Chris Writes.

So the racing vein continues: a little over a week ago I finished what might have been the most grueling single-day bike ride I’ve ever done: the Tahoe-Sierra 100, a decidedly-ambitious 94 mile mountain bike race that I completed in just under 11 hours. I wish I had a better story to accompany this, other than to simply say “whoa, that was hard.” but as far as the race itself went, it was a monstrous, well-supported slog through some very nice Tahoe scenery. Along the way I scared a rattlesnake, I helped a co-worker limp to an aid station, and on the drive home, the roof rack came off Scott’s car and went crashing down the freeway at 75MPH, all three S-Works bikes firmly still attached.  Thankfully, in each of those cases, nobody was seriously hurt.  And now that my 100-mile MTB effort has been checked off the list, I’m not sure I have any motivation to try anything like that again.  Bring on cyclocross, with it’s 60-minute races and post-race beer and all the related rabble rousing! And no more roof racks, I now have trust issues.
I’ve now checked off Mountain Bike racing, road racing, and cyclocross racing, all in a single season. So much for retirement, eh?

In other news, we launched an entirely new iteration of the Specialized Riders Club at work last week, a project on which I had invaluable help from many people, both at work and outside it. The short version of the long story was that the Riders Club site I helped launch 4 years ago had become a bit of a ghost town – nearly everyone had moved to Facebook, and it was clear our direction wasn’t serving our community particularly well. Conversely, we’ve grown a ton in the Facebook/Twitter/Youtube/RSS world, but there was no single place where you could go to see it all, so we built it: one single page that aggregates all our social content, as a doorway into the Specialized culture, offering existing fans an easy way to keep tabs on us.  Trouble is, because we’d never actually seen this done before, and because we couldn’t find a pre-built solution to aggregate the content in the way we wanted, we had to build it in order to try it out. We have no proof in advance that this is going to work, beyond our own intuition.  But if it works, it leads me to a question: as brands increasingly work hard to be present in all these different online spaces that extend well past their own website, why hasn’t anyone else thought to pull them all back together? Or has this happened, and we just missed it?  And the bigger question, one that we’re wrestling with now: of the myriad ways to measure this effort, what’s the best way to do so?  It’s not a trivial question, because standard web traffic metrics here are unusually unreliable. If someone uses this site to become a follower on twitter, and a fan on Facebook, and then bookmarks one of our RSS feeds, then the site has clearly done it’s job as we’ll be communicating (and hopefully interacting) with that rider on a regular basis in the future.  Yet they may rarely, or never, return to the riders club site. Site metrics would only count them once.

If you’ve got any thoughts on this question or the site in general, or related comments, or questions, please do write and let me know – I’m definitely curious to hear the opinions of both bike industry and non-bike-industry people on this one.

Moving on to other other news, Intel recently made headlines when they started shipping “crippled” computer chips that are designed to work at less than their full potential, and customers can unlock the secret powers of the chip they already own using a $50 code that they subsequently buy at the retailer.  Note that the computer chip itself didn’t’ change; it was just told that the ransom was paid, and it’s now allowed to work at it’s full potential. One bike industry equivalent of this has been available for quite a while from the guys at iBike, who make bike computers.  Their basic iBike sport model is *exactly* the same as their iBike Pro, but with key features disabled, and for $249, you can unlock them.  One could argue that this allows someone to get into the world of riding with their bike computer at a more reasonable price, and they can conveniently upgrade later, and there is truth to that. But that still can infuriate an owner if they ever end up feeling like they’re being held hostage.  And it’s when this idea of “if value, then right” goes any further that things get pretty absurd. Imagine if you had to pay for the right to put slicks on your old MTB, or add new disc wheels to your carbon Tri bike. As the argument goes, since you didn’t originally buy it for this purpose or in this specific configuration, this ‘new use’ must have new value to you, and thus, the original bike manufacturer should be allowed to charge you for that. This falls clearly into the realm of “doing things that make no sense to customers”, and when you do things that don’t make sense to the people you’re trying to serve, you end up like the telecoms or the insurance industry, hated by your own customers, and quickly abandoned as soon as a viable new option shows up.

My only point is one I’ve said many times before: Dear companies of all shapes and sizes: Please do things that make sense to people.  It’s a pretty basic, yet powerful rule.

Before cars, there were horses, and many of us have heard the near-cliche “If Henry Ford had given people what they wanted, he would have made faster horses.”  But he didn’t, and now we have traffic jams. Something important to realize though is that when Ford combined mobility with an engine, he didn’t rely on the design of a horse – he didn’t make a mechanical four-legged machine that mimicked a horse at all. Instead, he looked at the motor, and understood the underlying need (mobility), and designed the car around the new technologies at his disposal.   Think about that for a second.

Over at Eurobike this year, I saw a lot of ugly bikes. And they were all electric.  This is not to say that all electric bikes were ugly, but rather to make a point of something that struck me squarely between the eyes as I browsed around Eurobike: Electric bikes are evolving, but as they come into mainstream, they do not yet have an established design. We (the bike universe) simply don’t yet know what electric bikes are going to be, or even look like.

