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ANNIKA LANGVAD: Copenhagen is a very bike friendly city.
You can't really go anywhere here
without meeting enough people using the bike as a transport.
I love jumping on my city bike and just riding around town
and going for a coffee, going to buy some nice bread.
You can find a lot of good stuff around the city,
and I like living here.
In the winter time, I ride a lot on my road bike
just to collect a lot of base miles.
The Danish winters are really wet, cold, and dark,
and it can be awful to train outside.
So I need to do something a little bit more alternative,
like for example, go running stairs at the hospital.
Normally, I would run to the 16th floor
and take the elevator down and repeat that 10 times.
Within one session, you can get in 700 or 800 altitude meters
from just running stairs.
So even though we have no mountains,
we can still cram in some altitude meters.
That the weather is so bad in the winter time in Denmark
has a lot of advantages in the way
that a stage at the Cape Epic, where
I have to spend five hours in sunshine
seems easier, because in Denmark, I
spend five hours on a bike in cold and rain.
On those really, really tough and wet and hard sessions
in December where weather, I guess,
just really bad to train in, I would just
think, OK, soon I'll be riding in sunshine.
And I start to count down the bad training sessions
till I can fly to South Africa to Stellenbosch, which
is the last part of my preparation
for the entire season actually.
Four years ago, I never thought that I would
be racing my bike in Africa.
The conditions here are incredibly tough.
The ground is super dry.
You breathe this hot air the entire time.
It's just so draining on your body.
You get dehydrated.
It's like 40 degrees out there.
It couldn't actually be more different than Denmark.
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Cape Epic is getting really close now.
Training here in Stellenbosch.
Today, I had some uphill intervals on the schedule.
Pretty hard.
I already had some solid training days behind me,
so slowly I start feeling it in my legs.
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There's a lot of pain involved in winning a race like the Cape
Epic.
You sit on your bike for five or six hours a day,
and you just get extraordinarily tired.
You never know what could happen in a race like the Cape Epic.
First of all, you have to do you five or six hours a day
for a week, which is really hard.
You have to be very efficient at working together
with your partner.
You have to be very good at fixing
whatever can happen out there.
You have to prepare yourself for anything, actually.
We worked so hard to get that victory,
so even though we actually looked quite dominant,
we still raced our hearts out every single day.
I have a huge passion for racing now,
because the highs and the lows you experience racing at world
level, I don't think you can find the same range of emotions
anywhere else in life.
Right now, we're in Jonkershoek in Stellenbosch.
We're having a little bit of an uphill and downhill competition
today.
Well, I can't really compete against the guys,
but still it's great fun just to ride with them.
It's very inspiring, actually, to see
how they tackle the trail.
I just automatically start copying what they do,
and it's actually great training.
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I'm really looking forward to the Cape Epic this year.
I've done the race twice before and also won it twice before.
So once again, the pressure is on.
It would be amazing to win again,
but you never know what happens.
It's a different level every year,
so you can't ever relax wherever you are.
You have to go let out every single day.
We just give everything we have.