Team First Ascent Cyanosis raced the 130 km Kinetic Full Moon this Saturday eve with regular team members Clinton Mackintosh and Ryno Griesel and the addition of super Steve ! Steve Saunders from EMT (Equipment Motivated Training), dear friend, super athlete, navigator and our team contact with our sponsor Suunto wriststop computers.

Although Steve has raced competitive AR quite a few years back, he was once again re-united with his passion for AR this weekend - SO WATCH THIS SPACE ! Ask him about EMT and Suunto at the next event.

For full details about the event visit : http://www.kineticgear.co.za/Kinetic/KineticFullMoonAdventure/tabid/15807/Default.aspx

Stephan, Heidi and team once again put on an unforgettable race experience, with the four winter paddle legs with 3 big guys on a Fluid Synergy and the 50km cycle at minus 3 degrees standing out as highlights to me.

We managed a 5th overall finish, officially 4th and second all male to finish. We started at 13h00 on Saturday and finished around 6am on Sunday morning.

Well done to team Red Ants (winners and mixed) and team Olympus (closely second and winners of all male category) on leaving the rest of us in your dust.

The team (Alex Pope, Jane Swarbreck and Ryno Griesel) managed a win in the mixed category of the Kinetic sprint #2 on Sunday 30 May 2010 in a fast time of 1h19min, an odd 7 minutes behind the winning male team of USN (Brian Gardner, Ryan Hordiene and Piers Pierow), thus claiming a respectable second place overall.

The closest competetitors in the mixed category came in at 1h41min, and the third overall team came in on 1h32. 

For full results and reports visit www.kineticgear.co.za
Photos coutesy of the team Captain and professional photographer : Nicholas Mulder



Alex (front), Jane and Ryno on one of the 2 paddles


Left : Alex leading the team into the obstacle course
Right : Jane waiting patiently for Ryno to overcome his fear of heights :-)




Running into the finish : from left - Ryno, Alex, Jane


Winning smiles

... but the "view" from the summit of achieving anything worth-while in life makes up for it.

I had the coldest cycle this morning in a long time on the road (since Portugal ARWC) and enjoying a post ride coffee and I thought i'd share some philosophical "views" from my berg trip a weekend or so ago with Susan around the sentinal area.


This is what I live for.



The single track (left) up to Sentinal... the start of the DGT


Two rainbows post thunderstorm


View of the road up to the Sentinal car park



Watrefall lower down amonst the foothills of Royal Natal
park.

I raced the MTN Panorama tour (Road bike) over the last weekend (24-27 April 2010).www.panoramatour.co.za with my good friend Alfred Horne from Hatfield Cycles.
This road event was made more "adventerious" by wet and misty conditions over the whole weekend.

On our pre-ride on Friday 23 April 2010 we got rained on quite a bit, but for the rest of the days we only got slight drissle, but enough to leave the roads wet and slippery on the downhills...

One of the tandem competitors clocked over 100km/h on one of these wet downhills !! Crazy ?

I can really recommend this event to all - was great, and the road cycling is good base training for mountain biking and adventure racing.

I attach the profiles of the stages : check out of the 24.3km "time trail" on day 4 !