Ladies Night @ Bikeworks! And Rocky Mountain and Liv/Giant Demo Day!

Hey Everybody!
We've got some events coming up.

On Thursday May 1st, we will be having a ladies night at the shop, from 6 to 8pm.

Caroline from Liv/Giant (the women's specific division of Giant Bicycles) will be giving a basic bike repair clinic.  She will cover changing flats, and safety checking a bike, and other skills like that.
There will be beer (of course), and some sort of delicious mixed beverage likely containing gin (thanks to our friend Sara, who makes the best gin and tonic in town), and delicious snacky treats.
The event is free, and Caroline will be bringing schwag for attendees.
It will be a fun event, with the chance to learn a little something new, and perhaps meet some cool new people and future riding buddies.

On Saturday May 3rd we will have both Rocky Mountain and  Liv/Giant's demo rigs here.  We will be set up at the Coyote Trailhead in Tijeras from 9am to 3pm (ish).

Caroline will be running the Liv/Giant rig, and will have a selection of both road and mountain bikes, all women specific.
Road models will include the Avail, the Envie, and the Invite.

(The Liv/Giant Envie Advanced 1, the worlds first women's specific aero road bike.)

The mountain bikes are all 27.5 wheels, and there are both hardtails and full suspension. Demo models include the Obsess, the Lust, and the Intrigue.

(The Lust Advanced 2, one of our best selling bikes this year so far.)

At the shop we have been selling the new Lust, 100mm travel full suspension model  like crazy this year.  We have been seriously surprised at how popular they are, and we just received our 3rd re-stocking order in this week.

Rocky Mountain will have a selection primarily of their full suspension mountain bikes, including:

 the Element (100mm 29er),

the Instinct (130mm 29er)

the Altitude (150mm 27.5er),

and the new Thunderbolt (120mm 27.5er).  

There will also be some of the super light and fun Vertex carbon hardtail 29ers on hand.

So if you want to find out what all the fuss about 27.5 is about, or can't decide between 29 and 27.5, or just want to come and discover how badass Rocky Mountain bikes are, please stop by!

The event is free, but please bring a drivers license and credit card.  Also, please bring your own pedals if possible.

Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you soon!

Devinci Atlas Carbon Custom Build, 23.5 Pounds!

We recently decided that the Devinci Atlas Carbon frameset sitting on our wall needed to be built. And it needed to be light, with XX1, and a new Rock Shox SID, and ENVE bits, etc.

So we built it, and it is awesome.  With some Stan's ZTR Crest wheels, the bike weighed in at 23.5 lbs with Albuquerque worthy Continental Protection tires and plenty of sealant.

We chose the sweet new SID RCT3 with 120mm travel to compliment the 110mm of rear suspension. We have been enjoying the SID, it's plush and weighs just 3.48 pounds on our scale.

We feel like with the amount of travel, playful geometry and super light weight, this bike will be a fantastic 12 and 24 hour racer, but with the right geometry to be your fast trail bike as well.

We have it priced at $5,750, which we feel is a pretty good deal when you compare it to Devinci's Atlas Carbon SL which is priced at $6,300 and isn't as well spec'd.

So there you have it. Come by and take a gander, before Lucero takes it home.

Race Report: 12 Hours of Old El Paso with the Doctors

Last Friday afternoon I (Lucero) found myself headed to El Paso to check out the12 Hours of Old El Paso race for the first time. I had heard good things about the race, and I hadn't ridden a bike in the Franklin mountains in over ten years, when I raced the Coyote Classic "back in the day".  This time I was traveling with Dave and Brad, a couple of my favorite Doctors.

The entire drive down was windy, and it just got windier as we got closer to El Paso.  By about 10pm on Friday night the wind was blowing so hard we could feel our hotel getting pushed around a little, and I started wondering if the window in our room was going to break.

I took a lousy photo of the flag outside our room, that was getting abused by the wind. It's a lousy photo, but here it is anyway...

(I assure you, that flag was hanging on for dear life)

Fortunately Saturday morning came with just light winds and scattered clouds, with a high in the 60's, it was pretty nice weather for riding.

After breakfast we were detoured thanks to the NM Sports Online website, which had Google Map directions linked to the race for somewhere in the middle of the Franklin State park, and about half an hour from the actual location of the race.

Eventually we were able to figure out the actual location, and signed into the race about ten minutes before the start.  This made me really appreciate the unusually late 10am to 10pm format for this race.  Not being an early morning person, I thought 10am was a great time to start an all day ride.

The three of us had registered solo, and we pretty much stuck together the entire race, starting each lap at the same time.  It is a fun way to do an endurance race when you aren't there to try and win.

The view from our "camp" looked like this...

