The Paceline Cycling Podcast

On this week’s show we remember frame builder Dario Pegoretti who died last week at the age of 62. Pegoretti rose to prominence in the 1990s as a contract builder who provided custom frames for professional racers painted to look like the sponsor’s bike. He was so respected he built frames for the likes of Miguel Indurain, Marco Pantani and Mario Cipollini. I spoke to three men who knew him: Don W...

How neat a home do you keep? Do you do it all—cook, clean, ride 12 hours a week and write poetry before bed? As it turns out, we don't either. This week Selene takes on the notion of doing it all, of having the clean house, the home repairs repaired, the laundry laundered and the structured training time to podium at all the races. Sanity prevails. With all the talk about power meters and how it i...

The emergence of Allied Cycle Works, is notable as much for the quality of the carbon fiber bicycles they make as where they make them. At a time when all of the major bike makers produce their carbon fiber bikes in Asia, Allied has gained distinction for producing carbon fiber frames in its facility in Little Rock, Arkansas. That's reason enough to pay attention to them, but the fact that they ar...

How do you eat? This isn't a question about whether or not you chew, but what do you fuel with? Selene talked to Hannah Grant, the author of Eat. Race. Win. a book all about fueling for cyclists, and for that matter, endurance athletes. We excerpt a piece of her interview, the entirety of which will run in an episode of Paceline Tandem shortly. Listeners who want to get a 20 percent discount on an...

Few people can claim to be as inextricably linked with the birth of mountain biking as Gary Fisher. His company MountainBikes produced what were arguably the very first production mountain bikes, before he went on to found Gary Fisher Bikes, which he later sold to Trek. Though Trek has stopped producing bikes under the Fisher name, they have retained him as an advocate and expert, a wise move give...

Selene has a dilemma: Some people don't much like cyclists. What to do? You're riding on a bike path where pedestrians and cyclists need to coexist, hopefully peacefully, but you need to pass. Do you ring a bell? Do you call, "On your left"? Do you fly by them at Mach 16? Or do you ride off the path and 40 feet into the weeds? Every answer seems to have its drawbacks. Last weekend Patrick rode the...

In Part II of my conversation with Mark DiNucci, we discuss some of the work he has done as an engineer working on contract for other manufacturers, like SAPA and Evil. We go into greater depth about his building today, including the tubeset and lugset he designed for his bikes, right down to the CAD files. We also discuss a few of his sources of inspiration and builders he admires.

If you wanted to find the American who made the most profound impact on the ride of steel road bikes in the last 30 years, it would be hard to find a person more influential than Mark DiNucci. As an engineer for Specialized Bicycle Components, he was instrumental in creating the steel Allez which went on to be one of the most coveted racing bikes in the 1980s and '90s. He not only designed the bik...

Our man Patrick fell down this past weekend while on a mountain bike ride. Slid out and has the road rash souvenir. As crashes go, it's a minor one, but it has encouraged a bit of reflection. How should one consider the consequences of crashing? And how should consideration of those consequences influence the choices you make if you want to continue to grow as a rider? Selene checked out the Cross...

This week Selene poses an interesting question: How much riding do you need each week to be healthy both mentally and physically? Researchers at the University of Sydney published a study tracking 1500 healthy adults over the age of 49 for 10 years to find out what the optimal amount of exercise was. What they found was surprising, and at least for some of us, pretty gratifying. Patrick has a ques...

On this week’s show, my guest is Nick Legan, the author of Gravel Cycling, from VeloPress. Legan has one of the more varied backgrounds I’ve encountered in cycling. He began his career as a race mechanic, first working for Slipstream Sports and then working for Lance Armstrong’s Radio Shack team. He founded a bike shop in Boulder, Colorado, called the Service Course, but wasn’t content to restrict...

This week we take a look at the women and racing. There are some high points worth celebrating—Trek has created a new women's pro team—and a whole lot of low lights, like podium girls. Selene and Patrick take a look at some of the criticisms of women's racing as well as some of the realities and, honestly, advantages. And yes, Patrick did fulfill his promise to watch a stage of the Tour de France...

