Michael Hanslip Coaching

If you want to go faster, you have to pedal harder

Online shoe sizing

04/01/26 16:11 Filed in: Gear
There are many brands of shoes - I am specifically talking cycling shoes in this entry, but it could just as easily apply to running shoes or dress shoes too (there are many, many brands out there). A few of those brands have local dealers, who have some of their offerings. But there are way more choices than there are places to try the shoes on for fit.
I recently used the Trek 30-day trial for a pair of Trek shoes. My local Trek shop didn't have them in stock. They got me the pair I wanted to try. They were too big. Trek does make 1/2 size shoes, but Australia only gets whole sizes. A full size smaller would have been too small. I got my refund (shoes had barely been out of the box so I hope they get sold to someone else as new) and continued looking.
A few brands know they are poorly represented in physical stores, so they have online sizing guides to walk you through the process of selecting the correct size. Northwave, my usual cycling shoe brand, is one of them. I followed their steps and the suggested size puts me right on the line between the one I wear and the same size in "wide". Which is right on my experience with wearing them - about OK for width, could be a tad wider.
Armed with the knowledge that my self-assessment of shoe sizes is OK, I went to the Lake website and ran through their 4-step process for selecting the correct size and model (that latter bit is a realisation that they use different lasts at different levels and the optimal fit might be a specific shoe and size, not just a size). It gave me a size in wide in a specific shoe that is currently not in stock. Since my kangaroo crash in May, I've been looking for new shoes as the ones I had on that night got beaten up by being dragged along the ground.
 
Meanwhile I did the same fitting process with my partner's feet. She has been in some shoes for the past years but lately they've been hurting her feet. Feet change and what was once good is now less good. Lake has a model that seemed appropriate for her feet. I sized. She ordered. They fit well. Given the price and the fact that returns are OK until you place cleats on the shoe, I wanted to make sure she was happy before I put the cleats on. Turns out they were a good choice.
Thanks Lake. Your system works.
 
Sub-story. Why no more Northwave? With a few diversions into other brands, I have been wearing Northwave shoes most of the time since 1997. That's a long time in one brand. They had basically flat soles. A couple of years ago they wanted to make their shoes both stiffer and lighter. To get a stiff flat carbon sole requires a certain thickness. But if you make the sole shaped like a boat hull, you can use less thickness of carbon and still get stiffness from the shape. Except that bit I mentioned above about being on the cusp of the wide shoe - in the boat shaped sole I never got comfortable. They only produce a select few shoes - in one colour that I can see - in the wide model. Whereas Lake seems to make all their shoes in narrow, standard and wide widths. The Lake shoes are $50 more than the Trek shoes were, but $50 less than the Northwave shoes would be.
 
Hopefully they get some in stock soon.

Lifetime warranty versus "lifetime" warranty

30/12/25 16:13
Most carbon bike wheels now proclaim a lifetime warranty. Trek's carbon wheels are in this category too. Directly from their website I can see "Warrantied for Life" under wheel features, and then it goes on to say "All Bontrager carbon wheels are backed by a lifetime warranty for the original owner".
 
What they don't put in headlines is the fact that only manufacturing defects are included in the lifetime guarantee - it would be fine in my experience if that was only a year as most defects show up pretty quickly once you use the wheel. Not included is outside causes for breakage, you know, like hitting something and cracking the rim. The way most rims fail. That is limited to 2 years. Not a lifetime. Not even the lifetime of a mouse.
 
Recently took a broken Bontrager rim into the dealer and it was denied by Trek - it is 3 years old. They will replace the wheel for about 1/2 price. Which is nice-ish, but certainly doesn't go very far to covering for a very expensive wheel that cracked on an un-noticed rock out on the trail. It certainly wasn't a spectacular impact.
 
Then look at Reserve wheels. The rims from Santa Cruz bicycles, given a distinct name so as to not link too closely to the brand. They have a video of Danny MacAskill jumping down stairs without a tyre in an attempt to break one - he was eventually successful but it took some doing. And apparently those shenanigans are covered by their lifetime warranty. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Reserve is excellent about replacing broken rims, regardless of cause, even in the middle of foreign countries when people are on bike holidays and something went wrong.
 
