Doubt. Fear. Worry. More doubt. And yet more worry. Sitting in the cab of a stranger’s bakkie, my bike in the back, it all seemed a little too much. A terrible ride, possibly my worst day on a bike, had been ended by a phone call from my brother telling me my mother had collapsed.
 

She was fine. My mother usually is. She’s a tough lady, but she’d walked into a room where she had placed one of those fumigators-in-a-can, but had forgotten about.
 

The fumes overwhelmed her and she fainted. I was sitting at the Home of the Chicken Pie on the road past Lanseria when I took the call, 77km into a long, tough Absa Cape Epic training ride that had me doubting my ability to complete one stage of the race, never mind eight days.

Our cars were at Broadacres, beside the KFC, where we had parked in the early morning. I rode with Gugu Zulu, the rally driver who will partner Financial Mail deputy editor Max Gebhardt at the Epic for Team Absa.

I was pushing hard, looking for the legs I hadn’t been able to find all day. Gugu was waving at bakkies and cars as they drove past, trying to flag one down. I barely noticed.
 

Then one stopped. Gugu explained about my mother and the need to get back quickly. The driver was Tom Barlow, a triathlete who had passed us earlier that day as we stopped for water. He was going to a coffee shop at Broadacres to sit and chill and study, but couldn’t pass by cyclists in need. He and Gugu knew each other, having ridden the Dam-to-Dam a few weeks before, a mountain bike jaunt from Emmarentia to Harties. Barlow put his foot down.
 

An SMS came from my brother. My mother was fine. She’d recovered and was okay. Then it hit me. It hits me now as I type this.

A wave of fear, of being overwhelmed by things you cannot control and doubt as to whether you have done enough or are strong enough to control the things you really should be able to.
 

I had no legs on Saturday as we headed out for what would be a 90km Absa Cape Epic training ride. They had estimated around seven hours, but it started as it was meant to finish. I crashed within 5km, the front wheel of the KTM Lycan sliding out as we ducked under a tunnel and hit some soft mud. Then, André Ross of Absa, the ride leader, felt his rear wheel flopping around.
 

A quick investigation showed the bearings may have given up. Two hours in, and after getting lost again, Jack Stroucken of Absa, my partner for the Epic and an experienced Epic rider, broke the chain on his old Giant.
 

We fixed it, but had forgotten to thread it properly. Then the new magic links wouldn’t fit. He free-wheeled down to Nikita’s Motel to wait for his son to pick him up.
 

And still my legs wouldn’t work. My heart rate went through the roof as I pushed trying to keep up on the climbs and even the flats, but my body, which usually takes an age to warm up, wasn’t interested. And when the body goes, the mind usually follows quickly.
 

I blew on almost every climb, inched down the descents and pushed when the rocks looked vaguely dangerous. Doubt. Doubt. Doubt. Max, an old friend, told me I may have been over-trained. I told him I doubted it. I doubted everything. Diteboho Khumalo suggested that it was just a bad day.
 

“There will be days like this,” he said. That’s what Letshego Moshoeu, Survivor runner-up and Gugu’s better half, was doing as she struggled up the climbs, mostly ahead of me.
 

By the time I was in front of a TV set for the Liverpool v United match, my mother had recovered fully. I, though, hadn’t. A black cloud of fret sat over me.

I tweeted about it. Kim Rose-Gershow of fittrack.co.za, who has mapped out my Epic programme, sent me a message telling me to trust in my training. Ali McLean of the Cyclelab SuperCycling club tweeted me the best bit of advice: “Go out and ride your favourite route, put some good tunes on your iPod and enjoy it. You’re allowed to have a bad day.”
 

On Sunday I did just that. There will still be doubt with the Epic just two months away. But there will be recovery.