CrankBrothers Candy SL Pedals – Review

My first experience with the CrankBrothers did not start well, but Lord did I want it too. I’ve long held them in the “jeeze, this stuff is cool” category, but it just wasn’t meant to be… At least not right away.

I had a birthday a few months ago where Smart had gifted me a beautiful pair of Candy SL pedals. As a long time SPD (Shimano) clipless rider, I was a little reluctant to toss the new ones on the bike, but they were just so purdy I couldn’t hold out for long.

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Ride with Gary Fisher!

Banned from cycling because his hair was too long, Gary Fisher started taking his bike off road and into the hills of Marin California. More than founder of Gary Fisher mountain bikes, he’s a founding father of Mountain Biking as we know it today, period.

He’s going for a ride May 9th and you could ride with him!

Gary Fisher at Mud, Sweat and Gears

Saturday, May 9, 2009
Begins: 1:49 pm

It’s more fun with friends…

For the past few months I’ve been test driving a social training site called Dailymile.

Claiming that “training is more fun with friends”, Dailymile allows you to share your workouts and connect with friends or contacts online and use them for motivation, challenge, or advice.

I for one definitely think they’re on to something (and it’s free!).

The list of ways you can enhance and track your training is fairly robust and from the few emails that I’ve batted back and forth with their developers, they have more exciting features up their sleeves as well. To give you an idea of the type of things you can manage through Dailymile, you can:

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Trials With Danny MacAskill

Sheldon and I may like to ride crazy distances through varying landscapes, but when it comes to the urban jungle, trials are where it’s at. In it’s simplest form mountain bike trials are where a rider negotiates a series of obstacles without their feet touching the ground, but as you can see in this video, at an elite level, there’s a little bit more to it ;-)

Soundtrack: The Funeral – Band Of Horses
Via: Singletrackworld

Drugs in Sport – No such thing as a level playing field

It’s only my opinion, but there is no such thing as a fair, or level playing field – not when you really get down to it. In the recent wake of the media mayhem surrounding Lance and the Tour, I sat around this weekend and gave it some thought, and in the realm of sports, amateur, professional or otherwise I couldn’t come up with any ironclad examples of truly pure, fair competition. Someone will always have an advantage of some kind, be that access to better training/coaching, better diet, better equipment, or enjoy better physical health and so on. Even something like home field advantage tips the scales of competition. Other factors like temperature, or altitude also factor in. If a team does its training session at sea level and then goes to play in Colorado, the mile high city, clearly they will be at a disadvantage to the team that plays and practices regularly in the thin air.

My point is, that short of cloning two identical teams and having them play in a kind of universal vacuum where every factor can be controlled and equalized, the concept of a level playing field just isn’t a reality. It’s a really nice thought, but that’s about it.

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Trash Talk Your Friends With the GT Gold Diggers

To promote their new Golden Race Series, GT has launched a new website that allows you to not only learn a little bit about their tongue-in-cheek elitist ‘Golden Bike’, but also taunt and chastise your friends using the ‘GT Gold Diggers’ cheer team.

For those unfamiliar with the Golden Race Series, GT has put their Golden Bike up for grabs at a number of races throughout the year – to the winner go the spoils. The catch? To keep the bike, you have to keep winning – Or, in the words of GT: “Winning the GT Golden Bike obligates you to defend your possession of it at the next Golden Race or forfeit it like a pansy.”

The nice thing is that this coveted prize is only available to non-pro riders and should you actually win the bike, GT will fly you and a friend to the next race to defend your title (they’ll even take care of your race fees). It should make for an interesting twist to this years race season.

As a fun viral piece, the GT Gold Diggers allow you to send a ‘smack-talk’ cheer to your friend – I’ve already forwarded it to a couple of my friends and figure you should do the same ;-)

You can learn more about the bike and the competition at GTisGolden.com

Heart Rate Monitor – Suunto X3HR

Something you start to get used to when you train a lot, is your training equipment takes a beating. My Schwinn stationary bike still works fine, but its frame has developed creaks and squeaks, while my A-frame mag trainer seems to be getting louder and louder as time goes by as well. Such is life. Nothing stays new forever and my heart rate monitor is not immune to this either. I picked up a Suunto T3 a while back and it’s been on my wrist on many-a-ride since. Banged up, scratched and starting to give me wacky hrt rate readings (is 17 bpm normal?) I decided to look for a replacement.

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The Anatomy of a Bike Race

Really great post from PezCycling going through the tactics and strategy behind winning on the pavement. The article(s) are a little long, but definitely worth the read if you want a better understanding of what goes into a road race.

From PezCycling:

Tactics and strategy in bike racing comes down to predicting how a particular race event might play out, and then deploying the best plan to achieve your team’s objectives. Some riders will go through years of racing without ever truly understanding the anatomy of a bike race, so let’s use our magic divining rod and read some tea leaves to understand the black art of deciphering bike races.

Bike Race Anatomy I »
Bike Race Anatomy II »

What’s your dream bike vacation?

As you cut through the clouds you look out the cabin window and see the Eiffel Tower tenderly reaching into the sky. The plane touches down and you’re quickly whisked to your hotel, shortly after which the custom pro-spec bike fitting begins.

You relax, breathe in the fresh Parisian air, unpack and get ready for dinner. Downstairs you see Carlos Sastre and the rest of the team lounging, waiting for you to arrive. After enjoying some light banter with the team you get ready for bed, you’ve got a big day after all…

Sounds to good to be true?

Not any more. Cervélo has just unveiled their TestTeam Travel packages. Now you can travel to some of the most exotic and exhilarating races around the world and experience them (almost) first hand. As Cervélo puts it “chatting with fans for a few minutes never cost anybody a race (unless they did it just before the finish line instead of after).”

Some of non-exaggerated highlights include:

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SPIN

SPIN – Sweat , Gears, and Techno Beats

Who hasn’t heard of SPIN class? For the longest time, this exercise phenomena, this exercise craze, seemed to me like little more than another late-night infomercial fad. Thai-Bo, Pilates, Hip-Hop Abs, or P90 X, they come and they go. But SPIN doesn’t appear to be fading away.

Leading up to the Transrockies, in my quest to arm myself with training/fitness knowledge, I have been continuously reading books specific to fitness and cycling. Joe Friel’s ‘The Cyclist’s Training Bible’, plus ‘The Mountain Bikers Training Bible’, Ned Overend’s ‘Mountain Bike Like a Champion’, and Ross’s ‘Maximum Performance for Cyclists’, to name a few, but when it comes to SPIN, one book stands out; Gina Kolata’s, ‘Ultimate Fitness’ painted the most vivid picture of what SPIN is about. In her book, she describes a SPIN program where her and her husband joined that was designed to simulate the physical challenge of riding up Mt. Everest. Throughout her highly readable, and richly anecdotal book, she describes her personal fears, apprehensions and struggles as her SPIN class trains several days a week for the big day when they will pretend to ascend Mt. Everest. In many ways, this struck me as a Yuppie pastime, as I pictured a room full of middle-aged, career driven execs rushing into their ‘Members Only’ health club to make their mid-week SPIN class so they could pretend to be real athletes. It seemed like a hollow shell, a faded facsimile of anything even close to a true riding experience. But, that was before I knew what SPIN could be like, and I found out recently, as a fitness/training tool, SPIN is awesome!

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