ENVE limits their concern to 5 years and then has a pro-rated taper (I couldn't find how long it lasts) so that the longer you own it, the less credit you get towards the replacement rim. I hope I never break my ENVE rim because they would be non-trivial to replace with something else (unusual spoke hole dimensions) or expensive to replace with another ENVE rim.
 
Read the fine print...

TruTune time...

26/12/25 23:23
Both the enduro bikes at my house are running TruTune full-size inserts. And it is a good thing they are. Set up with a reasonable amount of sag and in our typical riding, we both sometimes see full travel on the O-ring. In the first couple of rides on my Zeb fork, I was leaving behind 25+ mm of travel while running the fork on the soft side.
They do what they claim - slow down the build-up in pressure as the fork compresses. The theory, for those who don't want to go seeking the website and reading all the info, is that the carbon inside the spacer adsorbs air as the pressure increases. Adsorbed air is not part of the gas in the air spring, so effectively it is reducing the amount of air in the spring space as it compresses - pressure increases more slowly than it would otherwise. And on rebound it releases that air just as quickly.
I find it pretty easy to tip into the travel, supportive in the mid-stroke and still willing to use full travel on a big hit. Just the way I like it. RockShox could have made the spring chamber larger, but they didn't, so this is the next best thing.
 
I was slightly concerned that the fork oil would seep into the device and clog up the carbon. Doesn't seem to have happened. You'd think they'd build it to avoid that.

Troubles for road tubeless

16/12/25 12:40 Filed in: Gear
You can just about guarantee that motorbike, automobile and mountain bike tyres are tubeless without checking. But road bike tubeless is affected by trade-offs that might swing any given rider either way.
Clincher rims, rims made specifically for high-pressure tyres with tubes, are able to "clinch" because of the hook on the rim. Both sidewalls of the rim end in a small inwards facing bump - the hook. The tyre bead grabs onto the hook with the tube pushing outwards on the tyre - a safe and robust system. When you get a flat, the tyre can roll off the rim and cause a crash.
MTB rims have become tubeless because it makes the rim more robust and at the low pressures people should be running their MTB tyres at (<30 psi) they don't try to escape from the rim well. No hook can also give the fat tyre a better shape - Stan's rims use tiny hooks (left over from skinny rim days perhaps?) to avoid interfering with tyre shape.
Road rims, even with wide (for road) tyres on them, have to contend with lots of air pressure compared to MTB. A typical MTB tyre runs mid-20s. A typical tubeless road tyre runs 3 or 4 x that much (depending on tyre, rim and rider weight).
I run 18/24 psi in my MTB tyres (with foam inserts) and 70/75 psi in my one tubeless road bike.
 
Not many sealants will seal at 75 psi. None will seal at 100 psi. All of them seal well at 20 psi. That's the difference and the problem.

Speed & Skill don't develop at the same pace

29/11/25 23:01 Filed in: Riding
I have seen this in early teen riders who get the racing bug. Usually the speed comes a couple of seasons before the skills develop. I won't name names, but several who went on to compete at pro level got their turn of speed around 15 years old, but didn't really learn to control a bike until more like 17 years old. Those were a scary couple of years to be riding beside them. Not quite an unguided missile. Worth mentioning that by 19 all these guys were capable of amazing feats on a bike. Teens learn quickly.
 
Mostly these days I coach older riders. Some have been riding for decades. Others are quite new to the whole cycling thing. But perhaps neither has experienced a bike at speed. It is tough to learn the skills to handle a bike going fast when you aren't fit enough to make that bike go fast. So the speed really has to come first. I've had some success with descending to obtain speed, I've also seen some crashes where the person thought they were faster than they were. The main problem with learning a skill at 50 or more kmh is the margin for error is smaller. Yes the skills you learn descending will set you up for success in a criterium race at 44 kmh, but you have to survive it first.
 
The take-away from this is be patient. If you are early in your riding you might want to descend like Tom Pidcock, but he's been at it for 20 years to develop those mad skills.

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