A small package came in the mail today from Rapha, and inside it a clever little printed guide to the 2013 race calendar of cycling events where Team Sky will be competing.

Part cycling bible, part marketing tool, the book includes pages for each of the race along with a history of the race and places to jot down the race’s key figures. It’s a bit of a journal and a bit of an historical marker that reminds me of the 33 Cups of Coffee guide books I gave to some of my staff at my coffee shop.

In addition to the pages of maps and race descriptions there is also a sheet containing stickers for the first three events of the seasons. The rest of the stickers can be picked up at the races from Rapha staff, or will be included with orders of Rapha gear.

My pack (as it was sent from Chris in Marketing) seems to have all the stickers, which means I now have an all-in-one decoration kit for our espresso machine.

The Rapha guide is available for $10 on the Rapha website.

It was not the fault of the Garmin Edge 810 that I rode my bike into the back of a parked car, launching myself over the handlebars, bruising my ribs and earning myself a visit to the local Emergency Room—stupidity and a lack of attention to road conditions caused my accident.

It is, however, such a perfectly fitting metaphor for the experience of using the newest Garmin GPS-based bicycle computer that I feel the two cannot be separated.

Mere milliseconds before I looked up and saw the (large) brown SUV in front of my wheel I had been silently cursing at the device, wondering how many times I was going to have to forcibly push a button with my gloved hand and have it fail to respond before I might see the screen on which I had set the display for total elevation and the road’s percent grade.

Moments before that I was wondering why the “Training Partner” (the Atari 2600-esque avatar that theoretically provides motivation by showing you how far ahead or behind a non-moving icon you’ve become) displayed the amount of miles I had fallen behind a little pixelated stick figure, but not how fast I was actually going that very moment. When I’m racing someone, I want to know how fast I’m going.

It seems a lot of companies are trying to refine the style of clothing for the road cyclist, and that’s a part of a trend that we’ve been commenting on for some time.

The problem to be solved is the same: tight-fitting and logo-clad lycra is growing old and many hard core riders are looking for something more comfortable and less garish. The solutions vary however, and some are much better at producing clothing that feels good on the bike and on the body.

The guys at Road Holland have approached this with a line of clothing that evokes yesteryear’s wool without the odd fit and form of the old sheep hair kits.

They sent us a few pieces to test and this, the Arnhem, fits great on the bike but looks good enough that I often just keep wearing it all day long. It’s a 40/60 wool/poly blend, so it’s just tight enough to keep from filling up like a kite in a breeze.

For $150 it’s a good price point for a full-length-sleeve jersey (I’ve got many, many short sleeve jerseys that are more expensive and not nearly as comfortable.)

Kurt Sandiforth is the type of guy you’d expect to find in a strange cafe somewhere while he’s in the midst of cycling around the world. He’s got the perfect cyclist build—tall enough for power but not so tall as to be laden by his own mass—and he’s got the sparkle in his eye that says “I’m going places.” Outgoing and enthusiastic about bikes and the world, he’s the perfect ambassador for the dream of throwing off the shackles of a conventional life and going for a long, long bike ride. The fact that he is cycling around the world then isn’t so surprising.

I first met Kurt a few months ago at my coffee shop, Gypsy Donut and Espresso Bar as he and a friend passed through my town on a test ride on his laden Surley. Nyack, where I live, is about half way between Beacon (where he worked at a shop) and Manhattan (their destination). Kurt had already worked his way from the west coast to New York via a very southern route and then paused in Beacon for a bit to prepare.

Kurt showed up again a few days ago in full-on-adventure travel mode, using Gypsy again as a cyclist-friendly pit stop. From New York he’s headed to Florida and then going to travel through Latin America and eventually start heading east until he lands back on the West Coast. When asked how long he plans to travel he says, looking off into the distance “oh five or six years. I’ll have to stop and get jobs along the way. This is a life goal, so I’m not going to rush it.”

As someone who has spent his life (until the last few years) as a freelancer I can certainly appreciate the journey he’s got planned. The idea of moving from place to place and living in the moment is the underlying attraction of most bike rides so a ride that encompasses years and spans the Earth sounds amazing.

