Professional Cycling

When we have the cyclingpassions calendar for our monthly toilet pictures, we have the UCI official Pro tour calendar to plan our training tours or Holiday road racing events.

There is a major change compared to last year, for the first time the tour starts outside Europe, the staring location is Down under and will start in South Australia. This will be the first event ever that features outside Europe for the UCI pro tour.

Also, the big 3 are still missing in the calendar, since the start of the pro tour the Tour de France, Giro and Vuelta are not implemented in the UCI pro Tour schedule, however, between June 22 and august 22 there is no race planned so that the major teams can compete in the tour de France.

There is also a Team Event, just like last year it features in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, this will be the last test event for the Tour de France, last year most teams started in the same setup as they would start in the tour de France.

Cyclepassions has made a new Calendar with famous riders as models. They’ll be seen in nice photo’s to improve your view at 2008.

The German Anke Willen is the brain behind this Third edition of the erotic bicycle calendar, the idea started when she noticed that her husband was getting more and more into his bicycles and even said that there was no more beautiful object than a bicycle…… With this in her mind she started to form the idea to make a calendar that showed the feminine beauty next to the beauty of a bicycle. To make it even more interesting, she asked former and ruling world champions to model for the pictures. With these ingredients her husband probably couldn’t deny that beauty is a relative phenomenon.

See this link of the official website and earlier calendars.

And a youtube with a preview

For the not so profi cyclists that don’t have their own mechanic and car with extra parts, lets make a list with a few tools that may come in handy when you’re on the road.

First of all, you need something on your bike to put the tools in. We know a few different places where you can put luggage on your bike, the main places are under your saddle and in your frame.

Most of the bike shops have an big assortment of saddlebags coming in various sizes.

Choose one that is easy to get to, with handy zippers and not too voluminous to stick-out and chafe your thighs. Let your own taste decide what kind of bag/tool holder you like, as long as its small, easy to get to and doesn’t hinder while cycling.

The tools are more important, here is a quick list of what i bring with me on an average ride:

Spare tire, Spoke-spanner, tire lifter, glue, small piece of sandpaper, a bike tool with imbus/chain tool.

When I’m off for a few days, and need to traverse some rougher country, I’ll take some extra spokes with me, just in case….. Today, you wont need to bring a device with which you can change your cassette since the triple almost everybody with a bike that’s older than 2000 will have enough gearing to ride everything that has asphalt on it. If you have a double gear at the front, you might bring some extra crones to change your gears accordingly to the landscape your riding through.

I’m using a Topeak mini tool which carries almost all the things listed above, its good if you have a cycle that is well kept, its of no use if you need it on rusted or corroded parts. Its not that strong and doesn’t give enough leverage to apply a lot of power.

Now, the only thing you need is knowledge of how to change everything on your bike when necessary for this you have lots and lots of books, websites and bicycle stores.

to make it easy, I’ll give a bunch of links to bicycle maintenance with some nice “you-tube” videos.

Repairing spokes

Fixing a broken chain

fixing derailleur problems

Okay, we’ll leave it at this for the moment, just remember that steady maintenance keeps you from getting to soon in too much trouble.

to be continued.

One of the most tricky things on your bike, the derailleur, its the key-machine in why you’re riding a road/off road race bicycle, to be able to shift gears.

What if the gears don’t shift easily anymore? or what if your cable breaks during training or tour?

I’ll try to give a short explanation on how and why, just enough to get you back on the road in no time at all.

During your rides, the cable may get a little off tension, that way you notice this is because the gears shift a little less fluently and the noise your derailleur makes gets louder. At one moment your gears may shift out of itself when you hit a bump in the road or when you apply a lot of pressure on the pedals. This means you have to tune your derailleur back to its efficient place.

One of the things most bikes have is a tuning wheel on the cable that leads from the gear shifters to the derailleur, with this you can increase or decrease the tension on the cable for a little bit, an increase in tension leads to a shift towards a lighter gear, a decrease shifts towards a heavier gear. Big sprockets are lighter and smaller sprockets are heavier. The only thing is that you’ll get problems with shifting to the out-most gears, so when you change the tension on the cable most of the gears will run smoothly except for the lightest and the heaviest gear.

Below a picture of the derailleur to make the you-tube video a little more comprehensible.

Follow the you-tube below for adjustments made on the derailleur itself.

