When you decided to ride a bike, you can be jumping into a world you don’t know well. People will use new words, or words in ways you aren’t used to hearing them. People will also try and give you advice, some will be good, and some will be bad.
We felt it would then be a great idea to offer you a few tips and ideas to make cycling fun and easy.
If you’ve spent all winter putting in the miles and doing the gym work, come summer you’ll just need a few extra touches to boost your performance. These touches don’t require you to get out on your bike, and they require you to delve into your mind.
Your body can be as best prepared as it is possible to be, but without making sure your head can deal with the pressure and stress of race day, you might not get as great a result as you deserve. Fine-tuning your mental preparedness can take you that extra mile, sadly just winging it will not work for most of us.
The best way to get better at climbing is to ride up grades, and not upgrades, according to Eddy Merckx. He probably knows a thing or two about bikes. Not all of us live near huge mountain passes though, we live where hills are slightly modest and don’t provide us the opportunity for long endurance miles.
XD R stands for XD Road, and it is based off SRAM’S highly successful XD driver for mountain bikes. The simple idea behind XD and XDR drivers was to allow SRAM to bring you a wider gear range by allowing you to run a smaller cog than can currently be fitted on standard freehub bodies.
When working on your own bike, it is easy to get caught up and make mistakes. It is always best to give yourself enough time to make sure that you aren’t going to make a mistake or develop bad habits. Taking your time is the best way to treat every job; don’t leave workshop time until the very last minute.
SRAM created the XDR and XD drivers to allow us to run cassettes that had cogs with less than 11 teeth, which is great if you want to go and run a 1x drive train and still have a big top gear. It will help to eliminate the topping out that some of us were getting on the flat and the much more likely topping out when we were descending.
There is a problem in transportation problem called the last mile problem. When the last mile problem is used around transport, it has to do with how do people get the final mile from a bus or train station to work. The obvious answer for us cyclists is a bike.
The bike trade is also keen on this, so there are a plethora of solutions for urban riding. You can get a folding bike. You could get a hybrid. The problem with these solutions is that they are sometimes a bit subdued. They are too utilitarian, they seem to have had their soul sucked out and the fun of cycling removed.
We felt this could be rectified. We want you to ride to work and feel so exhilarated from your ride that the rest of the day melts away on the high you’re feeling. We want you to fly through traffic. To feel the wind rush through your hair. Your bike to make you smile from ear to ear, we want cycling to make you remember what it feels like to be a child again.
Weight weenies was originally a pejorative term for people who got too obsessed by the weight of their bike. They were considered to spend more time worrying about the weight of their bike rather than riding their bike. They would pay thousands of dollars to get a bike a few grams lighter, even if it sacrificed comfort.
The weight weenie for many cyclists was a person with more money than sense. Though now by using the weight weenies forum you’ll find that people who care about the weight of their bike have been retaking the term. Many though still spend way more money than they should in order to have a light bike.
Once we’ve delved into the UCI we’ll move onto why having a UCI certification is good and a little bit more about where you can find their certification information. At the end, we’ll give you a handy little guide to which of our carbon fiber wheels have a UCI certificate.
The UCI certification then not only makes life easy for commissaires, but it also allows you as a consumer piece of mind. We went for full UCI certification as we wanted you to know that we aim to be the premier Chinese supplier of carbon fiber road bike wheels.