If you’d like to follow along with his journey, he’s blogging about his travels at pocket-thunder.blogspot.com and you can drop him a line at bikegreaseandcoffee@yahoo.com

Publisher note: Meeting Kurt was well-timed for our Fat Bike feature on Wired. It goes live Monday and we’ll have a post on the rest of the story after it does.

My coffee and donut shop, Gypsy Donut, is a small shop focusing on making hand made products in a sustainable way. We’re in the Village of Nyack, snuggled along the Hudson River and the Village has a really lively bar scene, as well as a summer festival of concerts and a number of street fairs.

One of the things that we really hoped to achieve with the business was to create a bike-based food cart that could be used to sell our baked goods and coffee at Village events and to the crowds gathered at the bars. (We’d like to get as much caffeine in them as possible.)

Here’s the catch. For some reason there are only three vendor permits per year, all of which are used by truck-based business that are only active in the summer.

On the 14th of February we head to the Village board meeting to request a change to the number of available permits so that we can operate the food cart. In addition to having to detail our plans, it would be incredibly helpful to present case studies on how bicycle-based food vending has improved a commercial downtown, urban area or community. I’ve found lots of websites talking about the build-out of these bike carts, but I can’t find a lot of coverage on their advantages and the benefit of a sustainable transportation method.

Does anyone have any links you’d like to share? I’d be interested in walking into the meeting with a binder full of some actual data and/or quotations from customers served by these carts.

Any thoughts?

As with many dutiful cyclists I tuned in for part 1 of 2 of the Oprah public relations event confession. I’ve struggled with what to write about Lance both as a journalist and as a cyclist because I have a lot of emotions over this. After a night of thought the journalist side of me has completed what I feel is an accurate and complete assessment of the interview: Lance is a sociopath. This Wikipedia entry backs this up both with the Triarchic model and the Cleckley Checklist (The checklist is more fun because there are sixteen check items that you can follow along with.)

But last night I watched Lance at the Cannibal restaurant yesterday at an event (not exactly a party, more of a suggested gathering place) organized by Rapha and I had a simultaneous epiphany as did Byron who was stepping out aside from the Lance story across the country.

Cyclists enjoying themselves pre-interview.

Same people, life force sucked out of them during interview.

Someone asked me why cyclists care about Lance’s confession, why waste time on a “retired” athlete, why do we want to “drag him through the mud” and “hurt cycling.” We all have our reasons why this admission of guilt matters to us and why this is more than a confession from a single doper. This article was going to be the summary of those reasons, but really you know why it matters to you and to cycling. And if it doesn’t matter to you all the better–your’e like the kid who doesn’t believe in Santa but then thinks he hears the clattering of hooves on the roof and finds a room full of toys. You’re better off not having seen daddy scurry out of the room with an empty Target bag.

But what occurred to me last night, while looking at the crestfallen before me, is that Lance has tumbled from his pedestal at a time when his pedestal may no longer matter. Cycling is no longer in the hands of the professional athletes but in the hands of companies like Rapha who have just finished a power transfer that’s been quiet and smooth while the walls of professional cycling come tumbling down.

This Thursday Lance will go on Oprah to probably make a complete, honest and pubic apology for his wrongdoing, promise to champion dope-free cycling teams and stop taking millions from his charity in the name of cancer patient supportstart the media train that will be his re-comeback to professional sports.

Regardless of which side of the fence you’re on, you can join in on the fun with a few parties being held on opposite sides of the continent.

For residents of PDX, head on over to Rapha’s new home near the Pearl District to watch “a live feed” of the event. Directions and details are here.

If you’re in the 212 you can visit Cannibal Beer and Butcher for a viewing party with Rapha and GAGE+DESOTO. I’ll also be there for BikeHugger sorta-live blogging (depending on how much of the beer I have. That event is at 8:30pm at 113 East 29th Street (Between Park and Lex.)

My money is on the following scenario: Lance gives a teary confession to doping, but not to being a mastermind behind a doping ring. He apologizes just enough to make the Yellow Bands feel awesome about supporting a man who was just doing what he needed to do to help cancer patients. It won’t be enough to heal cycling, it won’t be enough to implicate the UCI and the other complicit organizations but those magazines and media outlets that rode the Lance gravy train will feel good running stories on his “apology,” his “clean comeback” and his new era.