If you want to get in to it to become a bicycle mechanic, check this link .

see ya

Ever had to quit a ride because the chain broke? No? Well, you’re lucky then, because when you’re in the mountains or in a deserted place somewhere upcountry you can’t hike back to known territory within reasonable time and hoping someone will find you and give you a ride back is also not preferable…

So here is a compact description of how to repair a broken chain:

First of all you need a chain tool, this is a tool that by screwing a piece of metal through the chain you push the chain apart. see the picture on the left.

just pick a link in the chain, apply the tool and twist it until the pin from the chain link is almost pushed out of the chain.

The first few twists need some force, and you’ll probably hear a snap, once you heard the snap the rest is easy going.

Once the chain is opened, you can twist it a little and separate the links.

Remember, that when you do a quick repair because its broken you have to remove a pair of links of the chain, cause its hard to fit two outer links together see picture above for detail.

For a more visual detail:

Good luck!

The director of the pro-cycling team Rabobank has been fired, the team-leader Erik Breukink is under suspicion as well. During the research about how Rasmussen had managed to fool the entire team some stunning explanations were given.

Breukink new all the time about the real location and intent to mislead the UCI he even had a meeting with Rasmussen during the period he said Rasmussen was in Mexico, while the meeting was in Italy.. can you do the maths? More and more it seems obvious where and what Rasmussen was doing, he even published his blood-test results himself which showed unnatural results for a cyclist in such circumstances.

Below a picture of our fallen hero, doesn’t he look like a man who needs some…….?

Rasmussen has been fired directly after the Tour de France, team manager Theo de Rooij followed him shortly there after, The downfall in the Rabobank team hasn’t finished yet, Erik Breukink might be next. the stories are building up around him and he’s getting in a harder position each day. At the moment evidence that Breukink knew where Rasmussen was, and even worse, he knew that Rasmussen lied to the UCI to be able to get his own programme with the proved but not jet official drug Dynepo up and running. The tests from the tour showed that Rasmussen used this drug to enhance his blood to unreal levels. it Say’s that Breukink is in more deep than you’d want to be if you where wearing his shoes.

Its not clear that Breukink knew what Rasmussen was using, but you can figure out that he must have known that Rasmussen was using something that couldn’t be honest all the way. So to say that Breukink isn’t to blame is rather stretched, what hopefully will happen is that the Rabo-team decides its a good learning experience for Breukink and that he won’t make the same mistake again.

all in all you could say that the career in cycling for Michael Rasmussen is almost over, no way anybody can trust him after the stories he made up to prevent him to be blamed.

Even using his marriage to give excuses is rather pathetic if you ask me, I hope for his sake that it will stay with his cycling career and that it doesn’t end up in the deep regions of his private live. Even Rasmussen is still a cycling product from before the big doping problems and is probably influenced to much by the old cycling habits to know any better…

Tour schedule 2008, its been out a while, but with some comments from managing pro tour team directors it will be a more interesting story.

for the overview a small map of the rides.

Its a different tour compared to the last decades, there will be no prologue, 2 time trials that are not to big. It consists of 10 flat stages that will probably end in a mass sprint, 5 mountain stages, 4 medium mountain stages. of the total of 9 there will be 4 finishes on the mountain.

there will be 19 cols which will be climbed, see for details the blog about the European cols. riding the european cols.

One of the main Time trials is after 4 days of riding, so the first shift in the standings for the yellow jersey will be early in the course. There is one heavy stage in the Pyrenees, and a few undiscovered regions in the Alps, which will make the tour an interesting and invigorating sports-event.

Rabobank will aim at putting Mentsjov in the front, the stages are more suited to him than the last few years and show similarities with the Vuelta. since Mentsjov is one of the remaining grand Tour victors that hasn’t been caught on using doping, he’ll be one of the favourites for the yellow jersey.

Contador is switching teams with his manager Bruyneel, let’s hope that this transition to an European Pro tour team will have a positive effect on both of them and Bruyneel can continue his winning streak in tour victories. Especially the short individual time-trials will be in the advantage of Contador since his expertise is more in the mountains and the opportunities there will be plenty.

Management of the tour stripped the stages of the possibility to earn seconds in sprints in the hope that there will be more escapes and less politics in the stages. They want a more romantic tour, more heroes and less calculated victories.

