“Save your own life”, more than a company mission, almost a must for the Dainese company that has made the world of protection its primary concern since 1972. Dianese is no stranger to innovation, and is currently working air bags for motorcycle helmets and a skin tight space suite (with M.I.T.) for a trip to Mars. They are also happy to announce that they have expanded their lines of protective gear beyond motor and winter sports to include cycling. The new Velocity, Freeride, and Downhill projects offer hard, ergonomic and breathable protectors for extreme off-road use and clothing that competes the latest-generation soft protectors.

Above are the FAST GAIT T-SHIRT and FAST GAIT SHORTS. The jersey is Lycra with incorporated reinforcements on the shoulders in innovative shape memory retention Crash Absorb material (water-repellent elastic-visco nitrile rubber). This material does not reduce comfort in any way and ensures protection in case of fall. Inserts in honeycomb Lycra ensure the greatest breathability. The shorts are a breathable, ladder-proof Lycra and polyester with the Crash Absorb material on the femur. It also has inserts of honeycomb Lycra fabric inside the leg for the maximum aeration and a tour seat with Elastic Interface® Technology.

LOTS of new gear and Images below…

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Stuart O’Grady confirmed on December 23 that he will compete at the 2010 Santos Tour Down Under in Adelaide.

“As the inaugural Santos Tour Down Under winner in 1999 and a great South Australian sports star, Stuart is a big favourite with the crowds,” says Mike Turtur, Santos Tour Down Under Race Director.

“It is always special to watch O’Grady riding in the peloton in his hometown and it is great news that he will be fit enough to ride.”

O’Grady is one of the true champions of cycling with a decorated career filled with many victories on the track and road. As a gold medal winning Olympian and the first Australian to ever win the Paris-Roubaix in 2007 he is a force to be reckoned with.

“Stuart’s accomplishments at the Paris-Roubaix and Tour de France should not be forgotten. He’s won Tour de France stages and worn the famous yellow jersey, as well as consistently putting in epic rides to support his teammates,” says Mike Turtur.

Once rivals for the Tour de France Green sprinter’s jersey, Baden Cooke will join O’Grady in the Saxo Bank team in 2010.

“Baden is a welcome return and an asset to the spectacle of the race. In 2003, he won the Tour de France green jersey by two points in a tight finish on the Champs-Élysées with McEwen second and O’Grady seventh. It will be interesting to see this friendly Aussie rivalry reunited,” says Mike Turtur.

“It is great, as always, to have Jens Voight back racing in Adelaide. He’s a true cycling professional and has massive respect in the peloton.”

Team Saxo Bank’s team for the 2010 Santos Tour Down Under will be led by Team Manager, Brad McGee (AUS), and includes Anders Lund (DEN), Jens Voight (GER), Baden Cooke (AUS), Stuart O’Grady (AUS), Jose Juan Haedo (AGR), Frank Høj (DEN) and Kasper Klostergarrd (DEN)

The 2010 Santos Tour Down Under will be held in Adelaide and regional South Australia from 17-24 January 2010. For more information, visit www.tourdownunder.com.au.

This is excerpted from the December email newsletter from Formula Brakes.  Check out their new 2010 brakes from Sea Otter and Interbike to see the latest stoppers.

Hydraulic Fluids 101. Part of your proper bike maintenance schedule should include having your brakes bled. This can be one of the most important things you can do to keep your brakes performing like new. We generally recommend having your brakes bled at least once a year, but if you are one of the lucky few who is riding more than 2-3 days a week, every 6 months is recommended. After you finish reading and decide your brakes need a good bleeding, check out our bleed instructions.

Why bleed? As your fluid ages, not only do the heat resisting properties of the fluid slowly diminish, decreasing the performance of your brakes, but debris accumulates in the fluid, causing accelerated seal wear. Because the performance degradation occurs gradually over a period of months, you often will not even notice it occurring. DOT fluid is hydrophilic, which means it absorbs water and moisture, even directly through rubber membranes such as seals and diaphragms. The more water and moisture your fluid absorbs, the worse the performance properties of the fluid get. Old fluid can cause lever pump up on descents, inconsistent lever contact points, and debris can hamper fluid transfer from between your reservoir and main chamber.