If you’ve got a viewing party planned, let us know in the comments.

I’ve had a Garmin GPS mounted to my bikes since before the Edge series of bike-specific computers was available, using their hiking models and the bike bar adapters to fashion computers that were functional but not particularly slim. (I’ve saved my ass with a mapping bike computer on several occasions, including trips to road ride in Beijing, mountain bike in the forests of Louisiana and poking around in the Netherlands. In fact it was a Garmin GPS computer that brought me to BikeHugger. Byron, who can’t stand the UI of Garmin devices was decrying the usefulness of an Edge model when I chimed in and schooled him on the value of a mapping-capable computer. The rest was history.

The new Garmin Edge 810 and 510 (announced today) add some great features (live weather, sync with iOS and more) but they’re still missing something I’ve been dying to get in a bike computer for years—the ability to customize a training ride by answering a few questions.

Here’s an example—I often tack miles onto my rides to extend my training and I’ll randomly pick new roads and see where they go. Sometimes this is great, sometimes I end up doing 30 miles when I wanted an extra 5. Often I’m headed straight up a hill when I wanted a flat, fast ride.

A GPS-based bike computer knows the terrain. Like my mapping software in my car, it could easily pick routes and avoid others. What I want to be able to do is pick two point—staring point and end point—and then customize how many miles I want to ride to get from one to the other, and the terrain type.

For example, I want to ride from my house to one of my shops (four miles apart) but I want a 20 mile route to get there. Or, I’d like to start at my house and end up back at my house, but I want to climb 5000 feet during my ride, and I don’t care how long it takes me to do that. Want to do intervals? Great, give me a local hill and pace me up it to stay on track and then plot my cool down. Or maybe I want to go from my house to my shop but I want to avoid as many roads as possible that I’ve taken more than once.

Or, sometimes more importantly, I want a route home from my current location that doesn’t go over a mountain.

This came to me once when I was capping off a grueling 50 mile event ride with what my GPS told me was a nice 25 mile route back to my house but turned out to be an additional 3000 feet of climbing that I was just not prepared for. Even if the GPS had shown me the elevation profile of the chosen route I could have decided to scrap the route before I found myself granny gearing up a 20 percent grade.

This wouldn’t be hard to do, it’s a variation on the route avoidance calculations that car-based units already have. But it would be massively, massively helpful to me. I wouldn’t have to ride out with a encyclopedic knowledge of the mountains around my house (or in a new-to-me city) to get a climbing workout or blow up my legs after a training ride with a climb-too-far.

Please, future Kickstarters and gadget developers, add these features and convert my GPS from a passive device into a serious Sherpa-like route guide.

One of the coffee shops I own is nestled inside the aisles of the awesome Piermont Bicycle Connection, a shop that carries bikes from Cervelo, Cannondale, Scott and others. At Interbike this year Piermont and BMC got together and now the shop is carrying the full range of BMC bikes again.

It’s not uncommon for the sales reps to show up for meetings (and we’ve got a nice large community table for them to use) but imagine my surprise when a visit from the BMC reps this week yielded not only the local sales guys but the owners of BMC, including Andy Rihs.

Now it might not seem surprising for the owner of a company to pop into a dealer, but in the case of Rihs, I found it particularly impressive. After all, some media outlets report his net worth at more than 6.5 billion (US) and he runs a handful of large corporations. This, to some degree, would be like Bill Gates stopping by a Best Buy to see how Windows 8 was doing.

Okay, BMC dealerships aren’t as common as big box computer stores, but you’d think (or I would have up until he walked in) that someone with so much to do would delegate shop visits to someone at a lower pay grade.

Also impressive to me was how he (and the whole staff) took the time to say hello to everyone working in the store and shaking everyone’s hand.

But then again you don’t make a lot of money running companies by letting the little details slide by.

(Note: Despite the grumy look on his face, Rihs was actually jovial, funny and smiling from ear-to-ear.)

Sad but true, folks, cycling legend and anti-doping crusader Greg Lemond was caught on video in the 90’s using illegal performance enhancing substances, and then trying to cross the border to prevent detection.

It’s a sad day.