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Bicycling Magazine's Complete Book of Road Cycling Skills : Your Guide to Riding Faster, Stronger, Longer, and Safer
Category: Book |
List Price: $16.95
Our Price: $11.53 |
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As of: January 08th, 2009 02:55:41 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Easy reading collection of articles
As another reviewer pointed out, this is a colleciton of articles that don't make one continous book. I look at it as more of a manual. I didn't read it in order, but just went through the chapters that I thought were relevant and returned for the others later.
I am pretty new to cycling (beyond riding my bike as a kid). Although I was not impressed with the review of fast food burritos, I did find much of the information to be useful and encouraging.
It is a primer. You'll probably want to move on to other cycling books if you are interested in the topic, but this is a decent place to start.
 Light Reading
If you want to know little about not a lot then pick this book up. Yes, there is some good advice, but by no means a cycling bible. Do we really need to go over the menu and nutritional value of fast food restaurants?
Dated, but still a fun read
I'm an experienced cyclist and I found this a fun read. It's a collection of articles that were published in Bicycling magazine back in the 90's on various aspects on road cycling. There are sections on skills, training and nutrition and I found useful information throughout the book. I feel that the articles were chosen to have a timeless slant as there aren't many examples on equipment, most of the articles are on technique.
Specifically I found the few articles on training that included examples to be helpful, like the suggested trainer routines, use of an heart rate monitor, and estimating calories burned.
This type of book is what I call a bathroom book, as the short articles are perfect reading when you want something to read for a few minutes.
The book is also a success in that it helps get you in the mood to go riding. There's not a lot new here, but it's fun to read someone elses opinion on something most of us already know how to do.
Untrustworthy. There must be better books for this subject.
Some information in this book I find implausible, and some I /know/ to be false, which further reduces any confidence I may have in the rest of the information. For a subject like cycling, you need someone who understands the underlying physics as well as helpful subjective seat-of-the-pants techniques. Ed Pavelka seems to only have the latter skill, which gives his advice no firm foundation.
A case in point is the brief article on steering. His final conclusion is sound - that countersteering (see Wikipedia for an explanation) is how you steer effectively, but he prefaces it by asserting erroneously that there are 3 ways to steer. To paraphrase, he says you can steer simply by pointing the handlebars where you want to go, without leaning the bike at up to 15mph (defying the laws of physics), or you can steer just by leaning the way you want to go, or you can countersteer.
There is only one way to steer: countersteering. Most of us never realize that is what we're doing. Most of us learned to do it unconsciously on the day we first learned to ride, and from then on we muddle through with a unconscious "micro-countersteer" that starts the bike falling sideways, which we catch by turning the corner. The key to good steering is to use deliberate, active and controlled countersteering - a skill which becomes obviously essential on a motorcycle, where the increased weight makes it impossible to muddle through a turn on unconscious control.
He comes to the right conclusion - so what's the big deal? Well, to me, the big deal is he's made me read and try to understand false information which is of no use whatsoever, and /his/ understanding of the subject is flawed. How am I supposed to trust anything else he says, if it's nothing more than his assertions based on his own gut feeling?
Frequently, theory alone is insufficient, very occasionally practice trumps theory, but best of all is practice based on theory. _Sound_ theory.
Good
I always look forward to my mail for this one, however the ads are a bit much.
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