At the outset, I should draw an important distinction between North America and a healthy-sized swath of the rest of the industrial world.  In Europe, and even more so in Asia, e-bikes are nothing new. They’ve been around for years, and the mindset of the bicycle as “transportation” made the transition to e-bikes very, very easy for people to understand and accept.  But unlike the cheap electric bike swarms in Taipei intersections, the trekking or transport bikes in Europe are a hugely lucrative category.  Average price (depending on who you ask) seems to be around 1,500 to 2,000 Euro, and one brand manager confided to me that their european e-bike sales last year were $50M.

Meanwhile, over here in North America, bicycles are recreation.  An electric bike strikes some as about as sensible as an electric tennis racket, to make it electric defeats its entire purpose. It’s supposed to be exercise, complete with sweat and the promise that you’ll “lose 5 pounds in just one week, guaranteed or your money back!”.  Maybe, some might concede, e-bikes could be good for the elderly or the obese.  This is a dangerous conclusion to reach, as the electric bike is not likely an answer to questions that either of these demographics are asking.

It’s not that e-bikes are new; they’re not.  What’s new is the number of new brands getting into the mix, from new upstarts to established bigger players.  And with these new players and bigger guys come a unique new promise to e-bikes: more of the cycling industry’s top talent focused on it, and wider global distribution. These are the real changes to e-bikes.

For e-bikes to be commercially viable in an expanding market, it logically follows that the current customer base should show potential for expansion.  To expand the customer base, we’ll need new customer segments, or new geographies, or both.  This is where things got very murky at Eurobike this year: e-bikes for freeriding with dual crown forks?  Carbon fiber XC racing models with motors?  And who can forget the Cancellara debacle?  In trying to expand into new segments and geographies, e-Bikes represent an interesting congruence between chasing trends and rapid prototyping: in a short time, we’ve seen the introduction of lots and lots of new models, and everyone is simultaneously trying different things pretty quickly to see what might work. I’m reminded of the first full suspension mountain bikes, and how the first models were all vastly different, and the visual design was mostly a residual by-product of the engineering behind it.  I love prototypes – they’re an awesome and essential part of the design process.  But they’re rarely great sellers.

I’m excited by the idea of electric bikes, and I am even more excited about their potential.  But as the market expands, I’m concerned about three big things:  First, if the world is introduced to electric bikes with such blockish, frankensteinish designs, we’ll miss an important opportunity to get people excited about them.  if the first iPods resembled a homemade bomb with a battery bolted to a logic board, connected by exposed wires, they’d hardly have gained a solid footing with the fashionable crowd.  These bikes have every opportunity to look f@#king cool, to be a fashionable and hip addition to an urban lifestyle, a non-douchey and practical alternative to the fixie. I’m thinking here about Vespa, about electric motorbikes like the zero, and about matching helmets and bags accented by a Burberry tartan scarf.  But with few exceptions, the e-bikes I saw resembled at best an unremarkable cheap bike, and at worst, the something tantamount to fashion suicide, right up there with recumbents.

Second, I don’t think we’re clear about how many different customer segments these new e-bikes might appeal to, nor are we clear who we’re targeting with these new options.  When mountain bikes got started, they were just mountain bikes.  Now there are dozens of categories of mountain bikes, from DH race bikes to lightweight XC race bikes to singlespeeds.  At Eurobike, I didn’t see much evidence of people trying to clearly identify who they were designing their bikes for, and I think that’s largely because collectively, I don’t think we’re very sure about the potential customer segments that might exist.

Third, an e-bike renaissance in North America would ask bike shops to hire and/or train electronics-savvy mechanics – it’s one thing to fix a flat, quite another to identify a faulty capacitor or a blown power supply.  Bike shops that are quick to embrace this new revenue could gain a valuable position as an entrenched expert in the e-bike domain, and become the go-to shop for a region that’s far wider than the current customer radius.  But somewhere, that training has to happen.  Those shops need to be retrofitted to deal with problems.  And we don’t know in advance what those problems will be.

All of these concerns are opportunities: the first is to design an e-bike that people get excited about, in the exact way Tesla did for electric cars in the sports car demographic.  The second is for manufacturers to understand who they’re designing it for, and why, so that the story gets told in the right way, to the right people.  The third is the retail support structure that will make it possible for this category to do well.  When Henry Ford started selling the model T, the first car customers couldn’t take the car to see the same vet that they took their horse to when it got sick.  But that’s not to say that some veterinarians didn’t see a more lucrative opportunity in opening a car repair shop.

