If you like a challenge try Passo Fedaia, last 5km are horrific.
ClimbByBike

@Northwind – of course there is such a thing as ‘right’ anti-squat, its called a hardtail :-)

Regardless of colour/geometry etc, find it hard to look past the weight of a 5. The £5100 factory spec model weighs more than the £1300 bottom of the range canyon spectral. Clearly there’s more to how a bike rides than weight, but on a mid-travel bike that has to be pedalled uphill and accelerate nicely on flat/rolling terrain its still too important to ignore.

Wear road kit on the MTB. You wont fit in with the cool kids, but I can take that as the penalty for not having to ride around wearing a psychedelic top 4 sizes too big.

@adsh
Don’t know whose zones you are using to end up with 6, but i’m seeing a 6.5hr ride with 40mins well over LT power and 2hrs of Tempo/Sweetspot. It would be pretty normal to need a full week to recover fully from a ride like that. 40mins of z6 is a fairly tough workout that should take a couple of easy days to recover from all by itself.

As part of training for XC I ride my mountain bike on the road to get longer periods of training at a specific power/HR intensity.

Freewheeling downhill is below that intensity so in order no to waste that time I pedal against my brakes.

Clear?

Made sense the first time for those of us into the whole training zone thing. Probably makes us seem like complete nutters to the other 95% :lol:

So essentially you decided someones jump should not be there and removed it and you are surprised this pissed them off?

Just to play devils advocate you could also argue that someone adding a home made jump to a trail is equally vandalising the trail for others. I’m pretty sure the trails themselves didn’t construct a jump out of branches/wire/nails as a freak occurrence of nature.

The trouble is that these are pointless when premier league teams are free to choose the best players from around the world. Young, English players just don’t get a look-in these days.

Correct, they don’t get a look-in cos they aren’t as good. If a sufficiently talented player comes up through the ranks, impresses in B squad games or lower leagues you can be fairly sure the talent scouts will find him.
Extra cash into talent identification and development is how the situation is rectified, not paying a lot of money for a manager.

2010-2016, 7 bikes, average of 1/yr, maximum 2/yr.
1 given away, 1 on a semi-permanent loan, 5 in regular use.

Doesn’t really matter who the manager is.
The reality is that most of the current first 11 wouldn’t have even made it into the 22 man squad 10yrs ago – they are mediocre at best.
However whilst some fans have grasped it, there is still an unrealistic expectation out there that England should be going to tournaments and doing well with the current crop of players.

FA should hire the cheapest manager they can find and invest the remainder of the cash in youth development programs. When the squad actually has some potential to do well, then look at getting a top class manager in.

Short and hard, don’t drag for any significant amount of time.
Once you get up >30mph you can get pretty good air braking by sitting up and sticking your knees and elbows out.

Also,
A) Eat less cakes – shouldn’t be cooking your brakes to that extent on such a short descent unless you weigh as much as an HGV
B) Half a mile @ 30%+ didn’t happen unless its on Strava

Also interested to hear if anyone has any experience of COSINE wheels

Always. £60 travel insurance (of which part is medical/cancellation/baggage anyway) is a small price to pay compared to £2500 of mangled carbon should the worst happen.

can you clarify this for me – the body uses fat as its number one energy source, its geared up to burn fat to sustain life. How does it start to burn fat better?

This isn’t an argument, I’ve curious as to the reason behind this statement.

As a few others above said, the body will gradually switch to burning carbs as exercise intensity increases.

Can’t tell you about the exact biology behind it, but can tell you the training theory.

Riders have been doing long steady distance rides since forever which work by depleting the pool of carbs available, and eventually teaching the body to burn higher % of fat for any given intensity.
More recently, fasted rides (pre breakfast, only fuelled by protein and/or coffee) have taken this a step further.
Eating <50g carbs per day replicates these training examples 24/7 essentially giving the body a crash course in learning to burn a higher % of fat as fuel.

Can’t imagine <50g per day is going to play nice with cycling – especially until your body adapts to burning fats better.
Once your body adapts you should be able to manage easy paced rides, but i can’t see how hard rides are going to work. You are basically starting every ride semi ‘bonked’.
50g is ~200kcal ~=15mins of hard effort on the bike.

