In a promo video ahead of the Absa Cape Epic, Kevin Evans said that after the first stage a few years ago he thought: “If it carries on like this I don’t know how long I’m going to last.” After the prologue of the ninth Absa Cape Epic yesterday I was left wondering the same thing. It was JUST 27km…but it JUST had 900 metres of climbing. That’s almost as much climbing as the Cape Argus Pick n Pay Cycle Tour has in 110km. It’s, like, a lot.

Marmite sandwiches. Who would have thought that white bread Marmite sandwiches would taste like the food of the gods? After 57km of the first stage of the Absa Cape Epic, they were just that. Wonderful pieces of salty gastronomic genius served at the second water point of the day, halfway through a stage that most described, including a good couple of professionals.

There are better places to meet than in the Race Hospital at the Absa Cape Epic, but that was where myself and fellow Team Absa rider Elana Meyer found ourselves yesterday around happy hour time. Elana was there to change the dressing on the stitch she received on her damaged elbow on Monday after her crash. I was there to have the wound on my elbow cleaned up after my crash yesterday.

It is probably the wrong thing that the race director of the Absa Cape Epic is a German. It makes jokes about cruelty and coldness too easy to come by, particularly if you are a rider doing his first Absa Cape Epic, and have listened to her briefing every night after dinner has been served, looking ahead to the next day’s stage.

I cried when I finished the fourth stage of the Absa Capo Epic yesterday. I didn’t want to cry. Rita Duckworth, mother of Clayton my fellow Team Absa teammate, hugged me as I came over the line in nine hours, 49 minutes and a whole lot of pain. Then she cried. And I cried. Jesus wept. The relief of it all.

Ge Lydia van Gildenhuys has hurt me daily since I began the Absa Cape Epic, but in the nicest possible way. Lydia is one of our physiotherapists and has been my angel with the healing hands this week as she has massaged and worked the pain from each day’s ride out of legs that told me they had no business riding 781km in a week.

And so, with a gentle flop to the right, I fell over at the finish line of the sixth stage and the seventh stage of the Absa Cape Epic with a beer in my hand and one waiting in the hand of a lady. It was a slow, inelegant fall, a result of exhaustion, eagerness to get the bear and relief, relief, at having come through a tough second-last day on the Epic.

There are no words. There is no reason, no rhyme, nor sense to be made of the maelstrom that is my head as I right this. I finished the Absa Cape Epic three hours before I sat down to write this. I’m still struggling to take it in. My mind has no sense of direction, no amount of drifting, dragging and dredging can pull it into line to make a straight line of the accomplishment. There’s an acronym that works: WTF.