Tabla de contenidos para Issue 66 en Cyclist Australia

When we speak to Cyclist readers about their riding habits, the field is fairly evenly split between those who are gravel aficionados and have invested in a gravel bike, and those who are either gravel-curious, gravel-hesitant or, occasionally, gravel-averse. We can understand how people might feel that a road cycling magazine should stick to just that: the road. But we would argue gravel is an extension of the road scene rather than a defection to a different tribe. The aesthetic is much the same, if a touch more relaxed; the bikes are very similar in looks and ride style; and the roads are still roads, just a bit bumpier and with less chance of being crushed by a truck. If road surface is the real issue with gravel riding, then…

The Aeroscopes are Scicon’s newest performance cycling glasses, so naturally they are the eyewear du jour of Scicon-sponsored cycling star Tadej Pogacar. The glasses are all about adjustability. They feature the brand’s Horizon Adapt nose pad, which allows riders to change the lens position relative to their face to dial in their field of vision, as well as the Scala adjustable temple arms that feature 10mm of fore/aft movement. The distinctive funnel in the lens’s centre is dubbed VenteX, and Scicon claims it allows airflow without compromising protection. The lens also offers UVA and UVB protection, as well as impact resistance.…

Cyclist: Hey Jorja. First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself. How long have you lived in the New England region, and for how long have you been cycling? Jorja Creighton: Certainly! I came to New England three years ago around this time of year. The extreme drought New England experienced was well and truly over and it was the wettest, sloppiest and most vibrant place I had cycled in for a long time and I was captivated by the stations, the tight communities and the plateau landscape. There is a special quietness and friendliness in this part of Australia that makes for some of the most intimate cycling I have experienced. I’ve been cycling with intensity for the last 15 years, using the bike to fulfil a…

Exercise physiologists are especially fond of testing and measuring in their laboratories. Two of their most popular exercise tests involve measuring gas analysis, that is, VO2 (where ‘V’ is for volume and ‘O2’ is oxygen), and blood-lactate concentration. VO2 is measured via our breathing and provides an insight into oxygen uptake and energy production within working muscle. This helps build a picture of our integrated cardiovascular system’s capacity (heart, lungs and blood) to provide oxygen to the muscle, and therein our muscles’ capacity to use oxygen to produce energy and power. In contrast, blood-lactate testing records our underlying preference for carbohydrate versus fat as an energy source during exercise. This is deduced by monitoring metabolic by-products such as lactate and hydrogen ions to give an insight into muscular fatigue. It…

It turns out that pedalling a bike isn’t the only thing you can do with your legs. There’s also this thing called running. But should we be doing it? There are two answers to this, says Hunter Allen, former pro cyclist, owner of The Peaks Coaching Group and co-founder of TrainingPeaks: if you like running, yes; if you don’t like running, no. Let’s get the negatives out of the way first. ‘If you force yourself to go running it will just make you hate it more,’ says Allen. ‘If you want to train off the bike, chose another aerobic sport that you like better. Swimming? Roller blading?’ Let’s say you’re a cyclist who enjoys running, but perhaps not to the degree where you want to enter a duathlon (or triathlon…

‘Once you can ride 160km back-to-back days, the rest is in your head. Chances are it’s going to be your head and your resilience to deal with things that aren’t riding your bike that will stop you. ‘For me, every time I got off the bike it was a battle to get back on. When you’re riding, it’s just easy. I loved riding through remote areas, because I wouldn’t pass any services so I never had to think about whether I would stop. But all the way across Russia, every 3km or so there would be a service station and every single time I’d have a mental battle of wondering whether I should stop. ‘It’s funny because you cycle through so many dull and uninspiring places, but it makes you…

The new O2 VAM was designed for exactly this purpose – going as fast as possible over a mountainous route, whether in the hands of amateurs at the Étape or with professionals in Grand Tours. It’s astonishingly good. Bad bits? Well, the saddle clamp is annoying, and… that’s it. At 6.2kg and on super-light, carbon-spoked wheels, it climbs brilliantly. But it’s also a rocket downhill, a bobsled in corners, a TGV express train on the flat and super-stiff in a sprint effort. I fitted Favero’s light and accurate Assioma Duo power meter pedals to get the data I needed for this feature.…

