This past weekend was the Cyclocross Nationals in Wisconsin. Not as much snow as we were used to from racing cyclocross in Colorado this season, and overall a great event. Here are some photos.
It's great to see a father and daughter team racing 'cross together. Emily decided to join Lennard this year to train and race in the local Cyclocross series. Despite a snowy start to the season, the two of them have been out training together at dawn at least once a week, and racing on the weekends. Both are riding custom Zinn magnesium cyclocross bikes, and the lightweight, smooth riding bikes have helped keep the energy levels to the max. (Emily isn't quite lucky enough to have two bikes, like her dad, yet. Christmas is still not here......)
When building a bike for Di2, there are many ways of arranging the wiring. Some run the cables externally, and some run them internally. Several different ways of mounting the battery have also surfaced since the advent of Shimano's electronic component group. Read on and check out these images to see how we at Zinn Cycles have achieved a very sleek and elegant system for Di2 with minimal compromise in the frame's structural integrity.
I just had dinner last night in Vancouver with two tall (6’7” and 6’9”) Zinn customers, Layne Nadeau and Byron Tokarchuk, and heard inspiring tales of the riding that is now possible for them since they got their XXXL Zinn Gigabikes. The Vancouver North Shore trails are notorious for their steepness, slipperiness, dropoffs, stunts, and general technical challenge. Trails that are labeled blue (i.e., intermediate) on the North Shore would be labeled as double black diamond anywhere else. There are maybe two loops in the area that could be called “cross country” trails; everything else is an incredible network of freeride trails, many of them build high off the ground on skinny wooden Ewok-village-type structures with teeter-totters (even curving ones) in them.
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.
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.