Malherbe and Hinde dig deep in Epic ride for Cansa funding

“The world as I knew it has stopped,” cancer campaigner Con Malherbe (63) said, reflecting on last week’s Absa Cape Epic he and Jared Hinde, diabetic who is half his age, pedalled through rocky, mountainous, flat, hot, cold, dry and wet conditions. With the push of every pedal, the two, who made up the Coffeeberry Cansa Warriors team tested themselves to their limits in an effort to raise another rand towards their R250 000 target for the Cancer Association of SA (Cansa). The duo made up the Coffeeberry Cansa Warriors team and are still raising funds for the Cancer Association of SA, culminating in a True Stories Tuesday evening at Coffeeberry in the Cascades Lifestyle Centre to tell their tale, along with other local riders in “The Untamed”— as the Epic is dubbed — on April 7.

With them will be Travis Warwick-Olive, an amputee — and local ultra endurance cycling legend Kevin Benkenstein will host the event. They did it for cancer sufferers who would battle to get treatment, like the stem cell treatment Malherbe has had for multiple myeloma. He was recently diagnosed with a return of the cancer but in its very low stages and will start immunotherapy treatment soon.

The last two stages stood out for Malherbe and Hinde as eventful with heavy climbs and mechanical hiccups after having had the luxury of kinder weather and even headwinds after they started off. Some heat, some need for technical riding over rocks and even a traffic jam to add to the constant stress of whether they would pass each water point before its cut-off time, not to mention the cut off time at the end of the day. However, Malherbe stressed that all stages were “brutal and unpredictable”. A kind marshall let them off the hook at one on gruelling Stage Five that involved climbing more than 2 000m in a day, performing a compulsory portage descent in an environmentally protected area among mud and rocks — only to hear at the end of the stage, to their relief, that the cut-off time had been extended anyway.