened, on such a simple bend without any real obstacles I felt myself falling, between that thought and the moment I hit the surface I was thinking: ‘My wife is 18 000kms away and I am about to break something serious, she is going to be mad like a DraGon’.

I lay there not able to move, I managed to remove my helmet and down in the forest I could hear Mark calling after me.

My right wrist was shattered and the pain was unbelievable. In nearly three decades of racing down the steepest mountains in the world I have never broken a bone, I fell off my bike on numerous occasions without a helmet on, not breaking anything, and to me this was the worst thing in all my cycling days.

When Mark finally found me, he thought the same thing;

‘Gail is going to be mad’.fter X-rays the doctor just shook his head, he didn’t know how he was going to put that together, my bones were all over the place.
Before operating they first tried manually to help the bones to be aligned, and they did this without any morphine. Then to top this, the ignorant nurse could not find my veins, neither could they find my pulse, that has always been a problem; I had a naturally very low pulse.

Nurse Lynne Munisamy of New Zealand is going to have a hearty laugh when she reads this story. My wife was not angry one bit, Mark was very kind to me in arranging everything as I was in no mood to speak English.

I healed in no time, that being the blessing from cycling for years and looking after my body.

When I arrived in OZ, my wife, after many years of not cycling at all, bought herself a mountain bike, so did I. We continue to ride on and off in the forest and mountains of Brisbane.

These were my exploits on what we call today, the mountain bike.

In order of appearance: Carinus Lemmer, Mark Florence(Pantani) and Sebastian Engelbrecht