Nice.

There is a mountain bike downhill race in Lisbon Portugal called Lisboa Downtown that winds down these endless flights of stairs and cobbled streets and goes over man-made ramps and looks absolutely SICK. I first read about this on cyclingnews.com and then I watched some of the video on the event web site and all I can say is wow...

I remember when I worked downtown at Ti Cycles and took Dave's 2nd generation titanium DH bike for a spin down the SAM steps and all over Pioneer Square. Never before in my life had I been able to hit a curb head on and barely notice it. Or haul ass down a flight of stairs and not be worried about getting pitched over the bars. And that was with way old school suspension technology.

What a blast this event must be. Every kid dreams of riding down stairs - who doesn't love that, right?

The proximity of the stone buildings probably add a little to the excitement level of the riders I'm betting.

At the start of the first road stage of this year's Paris-Nice stage race cyclingnews.com reported that the rain was falling and the wind was blowing. The weather was so atrocious that the distance was cut in half... quite unusual for a professional road race.

As a winner of stage two of the 2007 Tour de France to Ghent, Gert Steegmans was known as a specialist for uphill bunch sprint finishes. He showed it once again by winning stage one of Paris-Nice in Nevers. The race was shortened in half to 93.5 kilometers due to severe weather, but was contested on a very high speed when Steegmans' team-mates from Quick Step decided to put the hammer down in the cross wind.

Under the rain, the Belgian squad looked as comfortable as if it was racing in its own backyard, unlike the diminutive Spaniards from Euskaltel who were daunted by the high winds. "Kevin Hulsmans and myself, we looked at them and we laughed, they were scared," Steegmans testified.

Nice. It takes balls to say that sort of thing but it takes even bigger balls to walk the walk and Steegmans did that in spades. Not only did Quick Step shred the peloton at will but Gert took to the front with 350 m to go and never looked back.

What's that clanking noise...? Oh, it's Steegmans approaching.

Sometimes someone comes up with the answer to a question that should never have been asked; like this Iso Truss mountain bike frame.

I mean I guess it's a neat engineering feat but there are so many things wrong with this design...

• What happens when you leave a cup out in the rain? It fills up with water. on a wet day all of these tubes are suddenly great, big cups that will fill with water, mud, cow poop, dead slugs and anything else you ride through. Live in So Cal? Have no fear, your 2.75 lb frame will also soon weigh 4 or 5 when it fills with dust.
• How many times have you banged your legs against the tubes of your frame or fallen on your bike? Now imagine banging them against a cheese grater or falling on a thousand tiny serrated knives...
• Ever sit unexpectedly on your top tube? Right, these bike designers obviously have not either.

This is the kind of thing you buy and then hang on your wall or seal up in your time capsule so you can laugh about how silly people were 20 years ago when you dig it back up.

There's more than one cycling nerd besides me at the Information School where I work so it should not be too surprising that one of them walked in to my office today and informed me that Sheldon Brown had passed away. Sure enough, you can read about it here.

My only real contact or interaction with this guy was one long email exchange on some techy bike list some years ago and I vividly recall how adamant he was that you only EVER needed one brake on a bicycle. That being the front brake. No amount of real-world examples that I had experienced would convince him otherwise.

The guy sure was an icon in the bicycle industry and a very unique individual, I wish his wife and kids all the best. Working in a bike shop is not exactly going to leave his family a big nest egg if you get what I'm saying.

Some things that stood out to me when I was browsing his vast collection of bicycles were a fixed-gear tandem and a fixed gear with a Biopace chainring. That takes balls.

Really, really damn fast. Check this:

http://www.cyclingnews.com/road.php?id=road/2008/jan08/qatar08/qatar082

On a flat, windy day of the second stage of the 7th Tour of Qatar the peloton (not just the leaders!) averaged 55 kph. For those of you that were not around for the half-assed attempt the US made to go Metric many years ago, that's over 34 mph. THIRTY FOUR.

Oh sure you say, "Anyone can do that when you are getting sucked along in the pack." Wrong.

• You have never had the likes of the Quick Step team riding you into the gutter because you can't get into their echelon.
• This stage was 137.5 km (85 miles) long. When was the last time you even averaged 25 mph for more than a few miles.
• This was the average. That means at times the speed was much higher.

Unbelievable.

I wonder how many bags of potato chips I could buy if I sold all my bikes. 'Cuz that's what I feel like I'd be pretty good at right now - getting fat.

Every year I think it would be a neat thing to post an all-inclusive calendar of cycling events that interest me. My first iteration was lame to say the least... But it slowly got better and in 2006 I settled on a format that I thought would stand the test of time. I 'borrowed' this look from OBRA and ended up liking it so much that I used it for the WSBA calendar as well.

But, since I'm no professional coder my calendar is 100 percent manual when it comes to updates and revisions. Not so good. And it has to be completely overhauled every year when January 1 no longer falls on a Saturday or whatever day of the week it was last year.

Enter Google Calendar.

Now my ride calendar looks like this. I love it. You can opt to view just road races, track races, social rides, holidays, whatever you want. I can now also create recurring events, easily link to Google Maps and people can add this stuff to their Google Calendar if they have one.

Outsourcing like it's going out of style - I love it.

How long until the next neat-o thing appears on the Internet? Oh wait, it's already here...