Many of the e-bikes I saw were, essentially, motorized horses: previous bike designs, with motors and batteries bolted to them in rather haphazard ways. This is not design, it is panic.  It’s my hope that e-bikes evolve into bikes that don’t look much like the bikes I saw. Some of the options available now might have the right function, but the form seems questionable at best. To settle for nothing more than retrofit design doesn’t seem appropriate for a category that offers this much potential. There were very few I saw that seemed to approach this as an entirely new category that might not need to be limited by the classic frame design, or handlebar design, or drive system, or anything else.  Even fewer seemed to have a clear message of who they were built for.

Photos:

The first bike I remember was a 10-speed, a garage sale orphan that needed work.  I’m pretty sure it started out yellow, but dad and I painted it red.  But the first bike that really sealed the deal for me was a red mountain bike, this one brand new, a birthday present.  >>FFWD a few years (skip past the bits where I’d suffered through high school, flickers of puberty, the theft of that red mountain bike), and I found myself at about 18 years old with a number plate tied to my handlebars for my first ever race.  I spent several years racing mountain bikes, working in a truly great bike shop, and putting myself through college.  Racing was a big deal, and I loved it even though I never won a single mountain bike race.  I progressed up the ranks, but the best result I ever had was placing 2nd, missing the win by less than a half second.

When I moved to Vancouver, and then to LA shortly thereafter, I conceded that at the wise age of 23, I’d ‘retired’ from racing – I was riding my bike for fun, a lot, and that glossy sweaty attractive sheen of racing was replaced by the grit, the stubble, and the beer of the bike racer denouement.  Sometimes I’d even poke fun at my former self for taking it all so seriously.  I didn’t think I’d ever return to racing.  I remember putting away the heart rate monitor and bike computer, in the way you put away classic vinyl records when the day comes that you finally lack a turntable.  You don’t throw them out, or sell them. But you know exactly why they’re being put away.

In recent times, I’ve fully and completely fallen off that retirement wagon.

Two years ago, and with no good or apparent reason, I raced TransRockies.  That may have sparked something, a sort of demon awakening, annoyed and hungry. Then last autumn, my curiosity with cyclocross racing became more of an official thing, coaxed on by the infectious enthusiasm of my beyond-wonderful princess/accomplice.  I bought a carbon CX bike, rode like hell, experimented with tubulars, made new friends, and fell into the ever-so-slightly-crossdressy NorCal CX scene.  It was during last year’s CX season that I won my first race, 15 years after my first race, and 10 years after thinking that I’d ‘retired’.  Poking fun at my former self is now a layer cake of meta levels, each one poking fun at a self that was poking fun at a self preceding it.  I think that means I’m well adjusted.

This year, I added an entirely new rollercoster to the amusement park of my cycling story: I joined a local team, Third Pillar, and started racing road bikes.  Even after I’d agreed with the local team to join them, I very nearly backed out just due to my work travel schedule – but thankfully, they put up with my springtime absences, and I did my best to make up for it.  I started out as a lowly beginner, just like everybody else, in the green and unpredictable Category 5′s.  Full of fast triathletes who can talk smack but can’t steer, bi-curious mountain bikers, and legitimate total virgins to the sport, the start lines of my first few races were all games of chance.  I never knew if the guy beside me was going to be strong, or dangerous, or both.  A few races later, I upgraded to Category 4, and had a few teammates to work with.  After a few more races and one more victory, I upgraded to Category 3′s.  And now, after a couple of races as a 3, I’m starting to feel like I’m getting the hang of this.

One fun aside of racing with my team is the unwritten rule that you should write race reports, which we share with each other during secret meetings in underground caves. Having never written one before, I had no idea what a race report was supposed to be, so I wrote them however I deemed appropriate.  I’ve written a few now, and figured I’d share them here too.

• Panoche Road Race – I won this one!
• Mt Hamilton Road Race – Big hill.
• Dash for Cash Criterium – $10 to the leader on each lap
• Timpani Criterium – conveniently close to where I live
• Winters Road Race – Big team turnout

And, in a fit of airplane-inspired frivolity, a race report fashioned after a children’s book to commemorate a tough little circuit race in Santa Cruz:

And now, with the dawn cracking over the silhouette of my fresh Tufo tubular tires and Avid Shorty Ultimates, I’m really, really looking forward to the upcoming cyclocross season.  Who knew that racing as an adult could be this much fun?

Dubs ain't got nuthin' on a set of 808's

If I could actually figure out how to do this to my Scion, I probably would. They’re *my* priorities, after all. Imagine if you could change products to be the way you really wanted to. Imagine the world as more custom; seriously, think about what “really freaking unique” actually means. It’s not just ‘custom’ in the expected ways (colors, optional trim, xenon headlights, stupid spoiler, etc), but custom in ways that nobody’s ever asked for, ever.  Fun, huh?

There are plenty of smart & talented people who have lots of things to say about bicycle design.  There are also plenty of incredible bike designers that spend their time designing, and don’t often spend much time waxing romantic about how great their designs are – they are far too interested in their work to waste time talking about it. But there is one other area in all this, the design of the bicycle business itself, that is rarely talked about explicitly, though often complained about.