Also since the breakup of the pro tour and the big three tours (Vuelta, Giro and Tour de france), its not an must to be a pro tour crew, so there are a lot more chances for teams to participate. only thing is they have to have bio passports, so the director of the Tour de france can choose the teams which stand for anti doping and thus give the smaller teams a chance to show themselves.

All in all a promising start, now lets hope the doping predicaments come to an end, and we’ll be cheering for a yellow jersey that wins the tour and gets to keep the victory without having to fight for it in court……

Ever been dreaming of riding the big tour de France cols? Always wanted to know which one is steepest or hardest? which one is best to start with when its your first time? or, which one is ridden most during the tour de France? Here’s a link to a dutch/english site with a lot of cool infomation about the mountains in western Europe.

www.cyclingcols.com

use it to your own pleasure, it helped me planning my tours in the Apls in the past years and gave me a few pretty good hollidays.

enjoy,

Once again, you-tube will give us some simple explanations by showing some vids.

I found a couple of you-tube bike maintenance vids. pretty handy if you ever get mechanical problems in an place far far away from any mechanical bike shop.

I had on a trip through Italy, my spokes gave way under the pressure of my luggage and I had to fix them myself. Using a spoke wrench, my home bought spare spokes and my very good hearing helped me back on the road.

Funny thing was, I had no idea how I could fix the spoke and keep my wheel from falling apart on the next bump in the road, I figured that the tune of the tension on the spokes should be the same, so with a little bit of gut feeling I began to put tension on the spokes and tried to get all the tunes in line…… luckily in knew how to turn my spokes to get them tight or loose. but if you don’t watch the vid below.

about tuning your wheels, fixing spokes etc.

for the really beginners here’s a vid about fixing your flat tires.

This I can show when my girlfriend is asking me again if I can fix her tire… tiring

Resupplying Nutrition’s,

Lot’s of athletes are known to the fact that you have to use not only water for fluid intake, but also a hypo-tonic solution, or a isotonic one. To keep up nutrition going to your muscle to keep it from depleting its food-chain.

Before we go in to the deep stuff, i’ll explain what isotonic, hypo-tonic and hyper-tonic mean.

Isotonic means an substance that is of equal consistence of the human blood, so to keep it simple your blood has an amount of ingredients per ml, an isotonic drink has the same amount of ingredients as the blood per ml.

Hyper-tonic means that there is a lot more of the same ingredients per ml in comparison to your blood.

hypo-tonic means there are less ingredients per ml fluid in comparison to your blood.

Most of us are familiar with the fact that its unwise to drink only water when you’re in an time consuming exercise like a marathon or say a 200km road trip on your bike. if you only drink water, the balance in your blood disrupts and in the extreme it can lead to life threatening situations. When sweating during an exercise you sweat out water to cool yourself from the generated heat, with all this water there is also a lot of minerals leaving the body, which results in time to a disrupted concentration in the blood. This can lead to nausea and dizziness or even in an seizure in the brain due to a lack of minerals. (water intoxication) to prevent this we have to drink fluids which contain the minerals and energy we loose during the exercise.

These fluids come in three different forms: isotonic, hypo-tone and hyper-tone.

One of the main reasons this is known is because of the grown popularity of the long distance races, marathons, triathlons and of course the iron man. There have been a lot of unexplainable deaths during the first years of these events that have been solved now that we now that the body is sensitive to the refreshments we take during a long-distance race. If you drink more than 3l. an hour and only water, you’re getting to the amount that can become dangerous, especially if its hot and you’re sweating a lot. So everywhere you go these days, there are a lot of stands along the race which have a lot of variations in drinks available.

What are good drinks to bring with you?

There are a lot of commercial products on the market, most known are Aquarius, isostar and AA. They all try to give the drinks nice flavours and ingredients to make your experience as pleasurable as possible.

If you’re not in to the commercial stuff, you can go for the powders that you can dose yourself, heaps of companys offer dehydrated minerals so you can make your own solution, so you can decide if its iso, hypo or hyper-tonic.

Once you have done this, its simple, drink regularly and switch between water and your sportdrink.

Not only will it help you during the excersise but it will also help you recover from it and get you fit for the next one. Not much negative things to think off using it, only make sure you brush your teeth regulary to prevent damage due to the amount of acids and sugars you’re using…….

have fun.