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Giro D'Italia 2013
Archive for the ‘Technique’ Category

Paris-Roubaix 2013-Ride the Crown

by Gianni / Apr 10 2013 / 94 posts

Was Paris-Roubaix the best of the Spring Classics in 2013? Milan-Sanremo was amazingly photogenic, Ronde van Vlaanderen was inevitable but Roubaix was just about perfect. We all prefer the wet and gray “This weather is good for us” Roubaix yet this race’s drama transcended the fine spring day in the North of France. There is no be...

Defining Moments: Hood Position

by frank / Mar 18 2013 / 87 posts

If I spent half a summer riding with one hand on the tops and one on the hoods, I spent the other half riding with each hand deliberately gripping the hoods differently. As any young Cyclist growing up in the United States in the late 80s, I had a major thing for Greg LeMond.I imagined Greg to be the perfect Cyclist, as youth often does of their...

Look Pro: Éclatant de Panache

by frank / Mar 13 2013 / 128 posts

The Prophet was very clear on how best to ride an individual Time Trial; start as fast as possible and finish as fast as possible. As for the middle, his advice was to ride that as fast as possible.The same can be said of climbing; as we covered in Part I and Part II of the Sur La Plaque series, the key to climbing well is to hit the bottom as ha...

On Rule #64: The Sudden Drop

by frank / Jan 29 2013 / 116 posts

The severity of a crash exists on two planes, the physical and psychological. The physical is the most obvious and one we busy ourselves with in the immediate vicinity of coming down. Our bodies need time to heal, our kits may need replacing or mending, and our bicycles may need repair work. For weeks and sometimes months, we may carry with us t...

The Selection Equation

by Marko / Jan 18 2013 / 26 posts

In order to win one must first make it into the selection. The selection, as it were, can take many forms; a lone break away, a small group, or half the peloton. It can happen within the last 500 meters of a race as it does in a sprint finish or, more rarely, from the start line. Selections are a part of virtually all types of road bike racing exce...

Look Pro: The Hunchbacks of Notre V

by frank / Dec 3 2012 / 114 posts

The flat back position is perhaps the greatest lie ever told in sport, provided you ignore any of the racing we’ve seen in the last decade or two.It is possible, I suppose, that when we talk about a flat back, what we really mean is that on an elementary level, all curves are really just a series of straight segments connected at an angle; wh...

The Thin Boundary Between Casual and Deliberate

by frank / Oct 22 2012 / 135 posts

Cycling and crashing are the kinds of things that come together whenever you liberally combine Newtonian Physics, skill, and overconfidence. In other words, I’ve been falling off my bike for nearly as long as I’ve been climbing on it.One of the more memorable crashes of my youth involved the commute home from my high school and a lady...

Anatomy of a Photo: Cornering on Cobbles

by frank / Oct 12 2012 / 72 posts

A lot of things taken for granted in Cycling go swiftly out the window when cobblestones are introduced to bicycle and rider. The notion that your wheels should both be pointed in the same direction at any given moment, for instance, or that that they should in some way be in alignment with the direction of travel of the rider/bicycle unit, such as...

Changer de Braquet

by frank / Oct 8 2012 / 153 posts

Some people are supremely good at it, reducing complex situations into matters of simple black and white. This isn’t my particular area of expertise; I enjoy wading through the pools of ambiguity a bit too much to go about bludgeoning this beautiful world into absolutes. In fact, I would venture that delighting in nuance is part of what dist...

Climbing Weight

by frank / Aug 22 2012 / 261 posts

When it comes to weight and body dysmorphia, we cyclists can go toe-to-toe with any thirteen year old tween who has done their time flipping through the pages of Vogue and Sixteen. However fit and thin we might be, at some point it dawns on us that we’re not as light as we could be. The obvious solution is to buy lighter parts for our bikes,...
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