Featured
The final piece in a series of deep-dives into my titanium dream bike, T-Lab’s X3. Fully custom designed and built to thrive across a broad range of riding conditions, my build biases toward reliability under heavy and frequent use in harsh environments.
Can an aluminum fat bike actually feel good enough to want to ride it a lot? What would it take to make it rule?
Tire construction influences steering dynamics more ‘strongly’ as volume increases. You WON’T see this jump out from the numbers, and this phenomenon, which has pushed folks away from 650b wheels/tires, is not widely understood.
How often do products actually live up to their name? Meet Castelli’s Unlimited Puffy jacket.
Lake, the first company to build winter cycling boots, remains dedicated to building options that prioritize function, which drives their approach to fit. Lake delivers solutions that enable riders to enjoy their time riding bikes outside, even when they don’t have years of experience riding in the winter.
The Polare 3 departs significantly from its predecessor. Tasked with covering the coldest temperature range Castelli designs and builds for, the 3 prioritizes dry-cold more than the NanoFlex, which is biased toward wet conditions.
For those with ample supplies of motivation and zeal, but insufficient kit for spring riding, this is a short guide to a selection of key pieces from Castelli. Quality cycling kit is expensive, so I hope this helps inform decisions that lead to many hours of happy riding, not regrets.
The devil is in the details, right‽ A garbage bag is wind and waterproof. A wool sweater underneath is warm. Poke some holes in strategic locations and the whole shebang is ‘breathable.’ There are metrics used to define each of these parameters, but that’s a rabbit hole I don’t want to go down. There is too much going on with the Alpha RoS 2’s design, materials, and construction to reduce its discussion to metrics that might be worth focusing on in the case of a shell. Instead, I discuss the elements that comprise a system that is very effective in the use-range its intended to perform within.
Curiosity drives this orientation to coffee. Brewing and extraction brings art and craft to the fore, into our hands, and turns the process of experimentation and discovery into a daily ritual.
In cycling, technologies that quantify performance have supplanted keen attention to sensations, yielding what has been referred to as a ‘robotic’ riding and racing. Honestly, it makes me cringe a bit whenever I hear riders say: ‘The numbers were good.’
What’s the scoop with 650b tires and wheels?
“I have one bike, three sets of wheels. How do you pick the tire set up? Tubeless with drys carbon tubulars with muds, aluminum tubulars with mixed?”
“When we gift we are in a position to jump through hoops to create something special, and it’s from this perspective that I’ve created this gift guide.”
Lake’s MX145 hit a sweet-spot for riders interested in extending their riding season and/or taking some of the suffering out of cyclocross. Every aspect of the boot’s design and construction suits its intended purpose, rendering the MX145 a highly versatile option for riding in wet and/or cold conditions from around -12 C to +12 C.
Castelli’s Elemento jacket establishes a new reality/normal/standard most riders probably didn’t even realize could be a thing.
RoS is an ethos, an attitude, an orientation in relation to the environment. In a sense, it’s a metaphor: reality, human experience, is constituted by rain/shine, dark/light, evil/good, night/day. Opposites, powerful forces, defined via contradistinction.
Instability makes riding bikes fun, and fun-riding bikes. The devil is in the details. Let's talk about that.