Every industry has a bell curve of attrition, in one form or another.  I could go open a pizza joint, or a coffee shop, or an auto repair shop, and my competition becomes a combination of the others around me offering similar stuff, and my own ability to not screw things up too badly.  And in a twist of that adage of “everyone, eventually, is promoted to their own pinnacle of incompetence”, there is some sick economic theorist that will have predicted that the bulk of the competitors will thrash about at or near the level of subsistence, while the least talented will fall away, and the most talented will be the subject of much envy and scorn.  Banks are, if you’ll pardon the pun, a prime example these days.

Bike shops, and the bike industry as a whole, seem to revel in this bell curve of poverty. Sure, there are plenty of bike shops and bike companies that have vanished in the past year.  There are also plenty that have sprung up in their place, and some that have done very, very well for themselves.  Despite what some might have you believe, we do not share any similarities with the Facsimile Machine Manufacturing and Retail Selling Industry from 2002. The bicycle industry churns year over year, in a largely predictably annual cycle, and chances are that while the product designs will continue to innovate and improve in the future, the industry itself will maintain itself within a similar business model. By this, I mean that brands will design their bikes, factories will manufacture on behalf of these brands we know and love, those brands will then sell mostly to independent dealers, those dealers will sell to customers, and the products will mostly be released on an annual model-year cycle.  There are myriad small departures from this, but this is the foundation.

If you’re wondering why I think the business model itself won’t change much, here’s why: a massive shift towards online sales is unlikely, if only because customer product education, fit, and repair services rely heavily on in-store interactions.  A massive downturn in interest in cycling seems similarly unlikely, environmental concerns are just one reason.  I could be wrong in either of these assumptions, but I think they are safe bets in the near term, say the next 5 years.  Exogenous forces that I’m also counting on: no massive global currency crisis, no military conflict between Taiwan & China (since they manufacture all this stuff), and no protectionist shocks, like massive increases in import duties.

No doubt, there will be shining examples of success – both regional and global, some short term and some lasting.  At the product level, the actual product design will play a massive role in the companies that succeed.  This has been true in the past, and it should not come as a surprise to anyone that it will continue to be true. This is the most hotly contested realm of design, and the most visible – especially given the model year cycle we operate in. We want and expect that the 2010 model to be superior to the 2009 model.

But at the business design level, where companies and retailers alike experiment with alterations to the way they interact within the overall business model, there have always been (and will continue to be) massive opportunities that ultimately shape the long term success of the companies or shops that do well.  If we take the overall model as a given, then redesigning our place within it can allow for some massive behavioral changes.

Two examples of what I mean, first at the manufacturer level: SRAM started as scrappy startup in a garage (sound familiar?), and fought a long, hard battle to convince cyclists at every level, from newbie to pro, that twisting their hand to shift was an improvement over thumb and finger-operated levers.  Over time, they made their impact, but this single product innovation was not their raison d’être. Stan Day and his crew of talent at some point shifted from the standard suite of inductive/deductive logic tools – what is, or what will be – and instead they started thinking abductively, about what could be.  At some point, SRAM stopped being a quirky shifter company, and became a bicycle component juggernaut that could rival Shimano on every level.  It wasn’t long ago that Shimano’s stronghold seemed simply untouchable.  Now, it’s been years since Shimano’s last Tour de France victory. Last year, SRAM won their first Tour de France.

This is one of many examples of Business Design hard at work in the hard-working bike industry.  It’s cultural as much as it’s strategic: I know many people at SRAM, and they’re all far more interested in designing what’s next, rather than deciding what’s next.  The difference is subtle, but critical.  It takes one level of acumen to assess a situation, brainstorm options for what to do next, and then decide which option is best.  It takes an entirely different level of acumen to assess a situation, and then look forward in a way that combines past wisdom with a blank slate of limitless future options.  If SRAM had simply focused on decisions, we’d likely have a narrow range of very good twist shifters.  Instead, their design centrism means we have a new & massive range of component options that have won World Cups, Tours de France, Olympic medals, and retail sales floor space.

Second, at the retail level, the bike shop is changing – not at the transaction level, but at the far ends of the spectrum: how they interact with suppliers, and how they interact with customers. Now common, B2B systems for dealers to manage orders and inventory were rare only a few years ago.  But even more critically, a shop’s connection with their local community was historically tied to their conversational skills and their ad in the yellow pages.  Now we have bike shops with rabid fans on facebook and twitter, and the very best of them have altered their transactional relationships into behavioral relationships by organizing rides, skills clinics, seminars, and even trips.  They’ve redesigned the bike shop into a social hub, a clubhouse, or at the absolute top level, a big pile of united friends.  Think for a moment about how different this is from a place like, say, Radio Shack, where you might walk in, buy 4 batteries, and leave, not knowing (or really caring) if you ever go back there again.  Bike shops used to be there.  Now, the very best have redesigned their businesses to be something closer to an extremely hip club.  But here, it’s not product that the shops are designing.  It’s interactions – and these interactions rely on keen understanding of validity, which is another key difference between the shops that fight in the froth of subsistence, versus those who are far ahead of the chum.