On this week’s show, my guest is James Winchester, the product manager for Masi Bicycles. The role of a product manager at a bike company is, perhaps, one of the most visible expressions of what it is to work for a bike company. They are responsible for determining what a bike is, who it is meant to serve, how that bike will handle, and ultimately, what parts go on the bike. It’s the role most sec...

Selene has a dilemma. She's watching the Tour de France. And enjoying it. She's concerned that maybe she shouldn't be enjoying it or that she should be more concerned about the doping or how awfully the UCI is running the sport. It seems a guilty pleasure and she's not sure how guilty she should feel. Patrick has been tracking the news on all the tariffs being levied on products being imported to...

On this week’s show, my guest is Lennard Zinn, whose book, Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance, has just been released in its sixth edition by VeloPress. Zinn is best known for his work as technical editor for VeloNews, but he joined the magazine more than 20 years ago as a result of his work as a framebuilder. Zinn Cycles has specialized in creating bikes for the big and tall set. If ev...

It's summer, irrevocably so. Unless you live in Honduras, you may be struggling to deal with the heat. For all the talk that cycling is the perfect thing to do on a summer day, it is, as we say, easier said than done. Selene discusses how she can do well in the heat one day but not so well on another, plus what she does to try to ensure success. Following Patrick's Paceline Pick of the new Daniel...

For as much as American cyclists idolized Greg LeMond in the 1980s and early 1990s, for a great many years there was really only one book on the three-time Tour de France Winner, "Greg LeMond's Complete Book of Bicycling." And while it included a fascinating look inside the 1986 Tour de France, the book was mostly prescriptive—a how-to—and as a result focused more on things like how to eat for rac...

On this week’s show, my guest is framebuilder Todd Ingermanson who is part of a relatively rare set of artisans known for crafting nearly any sort of bike. While many builders base their business on mostly (or even exclusively) doing just one thing, such as road bikes, Ingermanson, under his label Black Cat Bicycles, has developed a reputation for building mountain bikes, road bikes, gravel bikes...

Patrick is just back from several days in Ketchum, Idaho, where he attended a new media event called CrankTank. There were presentations by a number of exhibitors on everything from socks to ebikes. He details a few of the items that caught his fancy while there.  You've probably heard of Zwift, the virtual riding environment application that pairs with a smart trainer and gives you something to f...

How much do you know about bearings? This week Patrick went to Oakland to visit the folks at Enduro Bearings and talk about how precision bearings have improved how a bicycle performs. He got an apples to apples comparison of how ball bearing quality has improved as well as an explanation of why radial precision bearings are so much better than cup and cone bearings. We've talked on multiple occas...

On this week’s show, my guest is teacher, author and creator Kristen Ulmer. In the early 1990s Ulmer rose to international prominence as the world’s foremost female big mountain extreme skier. It’s a status she held for an astonishing 12 years. Able to huck any cliff and ski die-if-you-fall lines, she went big and gathered sponsors like Red Bull, Ralph Lauren and Nikon. And Ulmer was no one-trick...

Our guest for this episode is Alison Tetrick who finished third this year at the Dirty Kanza 200, inarguably one of the world’s toughest gravel events. This is the full interview we excerpted on last week’s episode of the Paceline. Alison burst onto the gravel scene last year a relative newbie to this rough road discipline and won the event in a spectacular sprint finish with Amanda "Panda" Nauman...

On this week’s show, my guest is framebuilder Brad Bingham. He's been called the finest TIG-welder in the world. Bingham rose to international prominence as a result of his work as a welder for Kent Eriksen Cycles. He has won the best welding award at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show for each of the last five years and prior to that multiple years as part of the team at Kent Eriksen that w...

We knew even before the race was over that we would be talking to Yuri Hauswald the new extra-long version of Dirty Kanza, known as the DKXL. How could we not? The 2015 winner of Dirty Kanza is as warm an interview as we get and his unguarded admissions are just the sort of insight into racing that we all hope to get from pro athletes. And Hauswald is different from most pros. He's older, and is a...

Last weekend's Dirty Kanza introduced a new length, the DKXL, a 350-mile version of the unofficial world championship of gravel racing. In this episode we talk about both the 350 and the 250 and excerpt two coming interviews with Yuri Hauswald, who finished 2nd in the DKXL and Alison Tetrick, who finished third in the DK 200. We also take some time to discuss the controversy around teammates and d...