The Paceline Cycling Podcast

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...

On this week’s show, my guest is Damon Rinard, the engineering manager for road bikes for Cycling Sports Group. Rinard has more than 30 years’ experience in the bike industry. He came to prominence as a result of his work for Cervelo where he was instrumental not just in developing what were some of the most cutting-edge aerodynamic bikes on the market, but for helping consumers place aerodynamic...

Cycling is a great way to both enjoy the journey and the destination. Put another way it makes getting there fun. But how important should goals be? Are goals like finishing an event or standing on the podium the end in itself or just a means to an end?  And we revisit ebikes. It seems like most folks have made their peace with ebikes for transportation, but what about in other uses? What about an...

Allen Lim has spent his career guiding athletes to their best possible performance. From the UC Davis Cycling Team to grand tour riders, Lim's career as an exercise physiologist was focused on helping solve problems athletes had. Nearly accidentally, Lim began making his own drink mix to help athletes, and out of that effort Skratch Labs was born. Six years later Skratch Labs produces—in addition...

After a brief hiatus, the Paceline is back in a slightly different format. Fatty has a new Leadville podcast he's producing, and as one of only eight people to complete Leadville 20 times, there is arguably no one better to produce a podcast devoted to all things Leadville. Hottie has also decided to pursue some other endeavors, though we're hopeful we can coax him back into some appearances here,...

This week I interview NAHBS Best in Show winner Gabriel Lang of Altruiste Bikes from New Brunswick, Canada. Lang won with a long-travel 29er that was truly unique among the bikes shown at the show. In this, our second episode, we talk to him about his background as a builder, how he got his start, what he's best known and where he hopes to take his business in the coming years. 

The Pull is a new podcast from Red Kite Prayer. My many interviews with framebuilders over the years have all lost something in translation from the conversation to the printed page (or pixels). I spent years dissatisfied with the outcome and honestly, reduced the number of interviews I did because the outcome was so dissatisfying, not to mention time-consuming for something that missed the spark...

I first read Bicycling Magazine editor Selene Yeager's work in the 1990s. Having edited the work of health and fitness writers, I knew what good work looked like and hers was exemplary. She did a remarkable job of balancing the science side of things with the dimensions that are curious to cyclists. What makes Yeager different is that she wasn't a journalist first and a health and fitness writer s...

Down is up and up is underground. Our man Hottie, formerly the leanest man in masters bike racing has portlied himself up to a whopping 165 lbs! What to do! He confesses that without all the group rides and races, plus a bit more beer than he used to allow himself. (He once rationed beers at a rate of half a beer every third full moon. In a good year that was about 2.5 brewskis). So he asks a guy...

Hottie took off with Mrs. Hottie for a bike-packing trip. Only they didn't camp out and sleep in sleeping bags. They stayed in a hotel. He thinks Mrs. Hottie brought too much stuff. But just how much is too much? And for that matter, how little is too minimal? Cramping and bonking. Other than crashing there might not be anything less fun in cycling—except for realizing you can't afford your dream...

What's the craziest experience you've had in a bike race or event? Hottie puts this question to Fatty and Patrick and while they share some stuff you might not want to duplicate, their experiences comes up lame when compared to Hottie's guest. Elon Rubin of Giant Santa Monica is Israeli and in his second mountain bike race crashed and landed somewhere even worse than a cow pie. His story is so epi...

Fatty had an unfortunate encounter with another cyclist recently. Actually, the unfortunate part of the encounter was between his big dog Duke and one of the dogs following behind the other ride attacked Duke. Took a souvenir out of poor Duke's ear. What do you do in that circumstance? He's a cyclist, so we like him, right? Do you mention it to him next time you see him? Do you get the authorities...

Vacation. It's such a loaded term. Is it time away from work? Time away from home? Is it recreation? Can it be a vacation without a bicycle? Hottie recently reviewed four different bike travel cases and decided to put the question to Fatty and Patrick of what their tips are for good travel with bike.  Last week one of Uber's self-driving cars struck and killed a woman walking her bike through a cr...