These very best bike shops, whether explicitly or implicitly, understand the difference between reliability and validity.  It does not take a savvy shop owner or staffer to look backwards at their past sales data and conclude that a certain percentage of their business caters to an urban city-riding commuter segment, and then make pre-orders and sales floor allocations based on those analytics.  However, this backwards look at the data is merely reliable – it’s been true before, so the assumption is that the trend will continue.  Statisticians call this linear regression, while those who look at actual human behavior call it anything from ‘distracting’ to ‘utter bullshit’.  The savvy shops are those who stay focused on conclusions that are valid, based on a wider array of data, even if it doesn’t easily import into a statistical model.  Consider a shop who just had a 150-unit housing development and 14 miles of bike lanes installed in their community: should they be more or less concerned with their past urban bike sales data?  The world is full of changes that are not reflected in historical analysis, no matter how rigorously it was conducted.

The conclusion to all this is simple: the bike industry (and other healthy industries) will continue to thrive in aggregate, and the complainers will complain in disproportionate volume because those who succeed are likely fewer in number, and also likely to be far too busy to spend time bragging about their good fortune.  And the aggregate success, across all levels of the business model, will probably bring about a wider and newer array of cool new stuff that we’ll all want.  And then we’ll go ride bikes, and the sun will shine, and we’ll trade high fives and knuckle bumps, and share a pint afterwards with a $4 burrito.

Life is good; don’t let anybody tell you different.

Hey all you marketing-types and human factors fans: If you aren’t already familiar with QR codes, you will be eventually, and probably soon.  As one of a zillion glittery new technologies in the eternally-rolling-in fog of things to (re)learn, it’s not really worth mention on it’s own. But there are two points I think do bear mention:

1. There are real applications of this stuff happening here.  now.
2. Despite years of popularity, especially in Japan, they’ve not yet caught on here because the reading technology has not been natively supported by cell phones in North America (conspiracy theorists: this is your cue!).  Curiously, this same excuse has persisted long past the point where the cell companies entirely lost control of this monopoly on the features of any individual device. With free & paid apps for iPhone, Android, and probably dozens of others available, anyone who wants it can have it, for free, now.

Remember when checking email on a phone was revolutionary? The entire landscape has changed, yet again.  We’re about to tip from a point where people said “My handheld can’t do that.”, to a point where people ask “How can my handheld do that?”.  The difference is both subtle, and seismic.

Technologies, like replicants, are either a benefit or a hazard.  Difference between us and Deckard is that if they’re a hazard, they’re not our problem.

I need your magic.

This has nothing to do with bicycles.  It’s just livin’ life.

I am allergic to cats.  That, alone, is typically enough to cement an opinion upon regarding all things feline.  For those of us afflicted by this common allergy, cats fall into one of two categories: house cats that make your eyes water and skin itch for hours, and larger cats that look at you as if to say “do you include dipping sauce?”.  I, through nothing more than angelic luck, seem to have discovered a third.  A category of cat that neither requires antihistamine with your daily coffee, nor wishes to eat you, and as an absolute bonus, contained a delightful personality that could perhaps be described as an extremely co-dependent and highly territorial version of Dot, the impossibly energetic cartoon character from Animaniacs. Curious yet refined, this Siberian breed actually lacks the gene that makes the bit that people are allergic to.  It’s basically magic, which worked in my favor, since she was a 14-year veteran of the girl I’d fallen for, and have since moved in with.

I’d never lived with a cat – Dad would have no part of it (due to allergy, see above, and maybe some other things, but who can be sure?).  He extended his allergy into a humorous animosity, but it wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles and was introduced to my dear friend Steven’s wonderful cats that I had really started to grasp the concept of a cat as a family member.  I’d seen it with dogs, but somehow that seemed more tangible, more obvious.  Living in LA, I spent many a late night working on websites at Steven’s place, with at least a couple of his cats in close proximity (not to mention antihistamines, and gin martinis).  They were as much a part of the environment as I was, and they had rights that trumped any I might have earned.

MOSFET - 1994-2010

MOSFET was always her mom’s cat – there was no doubting the fact that she played favorites.  With 13-ish years of seniority over me, there ain’t no question that’s the way it was gonna be.  But I got through here and there, we had our moments, and we’d achieved a harmony where I’d earned the right to scritch her behind the ears, but mostly only if Mom was busy or not home from work yet.  Or if I had the kitty hairbrush. Somehow, I’ve got a knack with that thing.  When frustrated (or maybe when just bored, hard to be sure), she did her best to remove the carpet with her claws, especially when she wasn’t getting whatever it was she wanted (whatever that was).  And if I had a nickel for every time the phrase “cat-like typing detected”, I’d be able to purchase the hardcover collectors-edition of her gibberish novel many times over.  She did like to walk on keyboards, if only because Mom so often has one on her lap. She was a lover of sunbeams, and attacker of shadows. She slumbered with us, ate with us, and shed most of her hair on a specific area of the apartment.  She hissed at the vacuum cleaner anytime I pulled it out; clearly evil.  She knew exactly how she wanted the world to be, and it involved much tuna, napping, and attention.

