WINTER
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Can an aluminum fat bike actually feel good enough to want to ride it a lot? What would it take to make it rule?
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.
It’s Monday morning, and I’m a wee bit hobbled. Yesterday was HARD; I’m wondering whether it was my hardest ride of 2021. I’ll go with yes, and feel tempted to say it was ‘epic,’ because I wasn’t sure I was going to make it home without calling a life-line until I was 10km from home.
There’s what I’d consider the ‘proper’ way to clean a bike after a winter ride, then there’s the ‘best-can-do’ way. The former will protect your bike from salt damage to the greatest extend possible, limiting damage to the whatever drivetrain grinding might occur during the ride itself. The ‘best-can-do’ method is likely to allow salt to reside on the bike in hard to access places, and do harm over time.
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.
Two-hundred kilometer rides every month through winter; doable? All I actually needed was an objective, something to look forward to through the dreary days of November, as daylight hours diminished rapidly, and the stark reality settled in: winter was coming. And not just any winter; COVID-winter.
I try to paint a picture here that’s more about building a holistic understanding of the environment you’re riding, and a degree of ‘mastery’ around decision-making than about telling you which tires you should buy. That’s the last thing I want to do. I want to help you develop a deep understanding of the requirements you’re working with, which you can then assess against your priorities. This will ground good decision-making.
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.
“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.
Read, listen, or both. I sat down with Castelli to talk about getting the most from their line of cold weather clothing, which dipped into general principles, and numerous tips and tricks riders can use to steepen the learning curve and create great winter cycling experiences. The blog post elaborates on numerous threads within the podcast, and functions as a complementary resource.