I first heard about MapMyRide from my friend Brian and I gotta say, this is cool. Not only can you 'map' your road or off-road ride, you can apparently also save you ride and let others search them, use them, etc., etc. A two wheel ride share if you will.

As cool as this is I'm really bummed that this service never uses a secure, encrypted (HTTPS) connection when asking you to create your profile, sign in, anything. In this day and age that seems unconscionable. Oh well, it won't stop tons of folks from entering all kinds of personal data I'm sure. :(

After checking it out and seeing that they use Google maps, I wonder how different it is from Gmaps Pedometer.

How much stuff can you cram into a cyclometer? Cervellum thinks it's a lot.

Not only does this bicycle computer have all the usual stats that everyone (doesn't) need, it also has 'modules' that you can connect to give you heart rate, an optional LCD on the top of your STI lever, a power meter, GPS mapping capability and a REARWARD FACING CAMERA SO YOU CAN SEE WHAT'S BEHIND YOU.

No, really. There is a lens that attaches to your seatpost and the image it picks up can be displayed on the unit's screen; just like some massive RV with no rear window.

I suppose it might be fun to be off the front and not have to look behind you to check on the progress of the pack...

Sometimes, after years of not finding what you want you come across it in the strangest way.

I was riding the bus home today and grabbed a copy of The Stranger to read on the trip. Now I love ads, often they are far more interesting than the articles in any magazine. So as I'm paging though the latest issue I saw a cool, little  black and white line drawing of an ad and promptly checked it out when I got home. It was for swrve cycling clothing. And they rock.

Ever ridden your bike in jeans? It bites. Seams rub you in all the wrong places, they bind and you have to roll them up so you don't coat them in grease or snag them in your chain and launch your self over the bars. And when your work place is close enough to home to make putting on the official cycling clown suite a humongous hassle I'm always looking for the perfect "ride to work and then still be able to wear it without looking like a fool" outfit.

I'm going to ask Santa for a pair of knickers for Christmas!

Okay, I love my bike(s). I have dreamed about them, resolved major moral dilemmas while riding them and asked girls out while on one. But no way would I ever consider going this far.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7095134.stm

Let me preface this rant by saying that I love CycleU. They perform a really great service for local riders and racers and provide invaluable coaching, training and skills classes. But... sometimes their customer service falls far short of what I think is reasonable to expect.

For about three years now they have had this indoor TT series. It's fantastic! The event is a 10 km CompuTrainer race and they have seven of these things lined up so when it's fully booked it's quite competitive to say the least. In the past when you finished a TT they would simply email you a spreadsheet of the results from the evening. This was super as you could compile your results as the year went on and also compare yourself to your friends, etc.

Then someone make a stink about privacy... I guess they thought someone else would get a competitive advantage or something if they saw all the results. When I heard this I was laughing. I mean I suppose it's feasible that this is true but c'mon; 99 percent of us here are just po-dunk local racers and I'll wager that there is not a thing anyone could do with this precious TT results knowledge that would affect the outcome of any local race. I guess I made a bit of a scene last year trying to argue FOR sending everyone's results to everyone but was shut down. Hard. "We take the privacy of our clients seriously" I was told.

So anyway, CycleU kowtowed to this user and started only sending me results for ME and not for anyone else. Now I had to email all my friends and share results the good old-fashioned way - by sending attachments. :(

After my first indoor TT this fall I was surprised that I got no results at all... When I inquired about this I was pointed to the CycleU blog and that results would be posted there. And guess what? everyone is listed!

Hello CycleU! Remember last year when you were all concerned about posting results from other people? Well now you are not only posting everyone's times but you are doing so in a format that is not very valuable to results geeks like me who want to track this kind of data and don't want to suffer through the manual data entry.

So my beef is:

1. I got no results.
2. I had to follow up to get my results.
3. The results are exactly what I wanted last year and could not get. Why the huge stink last year...?!
4. The format bites. You make me download an image? Argh...

Lastly - is there a link on the CycleU home page to their blog...? Only as of about today.

Why do people make stuff complicated? It's just an indoor TT and people want results. Sheesh. Why is it that so many bicycle industries are run by enthusiasts and not business people? I mean all the things CycleU does is great and these indoor TTs are great, where is that little bit of extra?

Seattle is awash with bicycles in general and in the circles I travel it's that times 10. Even so, sometimes I see a bike that really amazes me; like this Schwinn Varsity here.

If you look closely you will see:

• BMX pegs for crying out loud! Not like the rider ever uses them but still...
• The ubiquitous (for Seattle bicycle messengers anyway) top tube pad.
• The single speed drivetrain.
• Unlike most hard core messengers, this person rolls withOUT toe clips but has a front brake to compensate.
• Steel (or are they tin?) fenders.
• A full-on Brooks saddle! I see this so often, no matter how cheap and cobbled together the bike, the owner opts to totally pimp it out by breaking the bank on one particular component. In this case it's the saddle. I mean you could buy at least three of these bikes for what that saddle cost; including pegs for each one.
• Of course this ride is sporting the chopped and flipped (upside down) road handlebars. Nothing less would do for the messenger look.
• Note the chainstay protector, and it's protecting this frame from what exactly? Besides, it's a single speed bike,the chain will never get anywhere near that stay.

Anyway, it's pretty cool when people like their bikes enough to dude 'em up like this. Seriously. It won't stop me from making fun of these machines but style has no objective basis obviously.