It’s a sad day today – she passed away with her mom at her side this evening.  The apartment feels askew, and there’s a collar that is missing a kitten. We’re running through photos, sharing stories of this kitten that would take regular 3am sprints through the apartment for no apparent reason, and toasting her awesomeness with expensive scotch.  This officially crossed the line into family, and the loss feels real – the typical chirps and mewls she’d offer up when either of us got home are notably absent.  But I’ll be damned if she wasn’t the best cat ever. I mean c’mon – I wasn’t even allergic to her.  Clearly magical.

For a collection of awesome photos of this awesome feline, check here.

Clearly, I’m not the only one who will write a list like this.  Heck, I’m not even close to the most qualified to write a list like this.  I’m offering it up as a short retrospective, if only because this has been an excellent year of riding my bike (amongst other notable feats, like moving in with a girl for the first time).  There have been many rides, thousands of miles, and lots of hills. The death ride was tackled yet again, I rode a full stage of the Tour de France a few days before the big boys came through, and yet I missed the Tour of California on account of being home sick.  I raced cyclocross, and finished fourth not once but twice.  And through it all, I’ve managed to get through another year without seriously injuring myself.  Cheers to that, eh?

Pilarcitos CX #4 - photo credit Gnat Harris

So as a tech-geek gear hound, I thought I’d draft up a list of my own personal top products of 2009 – awards of sorts, for bike-related products that I’ve felt were the best items I’ve added to my quiver of bikes, or to my cycling closet, in the past 12 months.  Feel free to leave comments telling me what I forgot, or what I should try in 2010.  Happy new year to all.  May 2010 bring even more great rides and great memories.

Best wear-always piece of gear: Rapha wool baselayer.  These ultra thin merino wool baselayers are softer than the edge of a rainbow, and contain some sort of new zealand magic that perfectly regulate core temperature.  I treated myself to a three-pack of these, and I’ve worn one on every ride since then.

Best season-extending piece of gear: Rapha softshell gilet vest.  Two points for Rapha; I bought two items from their catalog, and despite the cost, they’re worth every cent. The softshell gilet vest fits perfectly, cut high in the front waist so it stays flat when you’re riding, the pockets are perfect and plentiful, and its an ideal layer for those days that are on the precipitous edge of discomfort.

Best retro-cool gear: Avid Shorty Ultimate cyclocross brakes. Leave it to the guys in Chicago to take what was supposed to be an antique technology (cantilever rim brakes) and redesign it in a way that makes even the most ardent gear hag drool blood. Weightless, beyond powerful, and cleverly adjustable to account for rear heel clearance, these are what every Grafton and Paul brake from 1996 dreamed of being.

Best wore-it-out-so-bought-it-again gear: Specialized All-Conditions Armadillo Elite tires. They’re race-worthy tires, not as elegantly compliant as a cotton-casing perhaps, but entirely capable in, as the name reads, all conditions. The secret joy of these 700c rubber circles is the Armadillo Elite puncture-resistant ply under the tread, which adds something like 20g per tire, but means that you’ll not likely ever puncture.  As winter tires, or simply as insurance year round, the thrill of being glass/thorn/tack/nail-proof is something I can’t recommend enough.

Best Finally-got-around-to-it gear: BG Fit.  Ok, technically not gear, but worth it’s weight in whatever your currency, this year I finally got it together and got myself professionally fit to my bike – the same fit trusted by the pros on Team Saxo Bank, and soon, some of those Astana guys too.  Read more about my fit experience here, then go find a Specialized shop that can do it for you.  Astonishingly better.

Best new nutritional supplement: Optygen EFS Liquid Shot.  Discovered this in the schwag bag of Levi Leipheimer’s gran fondo in NorCal.  A tasty, slightly thinner viscosity gel in a easy 5oz flask, this stuff was aces as I nursed it along the 100-mile course, and finished without cramping or any stomach upset.  Definitely ideal for those long days in the saddle.

Best New Awesome Gear: SRAM XX.  I used to race a 2×9 setup when I was racing mountain bikes, and I’m a big fan of the 2-ring setup for dedicated XC riding and racing.  SRAM has taken that idea, and a dozen other absolutely elegant design tricks, and created a dedicated XC racing group that is without parallel.  Favorite details include the shifters and brakes sharing a bar perch, the massively powerful brakes, and the OMG light 10-spd cassette.  In every way, incredible and worth the acclaim it’s earned.

