Cycling

Do you remember being a kid and riding your bike everywhere? You felt like you were free while you felt the wind blowing through your hair. Riding a bike today brings make such good memories from my childhood. It is always a great form of exercise. Now that I am no longer a kid, riding…

While I’ve been into mountain biking for a while, I’m still short on proper mountain biking apparel. In my defense, I’m not an extreme mountain biker, but still, I should probably get better outfitted. My buddies have some amazing mountain biking apparel and gear so I know what to get when I decide to buy….

If you’re a cyclist, then you’ve likely heard of tubeless bicycle tires. First introduced in 1999 — by Mavic, a France-based bicycle parts manufacturer — tubeless tires were initially deemed weighty and unreliable. As a result, many cyclists refused to try them and remained loyal to traditional inner tubes. With that being said, it has…

There was a time when keeping your bicycle chains lubricated was blissfully simple. If you lubricate the chain at all, and most kids who rode bikes for fun didn’t, you might use a few squirts from a can on all-purpose mineral oil or maybe some of your grandad’s WD-40. Or maybe you went to a…

As a mountain biker, you know the thrill you get when you are flying down a trail. I remember my first trail ride and how it was thrilling and scary at the same time. I did not know the trail, so that caused some interesting moments. Fortunately, I did not wipe out, but now I…

I’m an expert on how not to store your bike in a garage. One of my prized play toys was a used Yeti mountain bike I had been able to buy for a shockingly low $1800. It outlived my used 1972 Ford Pinto, my used 1987 Chevy Caprice, and my once-new 1995 Oldsmobile. It was…

I bought my first car for $600. It was a used lime-green 1972 Pinto with 187,000 miles on it. It had a rubber band suspiciously similar to something you would see in a gym for its alternator belt, and duct tape over a hole in the hose leading to the air filter. I replaced its…

Becoming a cyclist involves more than just physical conditioning and learning how to handle a bike on the road or the trail; you’ll need to get to know the anatomy of your bicycle itself. Understanding the specific components of your bike will give you a better understanding of how it works and how to leverage…

Buying an electric bike was never on my radar. In fact, becoming a mountain biking enthusiast wasn’t on my radar until 5 years ago when we moved to the North Shore mountains just north of Vancouver. Interestingly, my interest in trying mountain biking resulted in me getting an e-bike. Why? Because pedaling up a mountain…

I was sure naive when I first bought my electric mountain bike. I asked the guy who sold it to me (a buddy who owns a local bike store) if I could use it with the power turned off? He chuckled and said “yeah, sure, but I doubt you’ll want to.  The bike weighs over…

  Without a doubt, a phone mount is now a necessary cycling accessory, whether you ride on the road or trail. And it’s not so you can text and ride unless you have a desire to face plant into a bus. If you listen to music while riding, use various health apps and/or cycling apps…

Getting lost hiking or biking or doing anything else sucks. It can be scary too. We live on the North Shore which is a series of towns and districts north of Vancouver.  It’s basically along the lower part of a mountain range. Often we hear and see the North Shore Search & Rescue helicopter overhead…

At some point, whether you ride regularly or have kids getting into biking, you need to get a bike rack for your vehicle unless you have a pickup truck with a Dakine mat so you can sling your bikes’ front wheels over the rear gate. When our kids’ bikes were small, I just chucked them…

  Although I’ve been an avid cyclist for nearly twenty years, I’ll never forget the first time I saw an electric bicycle. I was living as an expat in China, where bike commuting is still fairly common. Each morning, I heard a tiny little put-put, sputter-sputter sound round the corner near my apartment. By the…

When I moved across the country to start graduate school, my bike was the first item I packed. Not because I needed it for my commute, but because I needed it for my sanity. The rigors of academia could not overwhelm me as long as I could still escape to freedom on the open road…