AngryAustrian

Looking at some of these pictures.... Do they really make you attached those stupid mountain bike style number boards to your handle bars in this race?? Idiotic.

With regards to insurance, I know my cyclessure policy has some add on event insurance if you cannot participate. Not sure the T&C of that and if it would pay in this case but may be worth looking into if you have bike insurance.

You can have mine

So a couple of weeks ago I took the plunge and bought a stages power meter. My issue is that I cannot seem to find a road long enough with a steady enough gradient and no traffic lights to actually do an FTP test on. Do you just do it and assume in the real world you will have undulations, wind etc or adjust for terrain? Also not sure about this whole 20m -5% story. I'm not sure I could hold for an hour what I can do for 20m less 5%?

Stunning. Where is this? Reminds me of Austria...

Amazon only ship the bracket to my address, not the light for some reason. Will have a look around. Giant actually make a very nice light for aero seat posts. Bought one for my madone which doesn't fit on my new bike ... Wanna swap [emoji16]

Where did you find this? Available in JHB?

So it's time to lather on the sun tan lotion and again and I realised I need to stock up. Until now I've been using whatever's in the cupboard which happens to be Nivea. It's pretty decent, not too thick so it's easy to apply and seems to last. What do you guys use/recommend.

http://www.jetlineactionphoto.com

Once again: "sorry we're out of goody bags, but had some this morning". How difficult is it to have the number of goody bags matching the number of entries. Rant over.

I've been fighting with them for over a week now, sent them 3 mails and although I got an initial reply, still not fixed: 1.) Time for Lost City is duplicated, and in my case used twice in calculation. 2.) Winning time for Dischem is wrong - 2.07.00 vs the actual winning time of 2.35.49. This was also an error on Racetec's site but that was fixed a week ago. 3.) For the Serengeti they have 2.23.16 but the winning time was 2.29.30 (although there were some tandems that finished before that but I don't think they count and the best was still not 2.23.16) Result is that my seeding which, by my calculation, should be around 15-16 is now sitting on 18. Maybe if more people mail them they will get off their backsides...

Only races that still count are D2D & Rand Water

pedalpower.org.za Last year I only had the 66k Lost City and a disgusting time in the 110k Rand Water to count towards my seeding and (after a re-seeding request) managed to start in L. Not a great group to start in and no bunch to speak of but at lest it wasn't too late...around 8h30 if I remember

Beta is supposed to be the difficulty rating, the lower the Beta the easier the race.supposedly. From the site: Formula to calculate an index for a result is: ((((Time / Winner) – 1) / Beta) x 100) + Penalty Where [Time] is your time for the event, [Winner] is the time of the winner (sometimes adjusted) [beta] is a number that indicates the difficulty of the conditions where more than 1 means windy or hilly and less means flat or calm [Penalty] is a number that gets added to the index usually for the time that has passed since the event (more than 5 months old) [Weighting] is the percentage of your total index made up by that particular ride

Thanks, that leads me to my next question. I've just had a look at my seeding on the website and besides the fact that they have listed the Lost City twice and used it both times for the calculation, where the heck do they suck that beta index from??? 0.78 for Lost City is just nonsense, no way that was an easy race. Yes it's flat but more then half of it was single file into the wind/crosswind. That's compared to 1.08 for the Dis-chem and 0.91 for the Fast One both of which were easy in my opinion. I would much rather have a couple of hills and freewheel down the other side than non stop effort on a windy flat.