Sniffie

I would say sub 3 Argus and sub 2h40 94.7 or perhaps sub 2h45 is about par.

I started in FF, riding for the Race 4 Better Hearing charity. A lady went down very hard about 150 m in front of me. She lay very still when I passed her.... It was not a pretty sight, really hope she is OK

Dust storm over the farm in western Freestate yesterday.

More pricey than Woolies? There is still quite a lot of non GM soya grown in SA AFAIK. It is just not kept apart from the GM soya.

I have been keen on trying some home made mayonnaise, but a lot off recipes on the internet suggests using grain oils like sunflower or canola, which I am not to keen on. Organic virgin olive oil on the other hand apparently gives the mayonnaise a strange not so lekker taste. What would be a good alternative? Was thinking of avocado oil as it's ratios WRT MUFA's, PUFA's and saturated fatty acids are comparable to that of OVOO. What's more avocado oil has quite a neutral taste.

Thanks HTone! Although I don't measure BG, wrt to weight I have had similar experiences. I would love to continue using it as it is supposedly one of the best probiotics one can take, and cheap as dirt!

He can be a bit grumpy at times! Mate off mine talked to him on Tuesday regarding W2W. Did not like the trails to much, not sure why. Perhaps just not as good as Great Wall My China, Sollie's Folly, mineshaft, kirstenbosch etc etc.

If you get to know him, he is one of the nicest and funniest ouks.

Regarding home made dairy kefir: Any one including it in their diet? How much do you need for the full pro biotic effect? Any effect on blood glucose? With regards to weight since including it, up, down or stable. How far do you guys let it ferment before using it? Will kefir that has been fermenting for longer have less lactose and thus have a smaller effect on BG?

What did you guys think of the highlight package last night on SS8? I thought it was quite good. Something different from the traditional TV race report. I loved the input from Gary and Sollie and to see how B&B operates as a family enterprise. This one will go on my "to do again" list, especially after we missed part of day 2 and the dam crossing due to the high winds.

They do their own timing, chip is in the board. After a few hick-ups seems to be working perfectly now.

Name and shame?

1 February 2014.

Dale, I think you mean grain based oils, as corn is just another type of grain. The 'bad' oils is thus things like sunflower, canola, soybean, corn, wheat germ and peanut oil, as peanuts isn't a true nut but a legume.

A lot have been said on this forum in the last couple of posts about what paleolithic people ate and that most of it is conjecture. I would be the first to admit that it is impossible to say exactly what our paleolithic ancestors diet looked like, but like in any other science it is possible through clues available to us today to form a very educated opinion of what their diet looked like: 1. We may not know exactly what they ate but we know exactly what they did not ate. Grains as we know it today have not been part of the human diet before the age of agriculture which was around 10000 to 13000 years ago. In terms of our Homo. genus's evolutionary timescale of roughly 2 million years it is a very short time frame to adapt to a completely new ingredient in the diet. 2. By examining fossil records of middens of early paleolithic human settlement it is possible to determine what they ate. Off course not all the foodstuff left fossil records. 3. Looking at the diet of the few remaining hunter gatherer tribes that we modern humans studied over the past 400 years would give us a good clue what their, and our, paleolithic forefathers ate. 4. Nutritionists look at biochemical pathways to determine how our diet has changed over a period of roughly 5 million years since our evolutionary split from the rest of the apes began. For example there is enough evidence to suggest that during the past 2,5 million years these biochemical pathways has brought us closer to an animal based diet than a plant based diet. I am not saying we are pure carnivores, but we are omnivores who have adapted to eating a very mixed diet of animal and plants. 5. By examining the diet of other non extinct hominid species in the wild, like gorillas and chimps, we can also have a glimpse at what our diet must have looked like a million years ago. To suggest that stone age people only lived to 21 is also only half the truth and misleading. Yes, their life expectancy might have been 10, 20 or even 30 years less than ours, but you must remember 2 things: a. Life expectancy is just a number, an average of a certain population. It says nothing about the maximum age certain individuals reached, or even the distribution of age at death for that population. To illustrate my point: Childbirth during paleolithic times must have accounted for a lot of premature deaths, as would have a lot of other things we no longer see as huge causes of premature death: snakebite, insect stings, simple infections etc, etc. Hunting a wild boar, mammoth or any other big protein and fat provider would have accounted for a lot more premature deaths than a trip to your local deli. Fossil records indicate that individuals who survived childhood and puberty often reached ages in excess of 60 years and even much older. Furthermore their quality of life must have been great without modern lifestyle sicknesses like diabetes, cardiovascular ailments and certain cancers. b. If it were not for the advent of modern medicine our own life expectancy with our modern sedentary lifestyle and addiction to things like tobacco, sugar and alcohol would be much, much lower. So to think that stone age people's relative short life expectancy was as a result of a poor diet is very shortsighted. Just a word on venison and its supposed lack of fat. Yes, it is true that venison has much lower fat content than domesticated animals, but one must remember that hunter gatherer tribes ate virtually the whole carcass. Some species of antelope carry quite a lot of fat around the intestines, and that fat along with other fatty organs like the kidneys, liver, intestines, marrow and brains would have been devoured first. The "prime cuts" of our hunter gatherer forefathers don't even reach the shelves of your local butcher these days. Try to get your hands on some sheep offal these days! In Afrikaans we would say: "Skaarser as hoendertanne!" Some tribes like the Inuit would even discard, or feed to their dogs, lean cuts of meat in favor of the fat and blubber. I must go, I smell some offal potjie in the kitchen and I am salivating all over the keybord!