Enjoyed my ride in the sun last night.
Apocalypse has arrived this morning, need a canoe and a headtorch to venture outside right now 8O

I’m loving it, temp has made a rare excursion into the 20’s here in Dundee.
My body doesnt actually begin to function 100% until about 22°C (yes, I REALLY live in the wrong place!).
May actually go wild and leave the arm warmers and windproof at home tonight :D

Spoke to the supervisor at Edinburgh last trip I did.
He said it was no problem, but advised to put pedals in a separate clear bag in the tray so they could be more easily identified.
May require a supervisor to clear them if a more inexperienced person is on the scanner and doesn’t recognise them.

Last time I checked BC were advising to travel with these items in hand luggage, so will be quite common.

Not actually popped the bead on mine to check, but pretty sure this years cookers are supposed to come set up tubeless already. If you’ve got tubes in there maybe thats your problem?

I’m actually finding the trailblazers on my cooker 0 really fast rolling @12psi. What pressure are you using to find them draggy?

Give it away, either to a friend/relative or a bike refurb charity.
Did same myself recently, bike was a wreck, but new owner is delighted with it despite being fully aware of all its shortcomings

Depends how hard you are riding and how your digestive system copes with different foods.
If you are bimbling round your ride in 8 hrs pretty much anything will work, cereal and/or cake bars from the supermarket will do the job nicely.

If you are pushing on a bit more, or if you struggle digesting fat/protein on the move you’ll want to stick to proper energy products.

Personally i like zipvit zv8 uncoated bars and SiS Go gels when going hard. When going easier, Powerbar wafers, kellogs breakfast bakes or whatever cake looks appealing at the cafe stop.

Edit: and whilst i know some people swear by them, jelly babies are not a smart choice when you do the maths on how many you need to eat to fuel a century on them alone

Lets see, colour of a battleship, giant hideous welds all over like a battleship and weighing about as much as a battleship.

What sort of riding in gloop are we talking about?

Anyone know the difference between the TX direct and the softshell proofer? On the face of it both appear to be for the same application

Nah, don’t think NQ is overhyped, and don’t think we’ve seen the end of him at this tour.
He’s a tiny rider – probably gives him a really ‘low’ threshold power at around 360W – he’ll have had a couple of hard days battling in the crosswinds, and won’t have had the raw power into a strong headwind yesterday.

Still the Alps to come, hopefully we can see him at his best there.

I think Porte is going to put in a good showing today, he looked strong yesterday and is a good time trialist.
Think Quintana will go better than expected – he’s done well in a couple of minor TT’s this year – will still lose at least a minute to Froome though

I think they’d have put more time into Quintana, not sure about the others, Yates and Aru had realised they needed to go full gas and had upped the pace shortly before the incident.
Overall the jury did about as well as they could do with an impossible situation.

No, not really.
There’s a world of difference between a terrorist deliberately driving over innocent people and drunken fools jumping into the middle of a bike race.

Is it really too much to ask for fans to cheer the race respectfully from the side of the road? As with most other things in life, morons will continue to be morons whilever there are no consequences for their actions.

Something like this has been on the cards for years.
Any ‘supporters’ that have so little respect for the riders deserve to be run over. A couple of Hummers as lead vehicles would do the job.

Cooker 0, loving mine so far

I have pretty much the same issue with my X7 front mech.
Works great while drivetrain is perfectly clean.
Tiniest bit of muck and it exhibits exactly the issue you describe.

I’ve come to the conclusion the X7 2×10 mech is just a bit pants, but in my case not quite pants enough to spend cash on replacing it. Can lead to a sore thumb though by the end of a 10hr race.

That has to be one of the ugliest bikes i’ve ever seen.

Kinda hard to define ‘fittest’ but for me it needs a prolonged endurance component, and both upper and lower body components.
That pretty much narrows it down to XC skiers and rugby players. The skiers get my vote.

Gabba (or equivalent) + nanoflex arm warmers.

As above, light rims are good for climbing, and get up to speed quickly, but heavier rims will hold speed better on flat and rough sections

12k is really good for pilot sports, only got 8k out of mine.
+1 for black circles.
If you want longevity look for fuel saving / economy tyres,they use a harder compound. Grip isn’t quite as good, but if you are pootling round town you dont need a tyre designed for ripping down b roads.

I’m off to A&E tomorrow to see how many mamils i can spot that have had a smash trying out new decending technique.

@muddydwarf: At 5’2″, 9st4lb isn’t even remotely skinny.

@tenfoot: both a and b

Not raining, TDF recording, guess i’d better go out riding

Anyone else finding RBTV app not loading?