Professional Cycling

Mauricio Soler is thinking about competing in the Giro and the Tour next year.

With a special and hard training scheme he should be able to compete in both competitions he thinks. There have been examples before of cyclists who could do this. One of the recent ones was dope related Ivan basso and of course Marco Pantani who won both races in 1998.

The Colombian Soler thinks that with the difficulties in the stages as it is now he has a big chance to compete in the top 10 of both tours. Maybe he can even compete in the Vuelta since this one implements a lot of mountains as well.

He is the winner of the mountain jersey in the Tour de France 2007, presumptions enough then.

Only problem is that he rides for a small pro tour team and is not eligible to get the entries to the tour like the big teams, they have to wait for the wild cards to be handed out.

The Colombian has been voted sportsman of the year in Colombia and thought that that was the right time to pronounce his wishes for the next season.

Lets keep him on our list for the next season.

For a good training session, you need a few things to measure; time, distance, speed and heart rate. There are a few options, you can use a computer and a heart rate monitor or you can combine them in one. this is what I want to look at, a few options on the heart rate monitor market that allow cycling functions to be included.

One of the main manufacturers is Polar, which is one of the leading Heart rate monitor producers world wide. It has some high end watches that will give you, functions like: speed, distance, heart rate, training zones, altitude, temperature, even a power sensor to measure which leg gives more power. they also have computers with some of those functions. They deliver a steer holder with the package. Only thing is, you have to buy the accessories like the power sensor or the pedal frequency next to it. The newest S725X features all this and more.

If you look for a cycling computer only, Polar has the CS600, which has all the above functions but is for cycling only.

A cheaper variant is the Vetta V110HR, but with its lower price comes also a little frustration in the way everthing works, batterie life is short, product is not always functioning like it is supposed to….. so try it if you want, but i’d invest a little bit more and go for the bigger producers like polar or maybe suunto in the future.

For alternatives, you have GPS systems which are able to measure almost everything except the pedal frequency. Polar supplies the RS800 G3, which uses GPS to measure speed, distance, altitude etc. but I wouldn’t recommend it for cycling.

Other manufacturers supply mainly GPS receivers in watches etc. and are not fully cycling minded. So no power/pedal output or cadence metering.

Since GPS is getting more and more integrated in everything thats has to move and locate it self. I would’nt be suprised if the big comapny’s integrated it in their new upcoming lines of outdoor watches/cycling computers.

Stay tuned and if you find anything worth while, post it in the comments.

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