Overview

Reviewing cycling specific eyewear is a favorite category for us at CogSnob. Why? With our base elevation and average UV exposure here in Colorado higher than most of the lower 48, the quality of specs on long rides is paramount. Buy a bad pair of sunglasses and head out for a long ride in the high-country and you will see what I mean.

Over the last two-years, we have reviewed a host of cycling specific performance specs including the Oakley Radar Path (our overall favorite) and the popular Oakley Jawbone. What have we learned you ask? The lens quality and field of vision are the biggest factors to consider when buying cycling specific eyewear...period.
Look as cool as you want, but if the specs don't excel in this category--looking fabo on your club ride won't matter.

That is exactly why we loved the new Cardinal from Gargoyles. Quite frankly, Gargoyles had dropped-off our radar for a while. With the recent entry of Giro in the space and the utter dominance and professional backing of Oakley, we forgot about this once popular option.

Before Oakley dominated the mindset of the populous, Gargoyles were the "it" pair of specs. Who could forget the shades Arnold wore in the Terminator, or Clint in Sudden Impact? Heck, back then, the military even took note and selected Gargoyles as their chosen eyewear for all military personnel. And while the decades have changed, the Gargoyle patented, Toric Curve Lens, has pretty much stayed the same.

I was asked recently how I create computrainer workouts to use with my indoor trainer. So I thought a write-up might be useful to others.

The videos I use are from The Sufferfest. Much of my workouts are based off older videos from The Sufferfest, but this method applies to the new videos as well as probably working with any video you can create timings for and apply to a computrainer.

First off my trainer is the Cycleops PowerBeam Pro, it has a built in PowerTap that also adjusts an electromagnetic resistance thingy. The PowerBeam works with the PowerAgent software to download and analyze workouts as well being able to create workouts based on several different criteria.

To start I take the Sufferfest video and import it into iMovie on my Mac. Then at each transition between workout segments I create a split in the video. Once I have all the video split, I can click on each split to get the length of time for each segment. I try to make the spits whole seconds, iMovie allows splits smaller than 1 second but that just gets painful to calculate and fill the eventual gaps.

I take the timings to these splits and enter them into a workout in the PowerAgent software. Then I apply the appropriate intensity to each segment. Right now I have things setup to work in power zones. The power zones are created based off a field test I did for sustained power and fall into five categories of Recovery, Endurance, Threshold, Race pace, and Max. So for me, race pace is 4Watts/Kilo (248Watts for 20 minutes divided by 62 Kilos). Max is around 281Watts (this is like a five minutes sustained average), although I tend to push the max to around 350-400Watts depending on how strong I am feeling. I align these PowerBeam categories with the intensities in the Sufferfest video, so a 10/10 is Max, 9/10 is race pace, 8/10 is Threshold, 5-7/10 is Endurance, and everything below 5/10 is recovery. There is no exact science that I apply for this, just whatever seems right and what I can actually do. If I cannot complete the 60 minute workout then I created something too hard and I go back and tone things down a bit.

The next iteration I plan on doing is rather than using Power Zones based off my field test will be to create Power Zones based off some setting higher than my field test. So I'll probably start out with Power Zones 2-5% higher (harder) than what I have tested at. I am not really looking forward to this, so I keep putting it off. I should just man up and do it though.

This first screen shot is an image of the workout in the PowerAgent software.

The second screen shot is what the workout looked like when I did it.

Hope this helps.

I have been riding for about a month now with a helmet camera from VHoldR called the ContourHD. There are a couple notable helmet video cameras out all having a varying degree of price and quality, but after about a month of research I decided to bite on the Contour. One the the challenges I had was to find one that I could hold in my hands and see how big or small it was, how heavy it might be, and how easy it was to use. Luckily I found the REI Flagship store in downtown Denver had a display model.

There are three variations of the Contour; the original which seems hard to find, the ContourHD a 720p camera, and the ContourHD 1080p camera. With some help from the "Which to Buy" page on the VHoldR site, I chose the 720p version. Specifications of the various models are on the VHoldR Tech Specs site.

Attaching the ContourHD to my helmet ended up being pretty simple. Out of the box the camera came with two mounting attachments. One attachment had a sticky tape back to adhere to a smooth surface, the other attachment was designed to slip into the strap of ski goggles. There are additional attachments available for purchase including an attachment for bicycle helmets. I was impatient and rather than ordering the bicycle helmet attachment I used a strip of high strength velcro with the goggle attachment and mounted it on the left side of the helmet. To my surprise this works perfectly. Using the Rollsys Retention System on my Lazer Genesis helmet I gently snug up the helmet fit and cannot even tell the camera is attached. So far with both road biking and mountain biking as long as the helmet is properly fitted I don't even notice the extra few ounces on the right side of the helmet. The fit has been awesome.

To operate the ContourHD, there are two buttons. A power button, and a record slider. That's it, it couldn't be any easier. Both buttons are easy to access even when wearing winter riding gloves for the most part. The record slider is a little stiff to move back and forth, but I have already gotten some mud crammed into it so that might be part of the problem. I am not sure how to clean it, unfortunately. To aim the camera two red LED lasers light up when the power button is pressed and point to where the camera is aimed. Pretty easy to see what will be recored. The one trick in the beginning was setting it up for when I am riding the road bike. Since I am not as upright when on the road bike, the first time the only thing that was recorded was the pavement 10 feet in front of me. So there is a little trial and error to dial in the aiming, but it only took one try.

Processing and creating videos is the hard part. I am sure this will totally depend on the tools and experience of the producer though. I am a novice, well a beginner. I use iMovie 8.x on my Mac Pro. There are several approaches that can be used with iMovie depending on what you want as the outcome. Originally I was doing all sorts of preprocessing, image stabilization analysis, and fancy speed adjustments. Doing all those things can add up to days of work for a 5-10 minute web ready video. My latest few videos I do little to no optimizations, and can have a web ready video uploading to Vimeo in less than an hour (not counting the processing time).

40 MPH is the Speed I Ride from Mike Berg on Vimeo.

It has already been a cold start to ole' man winter here in Colorado. Needless to say, the only thing positive about this fact was the chance for us to try out the Lake CX140 Boots. After years of riding with every bootie, shoe/toe warmer we could get our hands on, it was nice to omit that step from our winter-morning getting dressed routine.

Introduced last January to the Lake Winter Shoe line along-side the higher priced CXZ302 ($269.99), the CX140 takes a different approach to keeping your feet warm. Having ridden in sub 30 degree conditions as well as wet, miserably cold conditions, I was generally pleased with their performance, with a few caveats.

This is what I awoke to today, winter on the Colorado Front Range. So far it has not been so bad, but day to day it is hard to tell if it is going to be warm and nice or cold and nasty. We already had a 30 inch snow fall which melted away in a few days with 60 degree temps. Since then the weather has been mild and mostly in the 60-70 degree range and aside from being a bit windy it has been great cycling weather.

Well all that has changed today. No way I was going to be out in the cold wet rain and snow mix, so I whipped out the new Sufferfest workout called the Downward Spiral. Downward Spiral is the seventh edition of the Sufferfest workout videos. Last winter Sufferfest helped me build up some power and shed a few pounds during the times it was too cold or wet to be riding outside. The Sufferfest videos provide motivational eye candy and upbeat music to what is otherwise a mundane, boring, uncomfortable, hot, uninspiring indoor cycling workout (if you don’t get the hint, I hate indoor trainer workouts).