Bonking. It’s not such a good idea to mention this in polite company, unless you’re amongst cyclists. You’ll find that “bonking” means something quite different to these athletes. Whilst for most of us (in the correct circumstances) the idea of “a bonk” would normally be welcomed, for the cyclist it’s something to be avoided.

I used to understand “the bonk” as a sensation felt by a competitor towards the end of a Tour de France stage, where all the glycogen or fuel stores in their muscles has been exhausted. They’ve hit what marathoners call “the wall”. They are basically out of gas*.

For many years I commuted by bike between Twickenham (in West London) and Fleet Street. I would ride hard and fast. I knew nothing about modulating effort or recovery. And this intensity of a monotonous daily activity, I now understand, led to overtraining syndrome.

On occasions I’d cycle home late in the evening, perhaps delayed by a transatlantic conference call. I’d have eaten a chocolate bar (usually Snickers) earlier in the afternoon. By halfway, where I crossed the Thames at Putney Bridge (the famous start of the Boat Race) I was in an unexplained state of collapse, as if I had rowed stroke to the Mortlake finish for the Oxford eight. My head was light, my legs were leaden, like I was pedaling through treacle. Ready to faint, I’d dash to the nearest gas station and stuff my face with potato chips*.

I used to joke that these episodes were “the bonk”, thinking that I was probably misusing the term. Because how could 6 miles pretty much on the flat equate to a professional stage over the French Alps? However, while reading Art De Vany’s blog only a few weeks ago, I saw the term “bonk” applied to just such a modest implosion, and it gave me pause. It seemed to be saying something about my metabolism which confirmed a growing intuition that I had been, was, or was becoming, somewhat insulin-resistant.

The really bad part of all this is that there are a lot of high insulin people out there who can “bonk” from low blood sugar if they don’t get their carb hit. And then after the hit wears off, they may “bonk” again. They may be driving when this happens and are easily angered and lose concentration. They can be a danger to themselves and others when this happens. I would bet a fair number of auto accidents could be traced to blood glucose/insulin surges.”

And when you’re on a bike, you don’t want to meet those people coming the other way.

So, since Christmas I’ve been trying to apply De Vany’s paleo diet strictures (which have informed some of my thinking for a while now) with much greater observance. The effects on my current health — as far as I can determine — have been tangible, and arguably dramatic.

Way back in those glorious days when I used to dash home on my hand-built pillar-box red Condor racing bike, with its 27 gleaming Campagnolo gears (see below) I figured out a strategy to see off the bonk.

I called it “bringing the banana forward”. This terminology caused much mirth among my Canadian in-laws at the time. But I’d realised one thing about diet through this experience: the mid-afternoon Snickers bar was the principal cause of this strange loss of fuel-supply by late evening. I cut that out and ate a banana just before leaving the office instead. But that did not immediately do the trick. I guessed this was because, depending on how ripe a banana is, it can break down into sugars quite slowly. Timing the banana became an obsessive-compulsive ritual ahead of my evening departure. I eventually solved the problem by eating the banana a little earlier – i.e. bringing the banana forward.

Now, what De Vany’s blog was describing was in the context of hypoglycaemic episodes. The essence of much of this is that you don’t have to be diagnosed diabetic to experience wild swings in energy, attention, and perhaps even consciousness. In short, too many carbs at the wrong time can drive you bananas.

* I have self-consciously americanized this post, so apologies to all my British readers who expected to see the words “petroleum spirit” and “crisps”.

Photo credits: banana -eko- , campag: knackeredhack

The winners of the seventeenth annual awards, organised by Improbable Research, include:

• Chemistry: Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Centre, Japan, for developing a way to extract vanillin (a vanilla flavouring) from cow dung

• Medicine: Brian Witcombe of Gloucester, and Dan Meyer of Antioch, Tennessee, for their report in the British Medical Journal about the occupational hazards of sword-swallowing

• Peace: the Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, for instigating research on a chemical weapon to make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other (the “gay bomb”)

• Aviation: Patricia V Agostino, Santiago A Plano and Diego A Golombek of Argentina, for the discovery that Viagra aids jetlag recovery in hamsters

• Nutrition: Brian Wansink of Cornell University, for exploring the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup

All that leaves me feeling surprisingly peckish. For further details of a special commorative ice-cream, designed especially for the occasion (yes, you guessed – vanilla, but with a twist!), plus a series of FREE lectures tomorrow (Saturday 6th October), head straight for the horse’s mouth. Neither treat will be accessible to you if you are outside Massachusetts, unfortunately.

Update Whoops, looks like we lost a paragraph in the original edit.

The good people at TED, who run conferences for very clever people about even more clever people who can do presentations without Powerpoint, are promoting a great project called Pangea Day that is all about citizen film-making, or ordinary people making films. The objective is world peace through video. Easy.

Anyway, Pangea Day wants to bring together a whole bunch of video-makers in a big celebration next May aimed at reducing cultural disconnects by empowering real people to tell real stories through film. This is a global do-good thing, not a comedy gangsta rap thing (see below). The celebration looks like being a Live Aid/YouTube mashup.

So the people at TED have asked that we help this video go viral. Go here to view, comment and recommend Pangea Day on YouTube. For more information on how to participate and the full presentation from the project’s founder — documentary-maker and TED prize-winner Jehane Noujaim — visit the Pangea Day website.

And if that’s too serious for a Friday, here is that gangsta rap video on the subject of fresh fruits.This video is slightly rude, so if you are more arch than the Knackered Hack, don’t go there. To protect your limbic from the offensive material — which has generated a rather dubious lawsuit against the two brothers who made the video — here is the refrain:-

It’s all about the produce produce, we don’t like to kid
It’s the lower middle portion of the food pyramid.”

And here’s one for the evolutionary fitness crowd .

They call me razor blade because I cut veggies with precision and skill.
I cut the roots off arugula, Italian parsley, and sometimes dill”