One bike, three exploratory phases of endurance cycling progression, and numerous insights around why riding my bike long and far in 2020 wound up helping me maintain my mental health and well-being in a way that distinguishes cycling from any other endurance sport.

One weekend, two dirt races. BORCA’s Spring Chicken Enduro MTB race, and OBC’s Almonte Paris-Roubaix are the perfect pairing for weekend of racing bikes on dirt.

The final piece in a series of deep-dives into my titanium dream bike, T-Lab’s X3. Fully custom designed and built to thrive across a broad range of riding conditions, my build biases toward reliability under heavy and frequent use in harsh environments.

Can an aluminum fat bike actually feel good enough to want to ride it a lot? What would it take to make it rule?

Tire construction influences steering dynamics more ‘strongly’ as volume increases. You WON’T see this jump out from the numbers, and this phenomenon, which has pushed folks away from 650b wheels/tires, is not widely understood.

How often do products actually live up to their name? Meet Castelli’s Unlimited Puffy jacket.

Lake, the first company to build winter cycling boots, remains dedicated to building options that prioritize function, which drives their approach to fit. Lake delivers solutions that enable riders to enjoy their time riding bikes outside, even when they don’t have years of experience riding in the winter.

There’s what I’d consider the ‘proper’ way to clean a bike after a winter ride, then there’s the ‘best-can-do’ way. The former will protect your bike from salt damage to the greatest extend possible, limiting damage to the whatever drivetrain grinding might occur during the ride itself. The ‘best-can-do’ method is likely to allow salt to reside on the bike in hard to access places, and do harm over time.

The Polare 3 departs significantly from its predecessor. Tasked with covering the coldest temperature range Castelli designs and builds for, the 3 prioritizes dry-cold more than the NanoFlex, which is biased toward wet conditions.

Here’s the thing. GRINDURO is not ‘gravel.’ ‘Gravel’ is not a thing. It’s also not nothing.

The second in a trilogy on the process of designing a dream gravel bike, this piece walks through the way I refined my thinking and design for my custom T-Lab X3 modern gravel bike build, translating principles into specific decisions.

The first in a three-part series on the process of designing a dream gravel bike, this piece walks through the way I conceived my custom T-Lab X3 modern gravel bike build. This is a principles-based approach, which is meant to support decision making that lands riders on bikes they love.

For those with ample supplies of motivation and zeal, but insufficient kit for spring riding, this is a short guide to a selection of key pieces from Castelli. Quality cycling kit is expensive, so I hope this helps inform decisions that lead to many hours of happy riding, not regrets.

Two-hundred kilometer rides every month through winter; doable? All I actually needed was an objective, something to look forward to through the dreary days of November, as daylight hours diminished rapidly, and the stark reality settled in: winter was coming. And not just any winter; COVID-winter.

I try to paint a picture here that’s more about building a holistic understanding of the environment you’re riding, and a degree of ‘mastery’ around decision-making than about telling you which tires you should buy. That’s the last thing I want to do. I want to help you develop a deep understanding of the requirements you’re working with, which you can then assess against your priorities. This will ground good decision-making.