Dawn Patrol

Because the Transformative Power of the Stupid-early Ride Makes Your Whole Day Awesome.

- Jonathan Ancer

THE VAMPIRE RIDER

There’s early; there’s extremely early; and then there’s Neville Cragg early. (You could say he wakes up at the Cragg of dawn.) He gets up in the dark – and sometimes comes back after a three-hour ride, and it’s still dark.

“I have a job and a family; and if I want to see my kids in the evening, riding at night is not an option,” says Cragg, who is a competitive cyclist and a prolific Instagrammer (@bikemob_sa).

Cragg first started riding as late as 6.30am. Then, as he needed to do longer and longer training rides, he started riding earlier – 6am, then 5.30, then 5. Now, his normal ride time (and ‘normal’ is a relative term) is 4.30am, with more than the occasional 3.15am start.

“If I ride at 3.15am I can do a 100km ride, come home and shower, and still take the kids to school,” he says, reasonably.

According to Cragg, the only negative about pre-dawn riding is that it’s not necessarily safe to ride alone, and thus he depends on other people being available at an ungodly hour. However, he adds, it’s amazing how many people do ride that early.

“We have various meeting points, and pick up different crews along the route – by the time we’re all rolling, we have a decent-sized bunch.

“The benefits of dawn-patrol rides are significant. The wind is quieter in the morning – Cape Town mostly only gets blowing in the afternoon. And there are hardly any cars. Traffic is manic in daylight hours, and motorists get increasingly irate with cyclists; but in the early morning, because there are virtually no cars on the road, we can have a continuous tempo ride – which is much more productive, training-wise, than a stop-start ride in traffic.”