We gather on the beach before dawn for a ceremonial dipping of our rear wheels into the Pacific Ocean. The plan is to cross the continent of South America, riding due east from the coast of Chile to the coast of Argentina, taking in the mountains of the Andes and the vast plains of the Pampas along the way. Understandably, the atmosphere in the hotel last night was one of nervous excitement. Everyone here is part of the Rat Race Trans Andean event, a nine-day, 1,517km ride that isn’t a race but is instead billed as an ‘extraordinary global adventure for everyday people’. Certainly, it’s a diverse group of 29 riders on the start line, ranging from Marie-Louise, a racing cyclist from England in her twenties, to Scott and Charleen,…

Few bikes can claim to be genuinely visionary, but the Soloist is one of them. In 2002, Cervélo created the first truly aerofoil frame tubes on a road bike, complete with custom-extruded NACA profiles, and in doing so launched the aero road bike category. However, after some notable early successes in WorldTour races, the Soloist has been MIA since 2008. But now it is back from the wilderness. The question is, seeing as Cervélo has three other road framesets – the lightweight R5, the aero S5 and the comfort-oriented Caledonia – not to mention a fairly roady gravel bike, where does this revived Soloist fit into a very busy roster? Well, slap bang in the middle, is pretty much what Cervélo says. ‘The new Soloist focuses on serviceability, ease of…

When Specialized launched the previous version of its Tarmac, the SL7, the company killed off its Venge aero platform, suggesting the SL7 was so well-rounded that the Venge was no longer necessary. Crucially, the SL7 was still slower in drag terms than the Venge, but Specialized says the move to SL8 makes the Tarmac faster than the Venge ever was. The bike made its debut at the 2023 Road Race World Championships and was ridden to victory by Belgium’s Lotte Kopecky, which seems fitting given how successful the model has been over its 20-year and eight-generation history. Thanks to features such as a sleek, integrated cockpit, deepened head tube and slimmer seat tube, Specialized says the new bike is 16.6 seconds more efficient than the Tarmac SL7 it replaces over…

Cyclist: What did you do before cycling? Ricarda Bauernfeind: I tried almost every sport with friends; I was a very active child. I played soccer, I did ballet and a lot of running. I learned two instruments and started learning to ride a horse. Then my brother Gabriel, who’s five years older, got a road bike and so I also wanted one. My parents weren’t happy about it – they thought it would be too dangerous – but changed their mind. Cyc: You started racing while studying. How did you balance the demands? RB: After school, in 2018, I continued racing for a women’s elite team in Germany. We did all these national races and I recognised, ‘OK, I’m not that good anymore,’ so it didn’t make sense to focus…

‘I can’t translate Sudoku directly into bike racing, but I know it works the same area of the brain you use when making rapid decisions during a sprint,’ Mark Cavendish once told this very magazine. But now a recent study published in the Journal of Sports Science & Medicine might have found a less puzzling way to sharpen up reaction times. The study took elite-level soccer players and subjected them to two tests, the ‘Trail Making Test’, where participants drew a line between 24 randomly arranged circles in either consecutive numerical order or a mixture of number and letter order, and a ‘Modified Loughborough Soccer Passing Test’, where participants made a series of passes while examiners monitored how frequently they completed a ‘scanning activity’ (looking around to make assessments). A…

Don’t look up. That seems like a silly thing to say if you’re planning a ride in the Victorian Alps. It’s a region that boasts the highest concentration of Australia’s great road climbs, flaunting an embarrassment of riches like Falls Creek, Mount Hotham and Mount Baw Baw. It’s the closest thing we’ve got to those iconic French-style ski resort climbs, mythologised on our screens at two o’clock in the morning every July. But if you spend all your time cranking your neck skywards, you’ll miss what’s waiting right at your feet, which is exactly what I discovered this time around, sticking to the valley and tackling the well-known Gaps Loop with my mates Esjay and Neil. The timing of our weekend couldn’t have been better, on a couple of fronts.…