Fluid Choice: Your Formula brakes come stock with a high performance Shell DOT 4 fluid. It is also what we recommend to use during service bleeds. While we recommend name brand fluids from Shell or Castrol, in a pinch you can use any glycol based DOT fluid (such as DOT 3 or DOT 5.1). If you are faced with a myriad of choices, pick the DOT 4 fluid with the highest wet boiling point. Your local moto shop is a great place to look for the potent stuff. Remember to flush the old fluid out as completely as you can and be sure to use a fresh bottle as one that has been opened is already pulling in moisture. To recap:

• Good: DOT 3
• Better: DOT 5.1
• Best: DOT 4

Warning!!: You should NEVER use silicone based DOT (such as DOT 5) or mineral oil (great natural laxative, but not so great for high performance disc brakes). Using mineral oil or silicone based DOT will RUIN every seal on your brakes – DO NOT USE IT! Trust us, rebuilding every seal is about as fun as pulling nose hairs.

From BMCC: We’ve got news to share about the 2nd Annual 6 Hours of Warrior Creek…

SAVE BIG.   Spend some of your Christmas cash and register on the cheap for $40 through January on BikeReg.  If you would rather register via snail mail, you can find the forms on the race website…www.bmcc.us/6wc.htm

CHEERS!   The great folks at Boone Brewing Co, makers of Blowing Rock Ale, will be returning as presenting sponsor of 6WC 2010.  Visit them at www.boonebrewing.com. We’ll be updating our website with all of our great sponsors soon.

TRAILS.  100% of the proceeds from 6WC go to more of them.  Specifically, funds have recently gone toward new hand tools, a BOB trailer, and maintenance to mechanized equipment.  We are also working on trailhead improvements at Warrior Creek and improved signage.

IT’S NICE TO BE POPULAR.   We have had an awesome response to some early promos and cheap rates.  We anticipate capping this event at 300 participants to provide a quality event for everyone.  If you like the sweet single track at Kerr-Scott and want to support continued trail development, sign up today and tell your friends!

DON’T FORGET.  Registration prices go up for the BURN 24 Challenge in February.  Sign up today!

Merry belated Christmas! For the holiday, our family (parents, grandmother, two brothers and their wives, one niece and my wife and two kids) took a cruise through the Western Caribbean, so I got out of the snow, rain and freezing temps so much of the East Coast is experiencing.

Our stops included Roatan, Honduras; Belize City, Belize; Costa Maya, Mexico and a private island owned by Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCL). The photo above is from Belize City, and you gotta think that Bruce Cycling Club Bike Shop knew what they were doing when they selected this billboard location.

Other than the private island, there were bicycles everywhere at each stop, and most were modded, hacked (sometimes literally) and customized to fit the users’ needs. Few if any appeared to be purely for recreation or sport, but they were all pretty interesting. Check out the photos below and after the break…

This is the only bike I saw in Roatan, but we didn’t have a lot of free time to explore outside of our scheduled shore excursion to Gumbalima Park. It’s characteristic of the bikes though…they have gears, but few have working or extant derailleurs, shifters or cables. It’s almost as if they just shorten the chain to the gear they want when things get too rusty to work right.

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ARider is a work in progress, it’s not available yet, but it’s looking more and more likely according to blog entries (here and here) from Zeptotools / Ubiquitous Entertainment.

Based around the iPhone’s GPS and Compass/Accelerometer capabilities, it’s mated to Scaler Corp T3-A HMD screen that sits directly in front of your shades.  Since the screen size is not the same as the iPhone’s, they’re working on proprietary software to display the map, showing you where you’re going at all times.

Given that apps like Yelp Monocle already show Yelp ratings superimposed over restaurants and other establishments in real time as you point your camera, my guess is it’ll only be a matter of time before it’ll be telling you where you’re homiez is at and if they’re eating anywhere good.  Then, Carlton Reid will figure out a way to convert speech to text so he can twitter directly from his rides without stopping.  *wink*

“Cycle-Buddha” by jaKUBA.

To see more Pics of the Day, click here, and to submit your own photo to be shown to the world, go here.

The group trying to bring back the Tour de Georgia has announced that it will cancel the race for 2010 and postpone the return “until at least 2011″.

The Tour de Georgia Foundation, Inc. had secured a place on the 2010 calendar from the UCI, but announced it had not come up with the financing to make the race a reality on Wednesday.