The Franklins are pretty rugged mountains.  The terrain was fairly similar to our foothills trails here in Albuquerque, but I have been told that this race pretty much used all the easiest trails around.  With the lack of trees, and mean sharp rocks everywhere, I can imagine some pretty gnarly trails around there.

The course was listed as 9.5 miles, but they decided to tack on some extra and it ended up 11 miles long.  It was a fun course, 75% or so singletrack.  Almost all the climbing was done on sandy two track roads.  There were only a couple miles or so of smooth twisty trail throughout the course, the rest of it was all pretty rough over small rocks.  I was definitely happy to have rear suspension for the race, it was not a course I would have wanted to do more than a couple of laps of on a hardtail.

I was riding my new Giant Trance Advanced SX 27.5. 

I have been riding this bike since October, and I am completely enthralled with it.  The build spec on it is fantastic, and the only component that I have changed is the saddle.  It's pretty rare that I will leave a bike stock out of the box, having become rather picky after 15 years of working in bike shops, but I didn't even swap out the stem or grips on this one, it just fit so well.
The course was definitely manageable on a shorter travel bike, but there were a few spots where the long travel and aggressive tires payed off.

The stock saddle is a Fizik Gobi, which has never fit me well. So I decided to try something new and I got the Sq Labs 611 saddle that we started carrying recently.

A German company owned by physicians, this saddle has a "stepped" design that perches you up on your sit bones and reduces contact with the other "soft tissue" areas, or the "scranus" if you will.

I rode the saddle for about an hour before taking it to the race for a real trial by fire.  And I was extremely pleased to find that after over 6 hours and 66 miles of riding, the saddle was perfectly comfortable and I wasn't thinking about it at all.  The shape really does seem to minimize contact area with the saddle, which I like.  I also found that on very steep climbs, when you scooted toward the nose that is was still supportive and the stepped up area in back gave you something to kind of push against.

The saddle comes in four different widths, I was using the 14cm wide model, and I have no plans to take it off my bike anytime soon.

SQLabs 611 Saddle Web page 

Back to the race, we were riding together and enjoying ourselves.  The laps took about an hour each, and we were taking pretty leisurely pit stops between each lap.  My pit stops consisted of refilling my one water bottle of Tailwind, checking over my bike to see if anything rattled loose, and stretching.

We started selling Tailwind about a year ago.  It is an all in one drink mix that is designed to be the only thing you need for hydration and nutrition during an endurance event.  It is easy to mix, easy to drink, and it really seems to work.

http://www.tailwindnutrition.com/

Having a simple plan for nutrition is extremely nice once you start getting tired and simple things get difficult. I had a pretty big Denny's breakfast, and then just drank a bottle with about 2 scoops of Tailwind per lap.  After lap 3 I smelled some burgers grilling and suddenly I wanted to eat.  So I had a handful of Triscuits and a Hammer Bar. But on lap 4 I felt terrible. So I went back to just Tailwind.  At the end of the race I wasn't hungry, and I hadn't come even close to bonking or having leg cramps, and I always have trouble with leg cramps.
Granted, this wasn't a 24 hour race, and I wasn't pushing the pace.  But considering my complete lack of fitness going in, I'm really impressed with how good I felt just drinking Tailwind, and I plan on doing the same thing for my next race.
Apparently a lot of our customers have had similar experiences, because we can't hardly keep the stuff on the shelf.  Every flavor seems popular, and every time we re-order we seem to increase our order size by 50%.

Dave and Brad are also fans of the Tailwind, but they were supplementing with more other foods, such as bananas and baked potatoes.

The weather held out, and we had a great time putting in laps under the February Texas sun.

We finished lap 5, and decided to head out for a final 6th lap as the sun was setting.  I think we all had enough in us to do 7 laps, but it would have been spent entirely out of the fun zone and in the suffering zone, which is a hard place to convince myself to go lately.  And there were beers waiting.

So we finished up lap 6 at around 7pm, promptly packed up the car, and headed out in search of a hot shower and a good restaurant.

It was a great weekend, and I hope to make it out again next year.

Lets go race in El Paso, and.... New in the shop: BMC Trailfox, BMC Granfondo Disc, and Devinci Troy Carbon!

Now that we are a scant 24 days into the new year... Happy New Year!

So, are you feeling like you still need to recover from your holiday gluttony?  Yeah, I thought so.  Might I recommend impulsively signing up for a 12 hour mtb race, out of shape and under-prepared?  Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way.  That's why I (Lucero) will be headed out to the 12 Hours of Old El Paso next weekend, February 1st.

http://www.the-bicycle-company.net/events.html

It's a 9.5 mile loop, and the race goes from 10am to 10pm, which I think is pretty sweet since I normally sleep til 8.  I don't know the course, but I've been told it's a pretty mellow course, 75% singletrack, and the majority of the climbing occurs on a dirt road all at the beginning. Or something like that.

