Sugoi Winter Riding Bootie

Winter riding is still very new to me. I’m loving it though, and slowly amassing all me gear; base and mid-layers, shells, gloves, neck warmers and, yes, booties! I started the winter riding season with just varying combinations of multi-layer socks. That was okay, but not great. My feet would stay warm for a while, but once my shoes got damp, it was bad news… And you know what they say, ‘cold head, cold feet, cold core.’

I then tried cheaping out and getting the neoprene toe covers…

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Lance Armstrong – Comeback 2.0

As one of my b-day gifts this year, my wife gave me Lance’s newest book, ‘Comeback 2.0 Up Close and Personal‘. Instead of another traditional text heavy autobiography format, Lance opted to allow professional sports photographer, Elizabeth Kreutz, VIP access to his life as he mounted his ‘09 tour comeback.

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Top Ten for 2010

Well, welcome to the New Year everybody, to help kick things off, I thought I would pull together a little collection of links. There’s nothing like a Top Ten to get things started on the right foot, so I decided to combine two.

First – With all the fixie hype of late, I present “The Evolution of the Hipster,” curating 10 years of hipster culture from 2000 to today. As an added bonus, I also thought I’d include an interview with Steevo Cummings, the man who brought you “Hipsters Discussing Cyclocross.” The article is worth a read and guaranteed to make you grin – One of my favorite questions from the interview:

Since you’re a PRO, when you go out for a long training ride… Is everything “epic” and in black and white like on the Rapha website? Sometimes I do kinda’ longish rides on Saturday mornings… I have yet to see a glimpse of black and white… When was the last time that you saw anything in color?

Second – I wanted to highlight both Sheldon and my top articles of the last year (based on your viewership). As we look to make 2010 a stellar year both on the bikes and on the blog I thought it fitting to pay homage to the articles our readers liked the most.

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The Rider

“Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.”

As a kind of early Christmas gift this year, my wife gave me a translated copy of Tim Krabbé’s classic Dutch novel, ‘The Rider’. I cracked it same day and had it read cover to cover in very short order, save some note taking I did for this post. Not only is the subject right up my alley these days, but the dry, humorous writing style and tension –building structure makes it a page-turner – I loved it. ‘The Rider’ is a first-hand account of one road race, Krabbé’s 309^th amateur race, the Tour de Mont Aigoual and his all out attempt to crush his arch enemy Barthélemy, and finally chalk up a win. It only took a couple pages and I had to know how it ended!

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The winter kit

Despite very much enjoying the prolonged absence of snow, I know it’s comin’. Since I’ve already highlighted what gear I use as the mercury drops, I thought I would give you a run down of the gear itself.

Though it hasn’t gotten cold enough to fully enrobe myself in every winter item I have, I’ve had more than enough opportunity to fully stress test some of my new gear (as well as my old), and thought I would share my thoughts with you. When I see everything I wear all in a list it looks like a lot – I guess when you layer things, that’s what happens.

The added bonus, is if you have a winter cyclist on your xmas list, you might think of one of these items… Since this type of gear, as with any quality gear, don’t come cheap – but it’s worth it!

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Global Rides – Climbing Sufferage in Italy

I got an email a few weeks ago from Gene Nacey – founder of Global Rides, a company specializing in “first person” riding experiences for indoor training – wondering if I’d be interested in giving one of his DVDs a test-run. Not being the biggest fan of training indoors, I agreed enthusiastically… I’m eager to try anything that helps alleviate the potential boredom of training inside on your own.

Global Rides has managed to pack a lot of nice (and thoughtful) touches into this DVD, and it’s apparent right from the menu. Right off the start you’re able to make the choice as to whether or not you’d like music, and if you’d like a coach guiding your ride. I’ve only used the DVD a handful of times, but I can already see that it will be nice to have the flexibility and variety of spinning to your choice of tunes, and/or to ride a slightly different program than the one that’s offered on the DVD.

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Brands from Abroad

A friend of mine moved to China. His wife had taken a one-year teaching contract and so as fortune would have it, he had quite a bit of free time on his hands. So being a fit and athletic person by nature, he took advantage of local gyms, the running track and swimming pools. He also decided to buy a mountain bike.

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Tubed vs. Tubeless

Epic Battle #3

Most semi-serious serious cyclists you talk to will be gear-heads of some sort… I think we’re all guilty of a little gear lust. After all, who doesn’t want the crispness of the new SRAM XX components, or the bling of a Crank Brothers wheelset. But until I started racing with some level of regularity I didn’t realize that most of the gear talk surrounds only one component on the bike… The most discussed, the most contested, and arguably the most important component on the bike… The tires.

Now, either I’m a ‘bad’ cyclist, or I’ve just been fairly fortunate with my choices. I’ve never really experimented with tires. I always just got what I thought was a good tire and rolled with ’em (pardon the pun ;-). Now that I’ve been immersed in the race scene for a while, I’m realizing just how crazy cyclists (especially cyclocross racers) are about their tires. I’ll leave the pandoras box of tread pattern for another post (I find many times it just comes down to personal preference), but today let’s focus on tubed vs. tubeless tires.

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Cateye Strada Double Wireless

Because of my tendency to adopt new technology early I’ve been a user of wireless cycling computers for around 10 years years now (probably since they first came out) and the inherent flakiness of them always baffled me. If we can get a wireless phone to transmit from one end of the house to the other, from the basement, why can we not master the communication of devices attached to your bicycle less than 2 meters apart?

Of course I realize the limitations on the receiver and transmitter size and all that good stuff, but still!?!? Come on!! Perhaps it’s one of the downfalls of me being immersed in technology everyday – a very small tolerance for technology that doesn’t work.

Over the course of my many years of experience I’ve dealt with many models, mainly from VDO and Sigma. I’ve been very disappointed in both. From consistent ‘communication’ issues with the computer to constantly dying batteries… It was starting to not be worth my while. Rather than give up however, I decided to try a different brand. Cateye had just come out with a computer they dubbed the “Strada Double Wireless.” One of the main reasons it caught my eye is that it tracks both speed and cadence through one sensor, attached to the rear wheel. The beauty of this is that it will work on the trail as well as on the trainer!

Given my spotted past with wireless devices my optimism was limited.

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Canada Cup, Edmonton AB 2009

Canada Cup, Edmonton AB – 2009 from Sheldon Smart on Vimeo.

Although I wasn’t in this race, despite planning and training for it, I did get to watch some wicked national level racing, and cheer on some of the locals guys that I know. Dana, sorry about your chain, man… You were killin’ it till it snapped! Sam, good to see you out there bringin’ the beats as usual. Peter, 4th place Masters Expert! Wooo hoo!!! And Paul, I think you said this was your first race in 4 years, so welcome back! 

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