More at CyclingNews

From CyclingNews: Andy Schleck was involved in a collision with a car on Saturday but came away with no more than bruising. The Tour de France podium finisher was training at home in Luxembourg after spending Christmas with his family. Schleck was out on his bike and en route to meet his older brother Frank for a training ride.

“A car crossed in my path and pulled right across me. I couldn’t avoid the crash,” he added. “I didn’t have the speed on but I couldn’t avoid it.”

Schleck estimated that he was travelling at roughly 35 kilometres per hour when the collision occurred. According to Schleck the car came off worse. “There was more damage on the car. His door was a wreck and so was his bumper,” he said. “The passenger window and the front window were smashed too.”

Schleck saw a physiotherapist later in the day, confirming that while nothing was broken he could return to cycling on Monday.

Kool Fit America, based in San Diego, CA, manufactures and markets a line of proprietary Over-The-Counter (OTC) sprays under the trade name of KOOL ‘N FIT®. KOOL ‘N FIT “Sport Conditioning Spray” is a spray on product designed to increases blood circulation. Higher blood flow in muscles means better performance, higher workload, less fatigue, and more stamina. After a work out, increased circulation can help remove metabolic waste faster and brings more oxygen and nutrients back to the muscle.

One suggestion we are looking forward to trying out is spraying KNF into the legs of cycling shorts the night before a ride. It dries quickly but the ingredients stay in the fabric. Then, when sweating during the ride the ingredients are activated and should help avoid the “burning of the muscles”, tightness and cramping.

More to come.

For 2010, Santa Cruz Bicycles will be offering a new clearcoat on their powder coated frames.  Above, in their own admission, is a crappy quality photo showing the subtle difference.  Here’s their defense:

“Another thing we’ve been wrestling with for a while now has been getting around to applying clear coats on top of our powdercoat finish. Done right, this will make our final product tougher, longer lasting and more lustrous. All good things. But not as easy to do as you might think. Frames have to be prepped, sprayed, baked, let cool, then sprayed again, then baked again. This ends up increasing the time and complexity involved in running frames through Victor’s capable hands, and in this case it meant we had to buy a new bake oven and then figure out where the hell to put the thing. But it is done, almost all wired up, and you should expect to see a subtle shift in the finish of the bikes coming out of here, starting about now.

“We could probably do a real good job of representing how monumentally awesome this clear coat will be, get some mad studio shots, polish them in photoshop, and just go over the top in making these glossier than lipstick on a hooker. But it’s the last couple hours before we break for xmas, and all we managed to get together was this kinda blurry shot taken by someone we suspect to be under the influence. Even still, you can see that the new clear coat (left) makes things brighter and more shiny. It’s a good thing, really. You’ll dig it. And we promise to spring some better photos on the blog once we get our noses back to the grindstone in January..”

Other big news from Santa Cruz: They’ll have a full fledged demo tour throughout the year starting in 2010.  Numerous bikes of all shapes and sizes will be touring the U.S. in a Sprinter van with trailer.  We’ll post the schedule as soon as they have it sorted out, and it’ll be staffed by none other than Ariel Lindsley and Abby Hippely, the same couple that’s put together demo tours for Maverick and Yeti brands for the past five years or so.  The bikes are going to be outfitted with the finest of goodies from SRAM, RockShox, Truvativ, Avid, Easton and Crank Brothers, with WTB supplying saddles and tires, and there will also be a whole mess of Giro helmets and sunglasses on hand at ride events.  Unfortunately for us East Coasters, the sked will be heavily skewed toward the West Coast…so tell your local dealer they need to lobby hard for more face time this Summer.

The Cyclocross Meeting is a new film from Brian Vernor (Pure Sweet Hell, Where Are You Go) about the currently exploding US cyclocross scene, and the emerging Japanese cyclocross scene. The Cyclocross Meeting follows Barry Wicks and Adam Mcgrath to top US races in New Jersey and Oregon, and then to Japan, where they compete with seven time Japanese National Champion Keiichi Tsujiura, and the up and coming talent Yu Takenouchi. It also features 35 year veteran bicycle framebuilder Nakagawa.

The World Premiere of The Cyclocross Meeting was as Cross Nats in Bend, Oregon on December 12th, 2009, and at the moment there doesn’t appear to be any set screening schedule or DVD release date.