West 5 Cycles
Cycling, fixed-gear bike building and life on two wheels onlyArchive for August, 2008
Belt-drive Fixie
Whatever next you may wonder? But this is not the irrational dream of a man in a shed somewhere, but a big name bike maufacturer pushing the convention of bike design and introducing a new take on what the tried and trusted drive mechanism at the heart of bikes for over a century, should be.
You may argue that all this innovation is purely the result of designers spending too much time at the recent Annual North American Handmade Bicycle Show, or perhaps it’s just a desire to challenge the norm and experiment with what the bike of the future could be. I can’t help but be excited though – it’d be great to try it!
More on the Trek Distict
Training: Gadgets and Software Sense?
Training for long periods of time, whether you are doing it to lose weight, reduce stress or build up towards a specific event, is hard work and demands a lot of motivation. After the initial love affair of our new found sport tails off, we begin consciously or unconsciously to look for little motivating factors to help us sustain the efforts involved and get out on our bikes, nevermind what the weather is doing. Some make it a point to race whoever comes in their way out on a training run, others monitor their weight with a vigilance resembling obsession, others rejoice in riding further, longer and faster than they did before.
Whatever your choice of measure, what they all have in common is trying in some way to capture a sense of progress, improvement or development – how we are better today than we were before, because we intrinsically understand how important a sense of progress is to our motivation to keep going. If you can’t see any change nevermind how much effort you put in, however persistant you might be, sooner or later it will begin tasting like wood all this hard work. So we try, in all different ways, to nurture our motivation and egg us on to become all that we can be.
Needless to say, companies out there have all realised the promise of wealth and fame in delivering great tools to help us on our way and today there is an amazing variety of both gadgets and software to choose from, all vying for our attention as the toy to keep us on track towards our goal.
Fixie training: key skills for all kinds of cycling
Lots of people keep asking me in what way does riding fixed help you if you already have a road bike and train on that? Good question I thought and after hearing it more than once, I’ve tried to capture what the benefits are to cyclists of all affinities out there..
Arguably you could say that training on a fixed would create the biggest benefits if you are a road racer or ride on a velodrome, but actually skills gained on a fixie go wider than that, here’s why
Bike handling
This is an obvious one. When you ride fixed you have to settle for the fact that pedals are turning, constantly, always so things you would have gotten used to in the past like holding your inside pedal up at 12 o’clock when making a sharp corner doesn’t apply anymore. Pedals keep turning whether you are going straight or around the corner. This teaches you a keen eye for corners and the speed you take into a corner. Granted fixies and track bikes tend to have more ground clearance to the bottom bracket than your road bike, but still – carelessness will punish you with a grounded pedal and potentially your backside on the Read the rest of this entry »