Anyway, I suggest that you sign up and join us.  And I guarantee* that you will have a great time! (*Great Times not Guaranteed) 

Best case scenario is that I put in a whole bunch of laps, and ride myself into some sort of fitness for the year.  And my performance will be so impressive that all the other racers will take note and immediately become life long customers at Bikeworks and buy whatever I tell them to for ever and ever the end.

Worst case scenario is that I do one lap, quit, start drinking beer, walk around giving out unsolicited high-5's for 11 hours to friends and strangers, and then throw up in Dr. Dave's car (who was silly enough to drive me).  In which case, I'll at least have something awesome to write about on this poor neglected website of ours.

Either way, I'm not at work on a Saturday, and I win.

Moving on... it's 2014 and we got some new bikes in the shop!

Firstly, some hotly anticipated BMC Bicycle Racing Bike Machines have rolled in the door.  Such as the Granfondo GF02 Disc, in the best "orange colorway" ever. ("Orange colorway" is the pretentious way of saying "hey, this year we painted our bike orange")

(Photo of the actual GF02 in our shop)

(Photo of a GF02 from BMC's website)

Link to the website

The one we have in the shop is a 51cm, built with Shimano 105.  Tons of awesome details, this bike just oozes style.  We will have the more sizes showing up as they become available.

Also from BMC, we have the Trailfox TF03.

(My crappy photo in the shop)

(Studio shot from the website)

Link to the website

This is a 6 inch traveled, 29 inch wheeled, monster of a bike.  However, with very short chainstays, low standover height, super short headtube length, and long top tubes designed around 50mm stems, this bike seems much more compact than you would guess given its long travel.

According to the folks at BMC, they did a bunch of timed tests riding a bunch of trails with a bunch of their sponsored mtb pros, and hands down 29" wheeled bikes were the fastest.  And BMC is all about being fast. So despite trends, they put all their effort into a new 29er this year and ignored the 27.5 wheel size.  And while we are very excited about many 27.5's out there, we have to admit that this is the first really big 29'er that we are excited to throw a leg over.

Speaking of hot and trendy 27.5's for this year, we have a Devinci Troy Carbon sitting in the shop, waiting to get ridden...

(this is clearly the best picture of a bicycle that has ever been taken)

and... Link to the website

We have had the Troy Carbon framesets in the shop for a few weeks now, but we have been waiting for their build kit to become available to build one up. 

Why didn't we just make our own build kit?  Was it because the build kit came in an awesomely overkill plastic compartmentalized cubbyhole thingy, and we love over packaging things?

(highly unusual bike part packaging, strange yet awesome, a French-Canadian thing, we assume)

No, that's not why we waited.  We waited so long for their build kit because it is a silly good deal.  Like unreasonably priced, make other bike companies angry type of good deal.  Here's is the Devinci pricing scheme: 

 Alloy Troy Frame: $2000.

Carbon Troy Frame: $2400 (oooh, $400 more and I get carbon, sounds good)

Rock Shox Pike Fork: $1000 (hottest fork on the market, costs $1K just about anywhere)

aaaand.. Devinci Troy Carbon XP complete bike, with a Pike... $3400.

So, you buy the frame and fork, and get the rest of the bike for free.  And it's not a build kit that some bike nerd is gonna get overly excited over and go blogging about (freaking bike nerds and their blogs), but it is good quality reliable parts, and it is a complete bike for the price of frame and fork.  

Between the great value, and the fact that everybody who has ridden this bike has completely freaked out about its amazingness, we are very excited to have one in the store to be ridden.  And since we are a bunch of dummies, we are throwing our first complete into our demo fleet, that is unless somebody comes in and buys it before it gets ridden.  

Also, the specific frame/build kit combo that we are talking about here isn't listed on Devinci's website, all you will see is the Alloy version for $3000.  But we are cool like that, so we just ordered "off menu".

Okay, that is all for now.  Hopefully there will be some sort of tale worth telling after our little adventure to El Paso next weekend.  And if not, I'll just post a whole bunch of pictures of Dr. Dave looking annoyed while driving, because as I mentioned, he was foolish enough to offer to drive me.

The End.

WE BE CLOSING FOR CHRISTMAS!

Dear Friends (and Enemies), The management at Bikeworks Albuquerque International World Headquarters has informed us of their decision to close up shop for next week. We will be closed from Monday the 23rd, through Sunday the 29th. We will re-open for normal hours on Monday the 30th. This means that as of right now, you have less than two business days to get into the shop and do all your Christmas shopping. We hope you all will be enjoying some time off with friends and family this holiday season, and maybe even get out for a bike ride or two. Sincerely, Dan, Dan, Mike and Wes