Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Brazil. Viet Nam. Tahiti. Willard?

Sherwood_hills



I had a pretty good race on Saturday.  I felt much stronger than last week at Solitude, probably because I had been riding instead of fly fishing all week.  Normally I really like the race course at Sherwood Hills.  It’s got lots of tight, twisty singletrack through dark woods.  The trees are so thick that in many places you can be 20 seconds behind someone and not know it because you can’t see them.  I also like the absence of white-knuckle descents, which are a weakness of mine, but this year the race was one month later in the year so the course was really dusty.  I almost crashed at the start when the dust got so thick that I literally could not see any of the trail.  I could only see the rider in front of me from the waist up.  In other places the trail was so rutted that my back wheel was more useful as a rudder than a wheel for getting me through. 



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Mags raced in the Sport Women category on Saturday too.  She was worried about coming in last because it was only her second race ever, but she finished third out of five.  She was a few minutes behind Bob’s wife, Lyna.  Could this be the next exciting chapter in the Saffell/Harris rivalry



At the starting line I chatted with Rich and my teammate Aaron about Bart’s new sponsor, Mona Vie.  It’s another of those special juice blends that’s meant to make you live forever.  This one is made from the acai berry of Brazil, and yes, it’s marketed with a multi-level business plan.  I won’t go on about multi-level marketing today because I’ve done that elsewhere, but I do have a few things to say about fruit. 



At the starting line, Rich said that he thinks fruit is good for you, but that he thinks apples and oranges are just as good as acai berries from Brazil.  I would also add that they’re as good as gac from Viet Nam, noni from Tahiti and mangosteen from Asia, which are all key ingredients in locally based multi-level marketing scams to cure everything from gout to cancer.



Cherries



I should add that after the race Mags and I stopped at a U-Pick cherry farm and picked 84 lbs of tart cherries for canning, baking and drying.  The 79 year old cherry farmer told us that he is as healthy as he is (he did look like he was in his early 60s) because he’s been farming and eating cherries for 60 years.  He even had some literature to back him up.  Did you know that cherries are rich in melatonin?  Neither did I, but apparently it’s a powerful antioxidant. 



So what’s the difference between local cherries that are 50 cents a pound and superfruits from exotic lands that cost upwards of 30 dollars a liter?  Marketing.  It’s just too hard to make something as common as a cherry look chic. 



The point is that all fruit is good, but locally produced fruit is better because it costs less and requires fewer resources to get it to the consumer.  It usually tastes better too.  I’ve read that we should eat fruits and vegetables from the entire range of the color spectrum; from beets and strawberries to spinach and broccoli, to yams, to turnips to beans to blueberries to squash--all things you can buy at your local farmers market.  Throw in some whole grains and you’ve got the basis of a better diet than anything you can buy for 30 dollars a bottle. 



4 comments:

  1. Only if it is a friendly rivalry. I tasted some of that Xango stuff, I won a bottle at Soldier Hollow one wednesday night, tasted like total crap. People will believe anything so long as it points to an easier softer way, look how popular Optygen is in Utah, it is mushrooms, supplements make no sense to me, if I eat right, which means lots of fruits and veggies, i will be ok. Oh yeah I am starting a company called Saffruit, we make healing power Apple/Peach/Cherry juice from trees in our yard, only 100 bucks for 8 ounces. IT WORKS!

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  2. I've got a hundred dollars right here; send me a bottle of that Saffruit. You can guarantee that it will make me faster, right? Oh, and I've already got a network of friends ready to start buying the latest/greatest elixir from me--can I be a distributer? Cha-Ching!

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  3. I'm having a little "get together" at my house this weekend. We're going to talk about how you can save money AND make money, not to mention acheiving eternal life. Interested?

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  4. They have identified a drug called Resveratrol that has some solid anti-aging properties. It has significant effects on your metabolism. Red grapes are the highest fruit containing Resveratrol, red wine having even more. It may hit the MLM people at some point, but there are many credible people researching it right now.

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