A rider only touches his bicycle in five places: two hands, two feet, and the most sensitive place of all: the saddle.

People are very finicky about their saddles - for good reason - and it can be difficult to predict what will work for any given rider. I have been fortunate that the stock saddles that came with my bicycles worked well for my ( Read more... )

Coming back from four and a half months of forced inactivity is decidedly *not fun*. And I know from not fun.

Back on October 2nd of last year, I rode the first of this year’s Dirty Dozen group training rides. Then my mother got sick, and I had to go to Maine to care for her. Over the following 19 weeks I only managed one trivial ride, while my ( Read more... )

After over nine feet of snow and months of record-setting cold temperatures, Friday night we finally broke out of the 30s, providing a perfectly-timed weekend of 50s and even 60s.

I took this long-overdue first opportunity to hit the pavement on my R2-Di2, starting with a 65-mile ride up through Winchester and then along my usual Quad route, ( Read more... )

By now you’ve undoubtedly seen someone using Google’s autocomplete function to gain insight into what people think about something.

Well, here’s what it told me about cycling. The lighter text on the ( Read more... )

Bicycling magazine used to have a monthly feature called “The Big Question”, queries which solicited short, witty contributions from readers. After my recent review of my old magazines, I decided to post my responses to a few of them. I’m sorry they’re more serious than witty ( Read more... )

Pain. The bicycle is a pain machine.

I really didn’t know much about pain before I climbed back onto a bike in 2000 and started training for my first Pan-Mass Challenge. But the endurance athlete’s mantra of “no pain, no gain” quickly proved its verity beyond question.

It’s a strange thing: training. The whole idea is to push ( Read more... )

So yesterday I rode. And rode. And rode and rode. And rode and rode and rode and rode and rode and rode. That’s one “rode” per hour I was in the saddle. Yeah. From 6am to 6pm, plus or minus four brief rest stops.

It was my first attempt at the Boston Brevet Series 200k.

First, what’s a brevet? A brevet or randonnée is an organized long-distance ( Read more... )