Best post-ride brew: Lagunitas IPA.  California, while entirely screwed in many ways, does have a fantastic beer advantage over most of the rest of the world, with arguable cases to be made for Oregon, Belgium, Germany, and Czech Republic.  Post ride libation choices abound, and there are plenty I enjoy, but like a favorite old t-shirt, there is something fantastic about it that keeps me going back, again and again, never disappointed.

Best speed-enhancing product: Zipp 404 wheels.  I’ve had these for a full year now, and I can’t imagine living without them.  It’s the hollow sound they make as they roll underneath me, the unflinching rigidity they add to my bike, and the absolute badass-ness they add to my bike’s appearance.  Plus, in a cross wind, they’re like having a sail tacked perfectly in the gust, pulling you along as if some sort of divinity lived in your hubs and was hamsterwheeling you forward, off the front of the group.  Bonus points for my “skullz” wheeltags, which make them even more extra badass looking.  Sometimes, they make children cry, just on appearance alone.

Best extravagance: Campagnolo corkscrew. A birthday present from my sweetheart, this monstrosity of a corkscrew makes short work of the cork from any Brunello or Barolo, no matter the vintage.  The chainring bolt pivots are a subtle but polite nod to the cycling foundations of this marvelous bit of metalwork, and it never fails to elicit oohs and aaahs from visiting dinner guests.

Best battery-powered gear: Garmin Edge 705*.  A single unit that tracks GPS data along with heart rate and cadence, this admittedly bulky computer probably offers more power than the first PC I owned, and it’s an absolutely incredible way to track ride data.  An asterisk is added because I have reservations about the mount design, which breaks all too easily, but they’ve since updated it with a more robust version that I’ve heard is good, but I’ve not yet tried myself. Also, the new Garmin bike computers rely on a totally new mounting system, which looks pretty solid.

I’ve heard it said that there is no greater teacher than failure.  Perhaps true at times, but probably safer to say that there is no more painful a teacher.  The best teachers I’ve had seek to inspire far more than they actually seek to merely teach.  And I’ve not yet found that same palpable inspiration from any failure I’ve endured.  So perhaps it’s not the best teacher, but it’s clearly an effective one (once you get past the part where you feel like you got clobbered in the chest with a jackhammer).

It’s not without irony that I recently stumbled, quite seriously, in an area where I’m looked at to be a resource for others.  I’m supposed to know this stuff cold, well enough to teach it.  It was not my tactical knowledge or my state of mind that failed me.  It was a failure of empathy.

I’ve told many people that there are basically three rules to follow if you want to stay out of 99% of the potential trouble in the world of social media on sites like facebook and twitter.  They are as follows:
1. Don’t lie
2. Don’t fight
3. Don’t reveal secrets

For anyone who’s heard me say this before, I’d like to make some small but critical amendments to these three tenants.

1.1. Don’t lie, or appear to lie
2.1. Don’t fight, or appear to fight
3.1. Don’t reveal things that you or others consider to be secrets

These amendments highlight something important, something that has entirely and rather quickly reframed my perspective of what I will do online from this point forward.  I think if I was asked about this a few weeks ago, I would have agreed with all of this, but I might not have fully grasped the magnitude of the difference between the old rules, and the new ones I’m proposing. This new way simply wasn’t the lens through which I was looking at the world. Thus, it wasn’t how I was filtering everything I shared online regarding stuff I’ve seen, heard, or done.  I was following the original rules, and I was personally defining each time what it meant to lie, fight, or reveal secrets.  The cold shower reality is instead that it doesn’t much matter what I think the definitions are.  The definition of any of these rules is not a function of my opinion, but rather a function of anyone who might read and care about what I choose to share.  And in the online world, we know this means anybody.  Parents.  Girlfriend.  Old girlfriend.  Co-worker.  Friend of friend.  Someone you’ll never meet.  Anybody.

It’s not always easy to consider the views of everybody.  And in some cases, there will always be dissenting opinions – I’m not suggesting that we whitewash the world in the hopes of finding a meaningless harmony.  The point is this: the question isn’t if *I* think it’s a fight, lie, or revealing a secret.  It’s “could anyone think that this is a fight, lie, or revealing a secret?”.  And then having the wisdom and good sense to think critically about that question, and the people involved, instead of thinking about it entirely from my own myopic point of view.

I’m not a fan of making mistakes.  Nobody goes out looking to make a mistake simply because they feel like they haven’t learned anything recently.  It’s likely that I’ll make other mistakes in the future.  But with some diligence, I won’t make this same one again.  My sincere apologies to those involved; if you’re reading this, you know who you are.

It was entirely due to good luck that I happened to be able to be able to get my bike fit at the Boulder Center for Sports Medicine. I was in Boulder on other business, and was able to arrange a 2.5 hr fit session with bike fit rockstar Sean Madsen, a guy who undisputedly now knows far more about the workings of cyclist knees, feet, hips, shoulders, backs, and wrists than nearly anybody. I owe him a massive thanks for his time and his help.

