HaydenWilson

Hey all. last night (26/08/2011) my giant brass F/N C20C0881 and my giant Rock F/n GH8X7830A were stolen out from under my car port in emmarentia. If anyone see's a random riding a dirt jump bike please hit them with a car and deposit the corpse at 24 caledon road emmarentia or contact me on 072 232 4288. thanks Hayden

as to where in the richtersveld. mostly on the western side near sendelingsdrift but we went through to de hoop. could not get into namibia because you need a proof of ownership of the vehicle you are driving and as it was a varsity vehicle we did not have that..

Basically updating the floristic data for the region. we are working on trees which accumulate metals (very cool work, using trees to suck up pollution). the trees we are working on are found all over the northern cape but they interbreed with an exotic species from china. so what we need to do is find out where in South africa you can find the indigenous ones, where are the introduced ones and what do the hybrids look like and where are they. this basically resulted in me doing 5700km of driving on dirt roads in obscure places.... made me happy..

Hey all! I was recently doing some varsity field work in the northern cape and i had the joy of going through helshoogte pass in the richtersveld. Beautiful! but as i was lumbering around in my varsity sponsored 4X4 i could only think about how much fun that would be to do on a MTB! Has anyone here done it? if so which route would you take? i am thinking of doing helshoogte from the sendelingsdrift and then heading back via akadas pass. looks amazing!

Blast. wrote this epic thing and everyone beat me to it...

the easiest way to lose weight is to do the daily kilojoule count. if kilojoules burnt (By excercise or just living) is higher than the number of kilojoules you consume then the energy you have just expended has to come from your bodies reserves. (unfortunately your body can digest muscle as well as fat). Lower your kilojoule intake, maintain the excercise then something should happen! if your kilojoule intake is about what you are burning from excercise then your weight will remain the same (although it is likely that it will be redistributed, with me it went from my belly to my shoulders) one of the depressing things for me is how much you actually need to excercise to burn off the meal you just ate. if you consider that there are about 35000 kj in 1 kg of human fat then that is the number of kilojoules that you need to burn in order to lose that kg. Apparently in order to maintain a body weight of 80kg then the reccomended daily kilojoule intake is roughly 11780kj for a male. (http://www.bizresources.biz/KPD/PMP/body/weightloss.htm)Your excercise routine will affect your metabolism however. a slow metabolism is very good at converting food into fat and a fast metabolism is decidedly inefficient. thus people with fast metabolisms can get away with eating more. Hope that helps! you have burnt 240 000kj so far! thats over 410 beers that you have worked off!

Hey! I was there over the weekend (Splashy! wooo!) and it was seriously windy and quite wet in the late afternoon, was hiking halfway up the pass and got caught in the rain . so if you are going to hit it try and do it early! beautiful place tho! i saw quite a few mountain bikers heading up from himeville so i am sure you will be able to meet up with a crowd there. also as you drive into underberg just before the spar there is a sign for mountain biking trails, and if you go to the underberg info centre you can get a free pocket guide for the area that lists a few seperate mountain bike trails to do.

Ahh i like that a lot! keep it up!

WHAAAAAAA! really hope he is doing something awesome!

Oh pooh. maybe the gaurds will be nice... thanks for letting me know!

Hey everyone! A bunch of us want to go and ride at rietvlei farm tomorrow morning. what time does it open for people to go riding? my friends and i want to ride at first sparrow fart ( ie 6:00) and we do not want to head out early if we cant get into the place. Cheers!

anyone dirt-jumping this friday?

Thanks for the Reply Guys! I will forward a picture as soon as i get the bike back. I was in my heaviest gear and landed pretty straight. it did get snarled in my spokes which did cause it to snap off. so i guess thats good cos it meant my spokes and derailleur did not break. but why it wound up doing that i am not sure. the guys at mikes bikes are super perplexed and have a suspicion that it might be the spring on my derailleur which was not tight enough to prevent the chain from slackening on impact, resulting in the arm of the derailleur bending and getting snarled in the spokes. As far as i know i had everything set up tightly and correctly for some serious jumping. @ The_Break thanks for the offer mate! If this latest attempt at a fix by sorting out chain tension does not work then I will forward you a piccie and we can try and come up with a solution. maybe i should just cut out a wide circle out of perspex mount that between my gears and the spokes at the back and then there is no way the derailleur will impact the spokes?

So this evening i snapped off the derailleur on my Giant brass. Again. I was not even taking a particulaly Big Drop! the first time i did it i did it doing a bunny hop! has anyone else had this problem and does anyone know how to beef up the mounting bracked on this damn thing so that this stops happening? I cant beleive that giant could place such a weak component on a bike that is designed to be abused doing street and dirt jumping? why use a stock component which breaks and results in deraileurs intimately involved in your bicycles spokes when they could have easily adjusted the dropout on the frame to accomodate a beefy mounting bracket? AAAAARGH makes me angry. any advice as to how to prevent this would be greatly appreciated. short of not jumping my dirt jump bike that is.

I heard that there is a DH track on the linksfield ridge. i am looking for more entry level tracks that i am less likely to die on but are more slope orientated than places like rietvlei farm and MTN. would linksfield be appropriate to learn on? or should i rather head to places like helderkruin or the fort in pretoria?

I keep pepper spray about my person. however most of the mugging type situations i have been in the guys are only interested in the objects of value about your person. ie watch, bicycle, cell phones, wallet, jewelry etc. i have never been mugged on a bike but i have on many occasions when rock climbing. (Tied to cliff face! no way i can run without dropping climbing partner! sucked!) mostly if you do not have objects of value they grumble and leave you alone. One thing that you need to remember is that muggers are also terrified at the time of the mugging and so things can get really nasty very quickly. once 9 of us got mugged while climbing one of our number tried to defend himself and the guys all pulled out guns and held them to our heads. fortunately the guy that tried to defend himself managed to break the muggers grip and run away before he got shot! they then took our cell phones and wallets and waltzed off. So yeah. no objects of value is tthe moral of the story i guess. I now only carry ancient cell phones as i do not mind if they are removed. which is seldom. mostly muggers laugh.

dude i totally agree! the climbing system is great cos its gradual and the grade actually makes sense according to the number of difficult moves that need to be made. applying that to mountain biking should not be too difficult either! maybe slope angle, dropoff size, slope stability etc could be used to establish grades? i know a lot of it is subjective depending on rider skill but the climbing method gets over that so i do not see why it cant be applied to mountain biking. it would also be good for those of us who have weak frames and do not want to snap them. Ie nothing over a 23 as that is the grade that you need to start using either a dirt jump or freeride frame...

Dude let her do it! music video's are such a pain in the arse and directors are sooo anal there is almost no time for participants in the music video to actually talk to each other. my G.F was in one of isochronos's video's and she said it was just seriously tiring. could be good for your girls career however if she does any modelling or anything like that. people are far more willing to pay girls more money if they have some experience with a camera pointed at them. and its also exposure which is worth its weight in gold. Trust her. will build her confidence and generally be good.

or a big tree! but essentially i am trying to find out what the limits of my bike are and what is considered as safe to ride with an entry level hard-tail.

I have a stock standard giant rock.

Hey all! i have recently started to seriously enjoy my mountain biking and would like to eventually get involved in free-riding. I went today and found out that my bike is not at all suited to it and is likely to break soon. i have been doing a number of trails and they all have different colours assigned to them according to difficulty. what do they mean and what colour trails should one stay off if you only have an entry level hard-tail mtb? Just want to save my bike until i can afford a better one! i am currently doing things like down the side of melville koppies in joburg and some jumps (About 4-5 foot) and blue routes at rietvlei farm. any advice would be amazing