January 2011
14 posts
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Ogival - Another Non-Round Chainring
Non-round chainrings have been making headway in pro cycling for the past couple of years. Bobby Julich used to be the sole rider in the peloton riding O.symetric chainrings. This year Rotor will be providing Q-Rings along with their new 3D+ cranks to Garmin-Cervélo. In mountain biking the Specialized Factory Racing team has been running Q-Rings as well. Besides Rotor and O.symetric...
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End Of January Spitzberg Loop
When I looked out the window this morning, the fog was sitting high and I could see the Jura mountain ridges. Temperatures were pretty mild at around zero degrees. A perfect day for a bike ride. I wasn’t planning on staying out as long as last weekend, but I wanted to get some good climbing in. I rushed out of town and headed westwards. The ground was frozen and there...
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Chilean/Swiss Team Wins Transandes Stage 3
The Team composed of Swiss Mr. Zaboo Simon Zahnd and Chilean Javier Püschel has taken the first place of the Transandes Challenge mountain bike competition by finishing stage 3 with a lead of 2 minutes and 30 seconds in front of second place finishers Sager and Sonntag.
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Cycling Through The Eye Of Google Trends
BikeRadar ran a pretty entertaining article about Google Trends today. Evan Cycles out of the UK has been looking at Google Trends and compared those results with their own sales figures. Looking at the numbers it appears that mountain biking is losing ground. If one looks at those Google Trends charts this trend is clearly noticeable. Fewer folks are searching for “mountain bikes”....
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Five Hours At Sub Zero
Temperatures were hovering around minus three degrees throughout the day, probably some degrees lower at higher elevations. The Bise that blew across the mountains made sure that things didn’t get any warmer. Well, in the winter, weekends are pretty much the only days I can get some saddle time, so I headed out for what turned into a five hour adventure in the snow....
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Christoph Sauser's 29er vs 26er Report
Christoph Sauser rode a Specialized Epic 29er and 26er on the same runs and reports that the 29er was faster all around, whether going uphill or bombing downhill. He writes:
The big wheels made me go faster, both up and downhill! The most recognizable performance point has been, how much more energy I saved towards the end of my runs, and as a result of this I was faster in both ways. I stayed...
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Eccentric Bottom Bracket 29in.CH Style
Riding an Air 9 Carbon as a singlespeed, I obviously use Niner’s Bio-Centric bottom bracket cups to keep the chain nice and tight. The Bio-Centric BB is amazingly simple and works marvelously well. It stays tight and is absolutely creak free. There’s a thing, one could improve and that’s reducing the number of parts by getting rid of the external BB cups and...
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Hitting The North Side
After I grabbed the “wrong” horse yesterday, I took advantage of that reconnaissance ride and headed back up there again today. This time with the “right” horse. Much of the ascent presented itself wet and muddy, but my 2.4 Continental Mountain Kings never let me down. Those knobby pieces of rubber just bite into the ground like there’s no...
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TwentyNiner.ch 5th Anniversary
TwentyNiner.ch is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Five years during which a small but hugely dedicated group of Swiss and European early adopters of adult-sized mountain bikes aka 29ers have been discussing, meeting and riding 29ers in the paradise of mountain biking - Switzerland. Five years that they’ve been advocating big wheels - fiercely and always with passion. 2011 is a big...
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Busyman Cycles Leather Saddles
Today, I ran across a photo of cool looking saddle in my Tumblr stream. I apologize, but I don’t remember who of the folks I follow posted it and with a constant flow of new posts, it’d take time to go back and find the original photo post. Anyway, saddles are not 29er specific but every 29er on earth sure needs one, and Mike Peel of Busyman Cycles makes some very nice hand...
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