My day at the New Zealand Road Nationals Time Trial was the culmination of a year’s worth of focus.
Kieran Cox is a long time Zinn Cycles customer, and advocate of proper frame design and crank length for tall riders. Here is some interesting data he has developed with our custom cranks.
My quest to turn myself from a rugby player into a half decent Time Trialist continues...
By Lennard Zinn Now in my 20th year of cross-country ski racing, I’m finally embracing the traditional classic (kick-and-glide) technique in anticipation of racing the granddaddy of all ski races, the 54K Birkebeinerrennet in Norway March 19. The Birkebeinerrennet commemorates the rescue in 1206 of the infant crown prince Haakon Haakonsson (who later became Haakon IV of Norway) from enemy Bagler rebels by two mighty Birkebeiner (literally, “birch-bark leggings”) warriors, Torstein Skevla and Skjervald Skrukka, who carried the child over two mountain ranges during a blizzard to safety in what is now Trondheim. The racecourse now traverses a route west from Rena to Lillehammer over two mountains. Participants are only allowed to ski with the classic technique (i.e., skating is not allowed), and they must carry at least 3.5kg on their backs to simulate the weight of the infant prince. For two decades, including racing the American Birkebeiner 50K race in northern Wisconsin a dozen times, I have only been doing “freestyle” ski races, which means that the faster skating technique is allowed. (Ski skating looks like ice skating except for the addition of skis and ski poles and doesn’t require kick wax to grab the snow to climb hills—rather, the skis are waxed tip to tail for speed only.) On my bucket list is to do all of the races on the Worldloppet circuit—a series of 15 mass-start races in 15 different countries (mostly in Europe but including also Canada, USA, Japan and Australia), seeing along the way countries like Estonia, Finland, Poland, and the Czech Republic that I might otherwise have been unlikely to ever visit. I’ve been ticking them off one at a time, but the Birkebeinerrennet is the first classic-only one of them I will have done, and there are a number of other ones that are also classic only. So it’s time to learn how to classic ski.
Elkhorn Stage race in Baker, OR was on June 18-20 and here is my experience of the race.
Frozen Flatlands:
Finished up our season down here in NZ with our club AGM and prizegiving.
After a couple feet of snow fell around the front range last weekend, Lennard and I thought it would be a good idea to skin up the El Dora ski area and take some laps on the Corona Bowl. While in the parking lot gearing up, we were informed that that was not allowed. We decided to take a backcountry tour into the Indian Peaks wilderness. After breaking trail through heavy snow for 3 miles, we were finally at the base of our run. We ascended the 600 vertical feet through the slush to the top where we were greeted by a great north-facing tree run that was un-tracked.
It's been a great winter of riding the track at Boulder Indoor Cycling. The new Zinn magnesium track bike has really proven itself out there. They are so light, yet stiff, and super smooth. The magnesium frame corners on a rail and stays in control at very high speeds. Magnesium damps vibration better than any other frame material, which gives the rider much more confidence when riding really fast. Other frames send vibrations through to your body which means, you won't feel as comfortable at high speeds.