I started in H and did a 3h02. Had to do some work at the front during the first 50 km which hurt me later on. We picked up a lot of riders of earlier groups and had one massive bunch at one stage. It all fell apart in Happy Valley though. The last 30 km was a lonely grind to the end as I could not stay on the wheel of the young little mountain goat leading the H bunch up Harry Smith. Very hard but enjoyable race.

Geseed in HL! Enige kans vir 'n re-seeding? Ek het nie laas jaar gery agv rug operasie, maar in 2011 darem 'n 2:54 gery.

No

Here in the freestate platteland no such thing as a fishmonger. So it has to be tinned sardines or no sardines.

You are right on both accounts, but the whole debate is about temperature readings. For temperature readings to be comparable the world over meteorologists have devised protocols for recording this. Temperature readings are taken in the shade at 1.5 m above ground level. To be more accurate and comparable actually inside a stevenson screen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen Off course it will be warmer in the sun, maybe 20 oC or even more. If you put your garmin inside the stevenson screen the temperature would be much lower than on your handlebar in the sun, that is the point I am trying to make. Temperature forecasts on weather maps are for the temperature in the shade.

I am sorry if you think my intention was to befuddle anyone, far from it. Simple fact is if you ride with a garmin or any other device with a "sophisticated temperature sensor" on your handlebar or stem it will be in direct sunlight most of the time. This radiation from the sun will heat up the body of your device and this heat will be transferred to the sensor eventually. Common sense tell me that this temperature reading must me higher than that on a similar device left in the shade.

Yes it was wrong. Let me try to explain. (Excuse me if I have not got everything in my explanation spot on, it has been 29 years since I sat in the first year's physics class of Prof Lötz Strauss at TUKS.) Heat can reach the temperature sensor in your car in 3 ways namely conduction, convection or radiation. Now imagine sitting next to a campfire. If you hold on to the one end of a steel poker while the other end is in the fire you will after a little while feel the end in your hand heating up. This is conduction at work. Now hold your hands well above the flames. The heat you now feel is due to convection, it is warm air currents from the fire reaching your hand. Now stand some distance away from the fire. The heat you will still feel in your face is due to radiation. Same principles apply to the temperature sensor in your car: Where is the temperature sensor? Underneath some metal panel of sorts being baked by the sun, or somewhere beneath the bonnet picking up heat from any or all of the engine, radiator, gearbox, bonnet or ground whether the ground surface is tarmac, paving, gravel or sand. This picking up of heat can happen through one or all the processes of conduction radiation and convection . Could hardly be a true reflection of the real temperature. Manufacturers will obviously try to lessen the effects of these processes of heat transfer by trying a combination of things: 1. Using materials like ceramics or certain plastics which are not good conductors of heat to mount the sensor somewhere on the body. 2. By keeping the distance between the sensor and warm parts like body panels or engine or drivetrain parts as big as possible the effects of convection and radiation will be lessened. 3. Mounting the sensor in a well ventilated area will lessen the effects of convection. I think you can imagine that due to the construction of a car it is impossible to find the ideal spot where any possible outside influences on the sensor, except that of the real ambient temperature will be nullified. Once a car parked in the hot sun on a concrete or tarmac surface gets moving, and there is some kind of air flow around the temperature sensor, the influence of convection becomes less while the influence of radiation and conduction stays roughly the same and so the temperature registered by the sensor drops. It did not suddenly as if by magic got cooler when you started driving. I work outside all day and what's more I have an electronic weather station at home, recording daily minimums, maximums, barometric pressure etc, etc. I think after all the years I have a fairly good idea what 30 oC, 35 oC and 40 oC feels like. I also have vehicles with temperature sensors and I can correlate their readings with the weather station and that is how I know that a vehicle parked in the sun or even partial shade like under a tree will often register a reading of 15 oC higher than actual. I am not denying that it was very warm on Saturday, just not 40 oC. If it was 42 oC, and even hotter like you claim sometime Saturday, the local hospitals in Harrismith and Ladismith would have been flooded with heat stroke sufferers because even some off the non participating people and locals in the area would have contracted heatstroke. There is a reason why the army suspends training if temperature rises above 41 oC, and that reason is that it is downright dangerous, even for extremely fit and heat adapted young servicemen. Ask any of the men (or women) who did a stint of national service at some of the warmer places in South Africa like Oudtshoorn or Lohatla what 42 oC feels like. It is unbearably hot. Even the air that you breath feels warm in your lungs and everything, even plastic or wood that you touch feels warm because everything is at least 5 oC warmer than your core temperature. But hey, if you want to believe it was 45 oC and hotter over the weekend don't let me stop you! At least we are in agreement over the most important part of this thread and that is that Berg and Bush is one of the best events out there! And that most of us had the biggest jols of our lifes despite the heat, dust and wind! Big 's for all the organizers.

I started in D on day 1 and B on days 2 and 3, had lovely clear single track. Would occasionally catch a slightly slower guy but most guys would let you through as soon as it is safe to do so. Not sure about the situation in other batches though.

I agree whole heartedly with Fireface. Farmer Gary said on at least a couple of occasions during the weekend that berg & bush was designed as a test. A test of your conditioning, your technical ability and your equipment. What normally happens if someone fails in any of these departments is that they lose their sense of humor as well. Guys shouting and swearing at each other. Yes it was tough, warm, dusty, windy, etc, etc, this was how it was supposed to be and if you entered this event and expected anything less then maybe mountain biking is not for you. I say again hats off to Gary and his team! Excellent, we will be back.

+1!Amen brother.