You know a climb is going to be spectacular when it features in a James Bond movie. It was the case with Switzerland’s Furka Pass (issue 63), which saw Sean Connery screeching round hairpins in his Aston Martin DB5 in 1964’s Goldfinger. And it’s the case with this climb, which is the setting for a dramatic chase sequence in 2015’s Spectre, with Daniel Craig destroying an aeroplane in an attempt to rescue his love interest from Spectre’s henchmen as they bundle her into a Land Rover and speed off down the Ötztal Glacier Road. And… action! The town of Sölden sits in the Tyrol region of Austria, near the border with Italy. It is surrounded by Alpine peaks, the largest of which is the Wildspitze at 3,768m, the second highest…

Average watts (W): The average power, in watts, produced by the rider over a given period. Normalised Power (NP): A weighted average that accounts for the high energy cost relative to the true average power of a ride with spiky efforts – a hilly ride tends to require more effort than a flat ride even if the average power is the same. Functional Threshold Power (FTP): The maximum power sustainable for one hour. FTP is the key to setting your power zones and guiding your pacing. Intensity Factor (IF): Represents how hard an effort or ride was by expressing NP as a percentage of FTP. Duration is critical to judging IF – 80% for a four-hour ride is hardcore, but for a 40km TT it’s bone idle – so you…

The ‘World’s Best Road’ competition doesn’t exist, but if it did, I’d be throwing Going-to-the-Sun Road into the mix. It’s mid-morning and I’m on two wheels in Glacier National Park, Montana. The road surface is ribbon-smooth, the weather conditions are bluebird, and there’s no way to describe the scene in front of me without resorting to cliché. It’s gobsmacking. To my left, Saint Mary Lake, turquoise and shimmering in the early morning sun; to my right, a sheer, crumbling cliff face; and in front of me, imposing limestone peaks completely dominating the horizon. I’d love to tell you that I just rolled along, soaking it all in, but it’s 2023, so I reach for my phone to post a story to Instagram. I’m far from the first person to capture…

Without a tour group or private driver, getting to the start and being picked up at the end, as well as organising passes to enter Glacier NP, will be all up to you – so why not make it easy and book the premium experience with Trek Travel? However you choose to tackle it, make sure you start early – cyclists are prohibited from riding the western side of the climb after 11am. Also, while Going-to-the-Sun Road is definitely the showstopper in the area, we also enjoyed a number of other great rides in Glacier National Park and around Whitefish. Check out our full itinerary here: trektravel.com/trip/glacier-national-park-bike-tour/…

There’s a thought gnawing at me, scratching gently at the bit of my brain where really good thoughts come from. I’ve got a dropper post, two-inch tyres and a squishy air fork. I’m riding serpentine singletrack. But my thumbs are pointing forwards rather than down, and my hands are closer together than perhaps they should be. The thought is this: I am riding a mountain bike but also I am emphatically not riding a mountain bike. The Giant Revolt X is the Giant Revolt (see issue 54) but more so. A chunk more tyre clearance and commensurately more substantial rubber is accompanied by a Fox suspension fork offering 40mm of travel, and a dropper post that adds 25mm of squish at the back. X marks the sport The Revolt X…

Ravemen’s rear light has multiple flash modes to keep you safe and comfortable when riding on the darkest mornings and during the day, with a maximum 350-lumen output. It’s called a ‘brake light’ because it has a built-in motion sensor that switches the light to a solid 100-lumen output for two seconds when the rider brakes. The motion sensor also puts the light to sleep if it’s still for two minutes, activating when the light is moved again – no more flat batteries if you forget to turn your light off! Cyclist has tested this bike across the winter months and it’s proven a great balance of size, brightness and battery life.…

Distance: 113.41km Total ascent: 1,372m Navigationally, the Gaps Loop is pretty hard to get wrong. The ride can be done in either direction, but I can recommend the way we did it, leaving the big climb to the end but rewarded with a brilliant descent and just a short commute home to finish on an absolute high. Turn left onto Kiewa Valley Highway and follow it north all the way to the first major intersection you see. Swing left onto Running Creek Road, climbing over the ridge into Happy Valley, where the road becomes Happy Valley Road. This will lead to a T-intersection with Great Alpine Road at Ovens, where you’ll take, you guessed it, another left. Here you can either jump onto the Murray to Mountains Rail Trail, as…

