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Can anyone out there verify if this scheduled court appearance is still on for 29 Jan ?

I can highly recommend Dr Wouter Basson (yes, that one) - he runs full blood work and can do VO2Max testing on a bicycle for you.

Same same

For a small fee I will do practically anything LOL.

Minimum: Cholesterol Total LDL HDL Triglycerides Glucose Fasting HbA1c If your plan allows it or you have funds, the below provide a range of insights, but may not be necessary for an initial screening Us-CRP S-uric acid Insulin Fasting G:I Ratio Quicki Index APO - A1 APO - B APO B/A1 Risk Vit D (25 OH) Testosterone - Total Free T4 S-TSH PSA

Take carbs, otherwise you are going to BONK big time.

Good question, Dale and it sounds as if this is one of the issues that SSI is currently grappling with ! The literature on this is quite sparse and although I also thought of it as a roughly 4 - 6 month adaptation, it would now appear that this is only one part of the adaptation - and to keep it simple, let's just say this is muscle adaptation, where you form new mitochondria that are more efficient at burning fat for fuel. However what happens in the rest of the body and in the liver in particular is somewhat of a mystery, it would appear. The various energy cycles that are driven by specific hormones seem to take a lot longer to adapt, hence the term "reprogramming your genes" being bandied around. I think "complete adaptation" to the point where your body will be able to keep up with Glycogen / Ketone demands under any type of exercise intensity will take several years, and I guess the ultimate test would be to have said adapted athlete perform at above VO2Max levels for an extended period (in my mind certainly well over 2 hours, but probably closer to e.g. 5 hours). I am not an endurance athlete and I have never participated in any of the really long distance or ultra events, but just for general interest, are there any such athletes on this forum who could shed light on what their typical performance levels (HR, exertion, effort, etc) is during such a long-distance event ? I am now referring to running as opposed to cycling - do you run for e.g. 5 hours at below VO2Max, or would that be well above VO2Max ? I am asking this because I suspect that many of the elite ultra athletes are probably adapted to the point where they can manufacture enough energy from fat only to last several hours - but this would be from years training at those levels.

Welcome and much good luck. What you are feeling is "carb flu" and IF you are feeling this it means that you have restricted your carb intake low enough for your body to start showing withdrawal symptoms. Now just watch out for your body's "junkie mentality" to kick in as it tries to convince you that one more pie or one more sweet won't be bad for you. My advice is to not waste your money on a ketone meter. I have one and I use it once in a blue moon just as a control - the strips for this meter are helluva expensive too. Rather order some ketostix from someone like @flexia (PM her, she's on The Hub) and use that to get you going. A purple indication on that stick shows you that you are in the right zone and that's really all you need to know ! Keep us posted on progress and shout if there is anything that you need help with, there is a lot of collective experience and sometimes even wisdom on this thread

This was indeed a takeaway from Jeroen Swart's talk the other night - the whole low-GI thing is indeed quite pointless. Under exercise, when glycogen is depleted, you want those stores replenished NOW. A low-GI supplement merely prolongs this process, while something like table sugar would probably be a better option in a case of emergency. Two things that assist with the absorption of carbs in the gut / replenishment of glycogen stores are salt and caffeine. Hence the salt content in some energy preparations and this is why cycling and coffee go together so well. He agreed that the best top-up would be a GU type gel. According to JS (and many in the industry) the all time greatest energy replenisher is still Coca-Cola - it contains sugars in almost the perfect combination of fructose : dextrose as well as at the right dilution and with a helping of caffeine with that. I guess that's why, when you bonk, that Coke at the cafe on the corner has always been the lifesaver ! The truth is that during exercise your insulin production is practically shut down as your body is using the adrenal hormones to shuttle nutrition to the cells as fast as possible - he also mentioned that if you are carb sensitive or a Type 2 diabetic, to stop using carbs about 45 min before the end of the ride, so that you don't end up with excess carbs when you finish your ride. Of further interest was his debunking of the myth around eating muesli or raisins just before or during a race - some of the contents (like raisins) take up to 24 hours to digest so they will have almost no effect on your carb stores during a race, but because of how your body shuts down blood supply to the gut, these may end up causing major gastric discomfort....

SO... let's keep pushing, everyone. One of us is bound to find the answer or the key... or perhaps we just need to doggedly keep pushing the envelope ? Very cool to hear the experiences of new contributors to this thread and I think we can collectively agree that if nothing else, we can indeed ride for longer with less fuel already !

Roux, also remember that the glycogen in muscles only fuel those muscles, it cannot be shuttled to other muscles or other parts of the body. Once that is used up, the only store for glycogen is the liver, and that supplies all the muscles, organs and the brain, so guess which one of those will override the command centre when the stores are running low

When you run out of glycogen you will bonk yes, and in the worst instance your brain will shut down your body in order to protect itself (the brain) thus ensuring that it has what remains of glycogen for itself. When you become fat adapted, your ability to replenish your glycogen from fat stores becomes more efficient, but from current data (in this group) apparently not efficient enough to keep up with the body's demands for glycogen at high levels of exertion. My contention remains that with enough adaptation we should be able to reach a "tipping point" where the fat metabolism can indeed keep up with this demand, even at maximum continued effort. But I guess this is a little like the "Holy Grail" of low-carbing and the question is probably more around how much time we will need to get there and at what levels of intensity (and for how long) we will need to train to achieve this. I can certainly say from my own efforts that where I used to bonk at almost exactly 90 minutes, I can now ride for much longer (agreed not at max effort) before I get to a point where I can feel a bonk coming on, but by "surfing the bonk" you can allow your fat metabolism to catch up enough to give you more fuel, so what I do is I tap off until I feel the energy coming back and then pick up the pace again. Do this enough times and you start shifting this deeper and deeper into the ride. Again, this is not something that one should do under race conditions, but rather under controlled conditions in a training environment. I hear everyone saying "we tried this" but I guess the point I make (with tongue in cheek at times) is "have we tried hard enough ?". Who knows what we are really capable of ? edit: and what I wanted to say was that one of the keys must be to always ensure that there is some glycogen left in the store...

jcza, that is the "classic" timeframe for your body to burn up the available liver glycogen (you store about 100g and you burn it at a rate of about 60g/hour at threshold exercise). So... it could either mean that you are not properly fat adapted (which should buy you a few more minutes) or that you guys in the North just don't byt vas for long enough ... I will now remove my tongue from my cheek...

I just need to correct the statement - he did not say train WITHOUT carbs, he says start your training in a fasting state, then add carbs for an increased training adaptation. He was unequivocal that one should use carbs to race as fat actually slows you down (if not fat adapted) due to the lag in the metabolic process and the fact that you feel more tired because of that. He also showed a nice graph of what happens if you take carbs too close to the start of the race - he cited about an hour to two before the race being the optimal time for carb ingestion as that results in a stable BG level, insulin nice and low and adrenals firing properly.

The point JS made last night is that there is a huge training adaptation that takes place when training in a fasting state - so much so that he has several of the athletes that he is coaching on this regime. So there may be much more than just a weight-loss benefit !