Sean Madsen from BCSM looks on as I pedal while covered in tracking dots

This is the part where I say “Well ya know, I did my share of bike fitting way back when I worked in a shop…”  I’ve been riding bikes for the better part of 18 years now, and save for the occasional non-bike vacation or that bit where I was in school, there hasn’t been much “off the bike” time.  And while it’s true, I’ve never actually won a race (though I once got 2^nd), I think I’ve got a decent understanding of bike fit.  Or at least, I thought so.

Side view of the tracking dots - note the red cameras!

In recent years, I’ve learned even more as the science and physiology of biomechanics has blossomed bike fit from a pure art form into a unique science.  It’s a science where the algorithms are well established, yet remain flexible enough to accommodate each individual rider.  Yet despite my familiarity with the concept of fit, and despite my own experience, it was the process of actually going through it that really made me realize how far this has come.  From the physical assessment of flexibility and asymmetry, to being filmed with six cameras and those 3D tracking dots they use to create animated Golem characters, I was in awe at the undeniable precision.  I’ve seen this stuff on paper, plenty of times.  But this time it was me, and those circles being drawn on the screen were the ellipses of my knees, wavering and weaving left to right as I pedaled up and down.  These spiro-graph doodles that the heartless and whirring HAL-9000 machine was displaying were uncaring, ruthless, and perfect.  And they showed me, by exactly how much, that I was not.

I was riding my bike on a trainer under the 6 laser-beam equipped cameras in the lab.  The cameras and their computer tracked the 16 reflectors on my knees, feet, and hips to within a few millimeters in 3 dimensions.  I was pedaling at a fixed 290 watts.  After a healthy sample of about 4800 readings (16 sensors, tracked for about 5 seconds at 60 frames per second), Sean and I reviewed my results: my knees were too bent at the bottom of the pedal stroke, my back wasn’t curving right, and I was pedaling with my heels lifted all the time.  My knees weren’t optimally aligned over the pedals, and because I have a slightly longer left femur (who knew?), I was pedaling slightly crooked, so that my knees weren’t perfectly mirror images of each other.  Basically, I was pretty good from far, but up close, far from good.

We ended up dropping my saddle and my bars (yes, that’s right, my legs were too bent at the bottom of the stroke, but we dropped my saddle).  We adjusted my cleats, and I got back on the bike.  Cameras aglow in their sinister laserbeam red, I spun the bike back up to speed and waited for Sean to bring the wattage back up to 290.  It never happened.  Or rather, it did, but I never felt it.  These few small tweaks let me pedal at the same power, but at a far lower perceived exertion.  It was not subtle.  My center of gravity dropped by more than a centimeter, my bars dropped nearly 2cm, and my cleats now adjusted to accommodate for leg length discrepancies, I was now oddly unchanged, yet stronger.  I didn’t feel like my bike fit differently.  Sean simply unlocked some of my muscles.

6 of these, staring at me.

Apparently there were two big things at work here: one is that I am now able to utilize more of my gluteus muscles, which apparently are the strongest muscles the body has.  Second, because I was always pedaling with my toes pointed down, my calves were never getting a chance to relax, eternally flexed out yet not firing and providing power.  My seat was too high, so I was pointing my toes to reach the pedals. By pointing my toes, I wasn’t getting proper leg extension.  Dropping my saddle let me drop my heels, get better extension, use more muscles, and abuse my calves less.

Had it been up to me, I would have started by raising my saddle.  This would have been exactly wrong.

So what’d we learn?  A few things: first, the science of bike fit has more to say about the interactions of the entire body with the entire bike than it has to say about one specific aspect.  It’s chaos theory and butterflies in the Amazon, but it’s an ecosystem where, at least in a lab, you can clearly see and measure the effects of a change in position on not just that element, but the rest of the rider as well.  And the art form has moved from the knowing glances of a wizened Italian sitting in the corner with an espresso, to a scientist in Colorado who can measure everything, but still has the insight to know what to change to bring the entire system into alignment.

Second, I suspect that this might be uncomfortable for people who’ve been doing this for a long time.  The past generation’s gurus of bike fit, while probably well worthy of the acclaim they have earned themselves, are now at risk of being outmoded by a system that is more ruthlessly reliable, more quickly taught, and more accommodating to specific & individual rider needs (especially when, say, your left leg is 2 or 3 mm longer than your right).  It doesn’t make the Gurus any less talented.  It simply makes them less unique.

Third, this sort of scientific approach feels nothing like the inside of a bike shop.  I walked into the Boulder Center having no idea what to expect, and was rather surprised to find that it felt as clinical as it did.  Apart from a few exceptions I’ve seen (like the fit room at nearby University Bikes), the confidence and assurance of this laboratory was decidedly unlike the archetype of your neighbourhood bike shop.  But the fact that bike shops can learn how to do this, and that this fit technology has become available all over the planet within the past 3 years – well, it’s all rather stunning, and gives me hope about what the future of a great bike shop environment will be.  In some cases, it’s already there.  And that’s just cool.

Three tracking dots per shoe