How much better are pro riders than the rest of us? It’s an age-old question, and there’s one event that offers the opportunity to lay out the harsh reality. Each year, the Étape du Tour lets amateurs ride a complete mountain stage of the Tour de France a few days before the professionals, providing a unique chance to compare times and power data to assess the gulf between the best and the rest. Earlier this year, Cyclist sent me to the Alps to ride the 2023 event – 157km (145km of it officially timed) from Annemasse to Morzine with 4,100m of climbing – and turn myself inside out in the name of science before submitting to the ritual humiliation of comparison to the world’s top riders. Helping me to analyse…

While there are a few different ways to hit Going-to-the-Sun Road, this is probably the best one in terms of pure bang for buck. Starting in Saint Mary, jump on Going-to-the-Sun Road, which leaves town in a northwesterly direction. Within 500 metres you’ll be inside Glacier National Park. The first 10km are pretty flat, with great views over Saint Mary Lake to your left. At Rising Sun Campground, the road begins to rise at a gentle 1-2% for the next 10km, until the climb properly gets going just shy of the 20km mark. The east side of Logan Pass is definitely the easier side – at 4.9% average for 11.7km – but it’s still a solid (and extremely picturesque) grind to the top. Take the opportunity to fill your bottles…

Included as part of our Trek Travel trip to Glacier was a fully dialled Trek Domane SL7. Kitted out with Shimano’s Ultegra Di2 groupset – and a climbing-friendly 11-34 cassette – as well as Bontrager’s Aeolus Pro 37 Carbon wheelset, the endurance-focused but still ‘fast’ feeling Domane was the perfect bike for the trip. Most of our rides were spent on smooth hot mix, but the 32mm tyres and Trek’s excellent Rear IsoSpeed Decoupler easily handled any sketchy or loose surface we encountered. Beyond the high-end specs, our guides (and mechanics) for the trip had our Domanes set up exactly to our individual fit specifications, which we emailed through a couple of weeks before the trip. A few tweaks on the ground and we were ready to roll… except for…

1 Cervélo Soloist p128 It gets a reboot after 15 years, but these days the original aero bike is pitched at a very different market. 2 Giant Revolt X p132 This jacked-up Revolt boasts huge tyre clearance, a suspension fork and a dropper post for off-road thrills. 3 Canyon Endurace p136 Endurance bikes are a dying breed in the face of the ‘all-road’ trend. Canyon joins the fray with a long-awaited update. 4 Shimano GRX RX820 p140 After our first look in issue 65, it’s time to take Shimano’s 12-speed off-road groupset out for a long-term test.…

The Endurace was Canyon’s first road bike to use disc brakes, but since that revision in 2016 the manufacturer has tended to debut its most innovative features on its more aggressive race bikes, the Ultimate and Aeroad. What’s more, while Canyon introduced new Endurace models last year, that update focused on the lower end of the range. Up at the top end, it feels like the Endurace is long overdue an overhaul, but there is a good reason why the brand has taken its time. The bike’s name is a legacy of its original category, but traditional endurance bikes seem to be a dying breed. Ultimately this is just semantics, but more ‘endurance’ bikes are introducing features that shift them into being what might more accurately be described as ‘all-road’…

The rise and rise of gravel racing and gravel riding is well-documented across the pages and feeds of cycling media. You could argue that gravel riding started as the antithesis to road; a lukewarm counter-culture to a sport often stifled by rules. An escape from the UCI was freedom, it was wind in the hair, it was outside, it was bikes. Gravel was finding your own way on two wheels, away from the pressures to race. Instead, it was about you and the outdoors – and probably some close friends. As a close friend once reminded me, the best gravel bike is whatever you are riding right now. But we all know bikes do make a difference and the bike industry made sure they evolved to suit. Cyclists remained cyclists…