As most of you know, I'm currently raising funds for the Colorado Chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society via it's BikeMS ride. It's a two-day ride that covers a total of 150 miles from Denver to Fort Collins and back and is coming up in about three weeks.
My goal is to reach $3,000 and I'm about 80% there. In the final push, I decided to up the ante and will shave my legs if I beat last year's amount ($2,700). To add to the embarrassment, I'll post videos and pics of the ordeal.
Quite some time ago, I acquired an old, rigid steel mountain bike that I planned to turn into a single speed. The bike sat in the storage closet for more than a year before I finally got around to buying the simple parts needed to run just one gear.
The biggest reason I finally got around to it was that I hadn't ridden my road bike for more than two months and I needed something new to get me back on the bike. The single speed has certainly done the trick.
When you have more than 2 million Twitter followers, it’s no surprise that you can get a few thousand of them to show up in the middle of a Wednesday morning for a bike ride.
Oh and it doesn’t hurt if you’re Lance Armstrong either. Lance was in Denver to announce that a pro cycling race, the Quizno’s Pro Tour, is scheduled to take place in Colorado Aug. 22-28, 2011.
The Tour de France is about halfway through, but you can still catch the action live.
If you want to catch live video, FromSport.com offers a number of choices. The Eurosport Live channel is my favorite. The commentators are knowledgeable and funny and they answer questions sent in by viewers.
Beer and bikes are two of my favorite things. Hardly a day goes by where I don't enjoy both of them. Of beer brands, I hold New Belgium in the highest regard. You see, the folks up in Ft. Collins share my passion for all things beer and bike. Every day this summer, New Belgium Brewing is giving away a free special edition New Belgium Felt Cruiser. Entering is easy, just head over to newbelgium.com/bbt every day and enter in your information. You can also upload a photo of yourself and add it to a silly bike picture. Good luck!
Peopleforbikes.org is trying to gather 1 million signatures on a petition that will be presented to the government.
"Peopleforbikes.org will use our powerful, united voice to urge U.S Senators and Congressmen to make new, cost-effective investments in bicycling facilities and programs that will benefit us now and well into the future," according to the site.
I’m spending more time looking into the many features of the Garmin Edge 305. On my last ride, I tried out the Virtual Partner feature and it’s pretty cool.
Basically the feature lets you race against yourself on one of your previous rides. The display shows an icon of you and your virtual partner with a graphical display of how far ahead (or behind) you are. It also gives you the distance of how far ahead (or behind) you are. You can also see ride data or a simple map of where you are on the ride.
Like the other screens, you can choose what data you want to display. I just left it at the default settings and they seem to work fine.
I’ve been jealously eyeing my fellow cyclists’ Garmin cycling computers for quite some time. Last week I scored a great deal on a Garmin Edge 305 on craigslist.
If you’re serious about becoming a better cyclist, or are just really anal about tracking your rides, you can’t go wrong with a Garmin.
About this time each year, I start thinking about getting into shape for the upcoming cycling season. For me, it’s impossible to eat well and exercise during the holidays. But once February rolls around, I start to get serious about losing that winter weight.
Naturally, I look to the Web to help. I ran across dailyburn.com, which I can use to track my calorie intake, exercises and weight. One of the reasons I chose site is that it also has a free iPhone app that syncs with the site.
I first learned of QR codes from a colleague who spent time in Japan. These little bar codes are fairly ubiquitous in Japan.
QR codes are square barcodes in which you can embed text Web links, SMS messages or phone numbers. Using a camera phone, you can snap a photo of the QR code and special software will decode the hidden message.
