Welcome to the stage two recap of the 2025 Absa Cape Epic. We have team cycle sports,

Alex Wilde and Zach Kalton with us. This is the trainer road Aska cycling coach podcast.

You just had a 66 kilometer time trial and you're in a mountain bike race, which is wild. That's 41 miles.

That's 950 meters or 3,116 feet. And a key point to remember is that Cape Epic is a team

race. So even though this is a time trial and you were let off quote one by one, it was

partnerships one by one. So even though it's a time trial, it's not an individual time trial,

it's a partner time trial. The course started off with some rolling, punchy,

downhilly stuff, and then you had lots of flattish stuff that probably didn't feel flat,

and then it just progressively ramped up until it got into some, really, it looks like some punchy,

surgy stuff toward the end. I'm going to run through just this finish really quick, and then we're

going to get to your thoughts on the whole thing. Today, you had a finish time of two hours, 37 minutes, and

49 seconds. That gave you a total of your 24 minutes and 44 seconds off the leader and a 43rd stage

position finish out of the field, which is lower than where you've been. We're going to get into that.

At your GC position, you were now 32nd. You moved back six positions, and you have a total

race time of seven hours, 56 minutes, and 31 seconds. It was hot today, but that wasn't the reason.

I was looking at your splits, and I'm going to show them on screen right now, and I noticed that

on the second to last split or the third to last split, everything changed in the direction

of where you guys were heading. You were moving ahead and you were moving forward and then

suddenly something happened. What happened out there? So as it does, we passed the last

opportunity to snag a wheel on an innocuous fire rig,

is putting bottles in my bike, iced down the back, grabbed a gel, and then I'm just psh.

So our best guess is there's like a barbed wire underneath the gel.

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